Only in the 21st Century

It's been a while since my last post - the end of a very busy guest conducting weekend intervened - and I'm delighted Sam is giving you all some insights into the process of producing our Inside the Classics concerts. As you can tell from his post, it's an incredibly labor-intensive venture, for many reasons; the number of excerpts the library has to prepare, the script that goes through multiple drafts over multiple weeks, the coordination of individual ideas so we present a cohesive concept onstage, scheduling meetings with our soloist, not to mention the year-out planning for future seasons!

Add to the complication of that the fact that Sam already has a full-time job as a member of the MO viola section, and the fact that I haven't been in Minneapolis since December 18th, and you can get a sense of how difficult planning can be. As I was dashing off yet another email while leaving a voicemail during a layover at the Atlanta airport, it struck me how much more difficult preparation would be even 15 years ago, before the genesis of cell phones for the general populace and the normalizing of internet connectivity. In fact, at one point last week Sam and I were having an email back-and-forth to set up a time to talk via cell phone, which I found pretty funny in retrospect.

Between Sam's full schedule in his purely musical commitments and my being on the road, coordinating these concerts would be pretty much impossible without these late 20th century/early 21st century technologies. I can't imagine how we would have kept sending updated lists to the library - with the incredible volume of faxes which would have been sent I shudder at the number of trees we would have killed just with our upcoming concert! But this all makes me wonder; are we able to do this planning because we have cell phones and email and instant connectivity anywhere and everywhere, or do we plan and operate differently because we know we have this technology??