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Tracy Wilson approaches career coda,

but love of music will go on

Friday, April 3, 2020 By Jeffrey Borak, The Berkshire Eagle

PITTSFIELD — For Berkshire Music School executive director Tracy Wil-
son, it’s all about the music.

“Music is so deeply connected to the soul,” she said during a recent interview in her office
at the 80-year-old institution on Wendell Avenue. “If only people could find a way to make
music, it would make them feel better.” That’s a large part of the school’s reason for being,
she says. It’s why, on her first day on the job in October 2003, she moved the executive
director’s office from the first-floor street-facing parlor to the center of the ground floor.

three Eagle photos “[The parlor] didn’t feel to me to be as welcoming as it should be,” she said in an email. “[It]
was a far better room for teaching music with a big front window so [passers by] could see
and hear music in the making.”

The move also would allow her “to see all the comings and goings of the school,” she said,
“and families, staff and faculty members would know that my door would always be open
to them.”

In June, at a date that has yet to be determined, that door will close and another will open.
Wilson, 64, will be stepping down, retiring, after nearly 17 years in a job she’s wanted ever
since high school in Geneva, Neb., where she was born and raised and her father served
at a Lutheran church.
“I’ve always wanted to lead an arts organization,” Wilson said. “A friend even wrote it in
my yearbook — ‘She’ll be running a music institution.’”

Her route to the Berkshires led her to nearby Lincoln, Neb., where she was an undergrad-
uate music major at the University of Nebraska, and then to Washington, D.C. to complete
her studies for a University of Nebraska-issued Masters of Music and Arts Administration
at Catholic University and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts, which, on completion
of her Masters, hired Wilson as education program coordinator.

Looking back, Wilson has no doubt that she and the Berkshires were destined for one
another. While working at the Kennedy Center, she spent summers — three of them — in
Vermont as music director for the Weston Playhouse cabaret and assistant music director
for the theater’s main stage productions. She was caught by this part of Massachusetts, she
said, as she drove through on her way to and from Weston.
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