The Donors We Forget About

For eight of the nine years I've spent in Minnesota, I had a part-time side job as a news editor at ArtsJournal.com, the arts news clearinghouse that, not coincidentally, provides our blog's news feed. Basically, my job involved getting up unreasonably early several days each week and surfing the web sites of several dozen newspapers and magazines looking for interesting stories about orchestras, theatre companies, and dance troupes, and then writing short blurbs about said stories to appear on our site's front page.

It was a fun job, partly because I wound up on a first-name basis with a number of important writers and critics across the English-speaking world, but mostly because it forced me to take in a lot of different viewpoints about the industry I work in on a daily basis, and to summarize those viewpoints without filtering them through my own biases. I came away from the experience with a deep respect for professional journalists, and, I hope, a better-than-average understanding of the way arts organizations interact with the people we serve and the media that cover us.

By far the best part of working for ArtsJournal, though, was the regular conversations I would have with my boss, AJ's managing editor, Doug McLennan. For much of the time I worked for the site, I was Doug's only employee, and we spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off each other, discussing what the rise of the Internet Age would mean for arts groups of all kinds, and exchanging e-mails that usually began, "Did you see that piece of **** that Newspaper X ran this morning? What is wrong with that guy?"

The thing that I liked most about Doug, a Juilliard-trained pianist who's spent most of his professional life in journalistic circles, was the way he seemed always able to take the long view of things when others were focused on minutiae. If orchestras were debating whether or not to consider amending a national agreement governing the way we record (and pay for) CDs, Doug would be the first to point out that, unless the debate included a serious discussion of downloadable media and online distribution, it wouldn't make a lick of difference what conclusion we arrived at. (That seems obvious now, of course, but Doug made this comment in 2002, long before the advent of YouTube, iTunes, or any of the other online services we now take for granted. And just for the record, most orchestras still haven't really begun to face up to these changed realities.)

Doug also has a talent for defining the terms of an argument in a way that most of us wouldn't have thought of, and lately, he's been putting that ability to great use on his newly launched and long-overdue blog, Diacritical. Just for instance, here's his opening salvo from today's entry on the way arts groups approach the two groups of individuals who support our existence...

"Give an arts organization $1000 and they'll put your name in the program. Buy $1000 worth of tickets and they'll tell you that the cost of your ticket only covered 55 percent (or 40 percent or 30 percent) of the cost of you being there. Then a few months later, long after the performance, they try to hit you up for more money. Gee thanks.

"Maybe this is backwards. Who's the more valuable member of your community? The person who gives you money but otherwise doesn't have much to do with you, or the person who buys tickets and shows up for every performance?"

Now there are, of course, donors to every arts group who also buy lots of tickets, but Doug's made a very important point here. All arts groups have Development departments staffed by large numbers of very skilled people who are expert at the care and feeding of donors. But when it comes to lowly ticket buyers, we entrust them mainly to the comparatively inexperienced box office staff, which tends to turn over frequently, and be far less specifically trained than the folks in development. (This is not in any way a shot at the dedicated people who work in ticket sales, just an acknowledgment that, on the whole, low-paying hourly wage jobs are going to attract a different level of professional expertise than salaried and specifically defined office positions.)

So what's the solution? As usual, Doug has an answer that wouldn't have occurred to me, but that makes instant sense:

"In online social networks, participation is rewarded for the frequency and quality of that participation, and even small recognitions encourage people to participate at higher levels.

"If you have an audience member who brings five friends, find a way to reward them. If they bring 10 friends, give them something more. Every arts organization has a page in their program listing the names of people who contributed money and at what level. How about a page that lists the names of people who brought in more people?"

Better yet, how about having a web site that functions not just as a static advertisement for your organization, but as a social network (or a conduit to an existing network like Facebook) that makes it easy for ticketbuyers to aspire to such perks? Or special pre- and post-performance events for those who do? Why not reward the donation of time and effort just as much as we reward the donation of cash?

I'll give Doug the last word, because as usual, he says it better than I could...

"Most organizations don't give people enough ways to support them... All it takes sometimes is empowering them to do it."

"Get your hands off of my country"...

...says Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, causing great commotion in Disney Hall.

Art and politics are uneasy, if constant, bedfellows. I for one don't begrudge the opportunity (quite literally, a stage!) to air one's views (as do others); I only wonder why Zimerman chose this point in time and not, say, sometime in the past 8 years.

Putting aside whether you agree or not with his politics, what do you make of the fact that the statement was made in a concert venue (keeping in mind that he said his piece right before launching into the final work of the program, fellow countryman Karol Szymanowski’s “Variations on a Polish Folk Theme")?

Familiar Faces

Sarah and I have mentioned once or twice before that, despite being a global industry, the music world actually feels very small, and you tend, over the course of your career, to run into the same folks over and over, sometimes in the most unexpected places. When I started in the Minnesota Orchestra back in 2000, two of the first people I ran into on my first day of work were percussionist Kevin Watkins, who I'd known well at Oberlin Conservatory, and substitute violinist Dorris Dai (now with the Kansas City Symphony,) with whom I'd gone to summer camp in the late '80s and hadn't seen since. This kind of thing happens constantly, and the unexpected reunions can be a lot of fun, as well as an ever-lurking reminder that you'd better be careful whose toes you step on in a business where you're almost certain to see everyone you've ever met again someday.

I found myself thinking about this "small world" phenomenon last week, when I was talking to someone about the first major national music competition I ever took part in. It was my senior year of high school, and the competition in question was one of the bigger ones going at the time, sponsored by General Motors and Seventeen Magazine (there's a sponsorship combo, right?) with finals held at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.

To be honest, I had little to no interest in the GM/17 shindig. I've never really understood the point of competitions that don't end with job offers, and I spent most of my time as a student coming up with clever ways to avoid them. But that year, my teacher was bound and determined that I was going to take a serious run at a serious competition, so we spent an afternoon in my high school's auditorium making the best tape I was capable of, and packed it off to the judges.

I was honestly shocked when I was invited to the national finals - since the age of ten, I'd been living in small-town Pennsylvania, and hadn't had a lot of opportunities to measure my abilities against the huge numbers of talented musicians who gather in big cities to play orchestra and chamber music every weekend. But invited I was, so, battling a nasty cold and a lingering disinterest, I packed myself off to Interlochen, there to spend the next week living with and competing against four other violists, a gang of violinists, plus flutists, horn players, and a few other assorted instrument groups I've forgotten.

To be blunt, it was not the greatest experience. First of all, the competition had a bizarre rule severely limiting our individual practice time once we arrived on site, and the rule was enforced by not allowing us to leave our assigned dormitory floor without a chaperone. Second, my cold morphed into full-on Martian Death Flu within hours of stepping off the plane, and I didn't stop hacking, wheezing, and sniffling for more than thirty seconds for the next week. Third, I wiped out of the finals on my 18th birthday, partly because the Death Flu was preventing me from hearing anything coming out of my instrument.

Still, as I was telling a friend this story last week, I started to think about the other finalists I'd met at Interlochen that winter, and I realized that, almost without exception, I know, off the top of my head, where every one of them is today, even the ones I haven't seen in over a decade. Because like me, they're all in the music world, and most of them are doing quite well for themselves, too. Of my fellow violists, one is living and playing for various ensembles in Berlin, one is the violist of one of America's fastest-rising string quartets (which, coincidentally, is performing in the Twin Cities this very evening,) and a third (the winner of the string division at GM/17 that year) is the assistant principal of the Boston Symphony and a much-respected soloist, which is saying something when your instrument is viola. Four of the five of us wound up attending college together for at least a year or two.

Going beyond the alto cleffers, one of the flutists I spent most of my time hanging out with in our dorm prison at Interlochen wound up in Minnesota only a couple of years after I arrived, where she became a member of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. And the sweet, unassuming horn player who no one knew what to make of when we arrived at the competition (but who wound up walking away with the well-deserved grand prize) is now the principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Oh, and just to drive home the small world point, she's also the sister-in-law of MN Orch tuba player Steve Campbell.

Musicians tend to take the close-knit nature of the business for granted after a while, but it never fails to amaze me that we can work in a business that more or less guarantees that the people we grow up knowing will be flung far and wide around the globe (you go where the work is, as the saying goes,) and yet, we never stop running into each other. It's definitely one of the fringe benefits of doing what we do for a living...

Artistic License

We're playing the Bruch violin concerto on this week's concerts with superstar violinist Leila Josefowicz, which is presenting an unusual opportunity for those of us in the orchestra to compare how two different musicians approach the same piece. Ordinarily, a couple of years will go by in between performances of even well-loved concertos, so our memory of the last soloist who played Concerto X will have faded by the time we play it with a new soloist. But in this case, we just played the Bruch with Joshua Bell on our European tour (no, you didn't miss it - we never played it in Minneapolis,) and the interpretations couldn't be more contrasting.

Obviously, both Josh and Leila are outstanding musicians, but they've taken very different approaches to the life of a traveling soloist. Josh, of course, is one of the acknowledged masters of the core violin repertoire, excells at giving audiences emotionally charged performances of warhorse concertos, and dabbles from time to time in "crossover" music. Leila spends a lot of her time and energy seeking out and performing complex contemporary music, and even when playing a piece as familiar as the Bruch, she always seems to be searching for a new way to approach the music.

If I had to sum up the two versions of the Bruch that we've been a part of this season, I'd say that Josh's version was pure comfort food - lush, warm tones, everything seeming to fit together seamlessly, the kind of performance that just washes over you effortlessly. Leila takes what I would call more of a connoisseur's approach to the same music, offering a complicated reading that forces the listener to engage intellectually as well as emotionally.

In fact, Leila gives much of the first movement a distinctly spiky and angular quality that I haven't heard anyone else try in this context. When I first listened to her play it on Wednesday morning, I wasn't entirely sure what effect she was going for, until the moment when the first movement dovetailed into the elegant and beautiful slow movement, and then I suddenly got it. By denying us some of the outright romance that most violinists bring to the first movement, she was making us crave the release that she knew was coming all along. And the simple lines and delicate textures of the slow movement, in turn, set up Leila's ferocious attack on the virtuosic and showy finale. Rather than feeling like three separate chunks of music, as concertos so often do, Leila's approach gives a distinct narrative flow to the entire work.

In the end, I wouldn't trade either Josh's or Leila's interpretation for the other - the Bruch is, I think, one of the more underrated violin concertos in the repertoire, in large part because it leaves so much room for the performer to interpret how it should be played. Getting to be a part of two distinctively different approaches in such quick succession is a rare treat.

Singular viewpoints

I'm a little disappointed to be missing the Orchestra's Carnegie concert, but schedule intervenes, and after this week I won't be back to the Twin Cities until well into June. In the interim I get to spend a couple of very-much-needed weeks at home with my husband and dogs, as well as guest-conducting with a handful of symphonies - Eastern Connecticut, Atlanta, National.

This reminds me of a very interesting conversation a few weeks back with our principal percussionist, Brian Mount. After rehearsal one day he popped into my dressing room, sat down, and said, "I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you, like every other conductor who's on our podium, conduct ahead of the orchestra. What's up with that? Is it just us, or is every orchestra like this? I can't tell, because at this point this is the only orchestra I know."

I hadn't really thought of it this way before. Not the beating ahead part - all orchestras play on varying degrees of delay, and it's something you get used to, to a certain extent. Usually it's a matter of finding just the point where you keep momentum up without being so far ahead that it starts muddying up the beat or the musical intent. But how would the average orchestra musician know if this was normal or not? After all, if you're in a full-time professional orchestra, it's unlikely that you spend any amount of time working with other orchestras, so your understanding of orchestral playing becomes totally dependent on your job.

My answer to Brian was, no, it's not necessarily just any orchestra, although our Orchestra has a very strong tendency to take time at the end of a phrase and start the next phrase at a slightly slower tempo - the effect is a long and steady slowdown over the course of a piece - and to counteract that, I'll push ahead when needed. There were a couple of groups that I've conducted recently - LA Phil in particular pops to mind - where the orchestra tended to be more on top of the beat. Every group is different. But then, how would you know unless you've experienced the variety?

There's an upside and downside to this. The upside is the individual character ensembles can develop over and extended time of playing together (like the plummy MO string sound - which, incidentally, is also a contributing factor to the whole slowing-down thing...). The downside is that just as much as good habits can be reinforced, bad habits can be institutionally ingrained.

A conductor with an active guesting career has built-in checks and balances; it certainly keeps me honest. One might get a little lazy working with the same group for an extended period - musicians can figure out a conductor's strange habits or lapses in technique and learn to work around them. But take that sloppy technique to a new orchestra and you'll probably find yourself in some trouble.

Academia quite wisely prevents burnout and encourages the furthering of knowledge through sabbaticals; wouldn't a similar situation, in an ideal world, benefit orchestra musicians? How about a mandated musician swap every 5 years? It would certainly be a learning experience for everyone, and keep viewpoints from becoming too singular...

A Legend Gets His Due

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes were announced the other day, and fans of minimalist uber-composer Steve Reich are rejoicing that their man has finally been honored. Reich, whose "Clapping Music" was responsible for changing the way a huge number of people thought about concert music (ItC fans who go back to the David Alan Miller days may remember that David featured Clapping Music on his final Casual Classics program back in 2007,) has never slowed down in the 37 years since he wrote that seminal work, and the Pulitzer honors one of his newest works, a Double Sextet commissioned by new music wunderkinds eighth blackbird, who themselves walked away with a Grammy recently.

Now, one of the great things about eighth blackbird is that they produce a LOT of online content, both audio and video, so there's no need to wait for a studio recording of the Double Sextet to hear what so impressed the Pulitzer committee. Here's a clip of the blackbirds taking their first rehearsal crack at the piece...



And here's a behind-the-scenes look at the recording session the group did last year to lay down the "other" sextet part that plays simultaneously with their live performances of the piece...



Lastly, for those of you in Los Angeles (and we know there are a couple of you, at least,) the blackbirds will actually be performing the Double Sextet this very weekend at the Colburn School of Music, as part of a weeklong residency they're doing there. You can check out the group's concert schedule here (but note that they change up their repertoire a lot, so the Reich, which premiered last month, may only be on a few upcoming programs,) and read their own blog post on the Pulitzer announcement here...

Defiant Cockroaches Are We!

Every April, orchestra consultant and tireless analyzer of all things classical Drew McManus gives his blog over to an event he calls Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month. Throughout the month, he solicits guest editorials from folks all over the music industry (I wrote a decidedly tongue-in-cheek episode way back in 2005) on the general subject of how to bring newbies into the orchestral fold. To be honest, a lot of what he gets back is of either the way earnest or way bitter variety, both of which are certainly attitudes that pervade the classical music business, but neither of which hold any particular allure for me.

But every once in a while, a TAFTO entry comes along that just floors me, and not only perfectly reflects the way I wish orchestras would conduct themselves, but also gives me new perspective on how audiences and outsiders may or may not perceive us. No surprise that this year, it's Boston composer/critic Matthew Guerreri who's knocked it out of the park. Sarah and I have both linked to Guerreri's work in the past at his excellent blog, Soho the Dog, and in response to Drew's request for an article, he's instead turned in a cartoon that says, in very few words, everything that orchestra musicians and managers need to be hearing in these trying economic times.

Guerreri's prescription for orchestras struggling to sell tickets in a depressed economic climate is simple: "Don't apologize. Don't explain... Just let 'em hear the loudest, craziest thing you've got." Essentially, he's warning against the temptation for orchestras to turtle and play nothing but Classical's Greatest Hits in a downturn, when such an approach will likely appeal only to those who never stop coming to our concerts anyway. Why not take advantage of dwindling box office to showcase truly daring concert experiences and see who comes out of the woodwork to watch?

Guerreri's cartoon dog also points out (as I did a couple of weeks back) that so-called experts have been predicting the demise of orchestras for decades, and declares that our refusal to go along with the doomsday scenarios makes us "the sexy vampire of music." I like it. And I like "the defiant cockroach of the post-nuclear cultural wasteland" even better - there's gotta be a way to work that into next season's brochure, doesn't there?

Anyway, go read the cartoon. You'll be glad you did. Oh, and if you're so inclined, you might think about taking a friend to the orchestra this month...

Cirque du...?

Whatever happened to this contortionist version of the Andrews Sisters? And what does "Solid Potato Salad" mean? Questions aside, it's three minutes and fifty seconds well spent - I particularly like their big close. Hang in there until the one-minute mark, where the real magic starts...

Just for the joy of it

Before I get started, Happy Tax Day! (OK, fine, it's not a happy day for the vast majority of us, but now at least we'll be done with it for another year.)

An interesting article in the New York Times today ; it's a slice-of-life piece on a young violinist in central Ohio and her decision to attend nursing school ("Everybody gets sick", she says) rather than going away to college to become a music teacher (noting that arts in schools are often the first to be affected by budget cuts). Blame for thwarted dreams is placed on our uncertain times, when virtually-assured employment trumps pursuit of one's passions. The article follows her to a high school orchestra competition in New York, and it's the final line that caught my attention:

What role music will play in her life, she doesn’t know. But for now, at least, she is on a New York stage, wearing a borrowed black gown, playing a borrowed eBay violin, and Tchaikovsky holds her.

What struck me was the "either/or" assumption here; either she attends college to become a music teacher or she gives music up completely to pursue nursing.

I've taught a great deal over my career so far - everything from theory and eartraining classes to conducting lessons and chamber music coachings, to all levels of students. I don't assume my students will pursue music as a profession; I certainly would not encourage a musical career, and I urge even my most gifted students not to take the leap unless they absolutely could not imagine life otherwise. In fact, I can think of few better scenarios than a talented musician entering a different field professionally, making a good living, and enjoying music on their own terms, on their own time, for their own pleasure. Why not be an active amateur musician and have the best of all possible worlds?

My father, a lawyer by trade, was an enthusiastic amateur pianist, and my most cherished childhood memories are of gathering around the piano to sing as he played, or sitting next to him and playing four-hand duets (at some point in the history of leisure time, pre-TV, such a scenario was undoubtedly more common!). His skill as an organist was what helped him fund his college education, so he must have been really good back in the day; but he was practical about the difference between making a living and having a lifelong passion separate from one's career.

One of my first jobs post-conservatory was as music director of a community orchestra - some professional musicians, but mostly amateurs - an ensemble good enough to play all the big repertoire pieces, which was fantastic for me. What struck me about this orchestra was that despite fairly disparate skill levels, the level of commitment and enthusiasm at our weekly rehearsals was astonishing, and consistent. In fact, I remember that one of my very first rehearsals with them (the group was based in Princeton, NJ) was on September 12, 2001 - and the single member missing from that rehearsal was the second trombonist, an FBI investigator, who was needed at Ground Zero.

Amateur music-making can be of incredibly high quality, but really, near-professional quality is not necessary for the deep enjoyment of simply making music. I believe we've mentioned the Really Terrible Orchestra on this blog before - the "cream of Edinburgh's musically disadvantaged" - clearly, skill (or lack thereof!) is no impediment to relishing the experience of making music.

And then there is the "Rock Choir" which has become something of a sensation across the pond. All proof positive that there lies within all of us a fundamental creative drive, a desire to make music; not because we have to, but just for the joy of it:

Strangely Mesmerizing

If you've ever been sent into a trance by the music of minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, and wondered just how they create that mesmerizing effect with nothing looping snippets of music, this site is for you. Part video game, part geometry test, and part compositional aid, you create your own mathematically generated piece just by drawing lines in the way of bouncing balls. Even just drawing a single horizontal line directly under the ball's entry point results quickly in an ever-more-complex world of sound. Box in the whole screen, and see how long you can keep the result from becoming cacophonous.

I'm normally not terribly susceptible to supposedly addictive games. But I've already spent several hours playing with this one. And I'm not even that big a Glass fan...

Pure coming and going

In a yoga class the other day, the instructor reminded us that there was no single correct way to execute the triangle pose (trikonasana). I was having a particularly hard time of it - it was one of those days where I was feeling distracted and very out of tune with myself, and the whole breathing-with-movement thing on which yoga is predicated was not coming easily. As I eased down into the extension, she spoke again: "There is no single trikonasana; there are an infinite number because each of us individually is different from each other, and none of us will ever do trikonasana the same way we do today."

This got me thinking about music (OK, I confess, just about anything gets me thinking about music, but that's what musicians do). I've alway wondered about performing a piece multiple times, and how different it feels each time, even if a recording of each iteration might have very little ostensible variance. I end up doing a lot of repetition with the Orchestra when I'm doing Young People's Concerts (which we'll be doing this coming week), and even with the pieces that the Orchestra has performed a billion times ("Ruslan and Ludmilla" Overture comes to mind) it is never the same over two (sometimes back-to-back) performances.

But what if those performances were identical, would two different audiences react to them in the same way? And would the musicians creating those identical performances actually experience them in identical ways, or can you duplicate a musical product while having a disparate personal experience internally?

This reminded me of a post over at "On An Overgrown Path" about the very nature of music. What is a piece of music? Is it the notes on the page? Is it what the composer heard in his head as he was writing down those notes on a page? Is it and aggregate of all the performance ever of that given piece? Or is it the last performance of it that you heard? The conclusion here is that: "The answer must be that the Matthew Passion, or any composition, is simply the music we hear in our head at any one moment in time - whether the source be a score, a live performance, a recording, a memory, or our imagination."

Which I rather like. The post goes on to talk about the impermance of music (with which I also agree) - the delight in music is that it's ephemeral, ungraspable and utterly unquantifiable. Every performance is a coming and going that only exists in that moment, and that's why we savor them.

Critical Thinking In A Critical Time

Continuing with my attempts to find silver linings in this dark period for the arts (and, let's face it, for most every other industry as well,) I'm feeling the need to talk a bit more about the way the media covers downturns and their effect on non-profits. Specifically, I'd like to encourage a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to a lot of what gets written about symphony orchestras, whether online or in print, by people who claim to be experts on the subject.

I'm a big fan of the international affairs columnist and author Fareed Zakaria, partly because he regularly gives me new ways of looking at the world which wouldn't have occurred to me, but also because he's very good at seeing the forest for the trees in big, complicated situations. In his book, The Post-American World, Zakaria spends several early pages laying out all of the horrible, violent things that have occurred in our world since 2000, only to turn around and point out that, compared with most other historical eras, ours is a comparatively peaceful one, with the likelihood of a given person dying from political or terroristic violence at an all-time low. What makes the present seem so much more violent is the way that the 24-hour news channels portray comparatively minor bloodshed as an Armageddon-like event, and the simple fact that, today, we get pictures and descriptions of violent acts almost in real time, and it's nearly impossible to turn away.

A similar effect can be seen in press coverage of the arts whenever the economy dives. The steady stream of budget cuts, layoffs, and salary reductions at American orchestras has some within our industry alarmed, and the journalists who cover us can smell that fear. So articles like this one start to appear, suggesting that orchestras are doomed unless we completely overhaul the business model we've relied on for decades, and dump the idea that musicians should be able to expect year-round employment and/or comfortable salaries. (Of course, the vast majority of musicians enjoy neither year-round employment nor a comfortable salary, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Such articles usually contain a lot of scary but isolated numbers (an orchestra CEO who makes $1 million a year!! a stagehand who makes north of $400K!!! a newly minted orchestra musician right out of school making $130K!!!!) designed to drive home the idea that orchestral finance is completely out of control, thus relieving the author of actually having to prove his thesis with real economic data that applies across the broader industry. (My favorite example of this technique came from notorious doomsayer Norman Lebrecht, who in 1997 penned a terrifying book called Who Killed Classical Music? It was a genius title: before you even opened the book, the author had dispensed entirely with the necessity of proving that classical music was actually dead, and had moved the discussion straight on to the autopsy. The fact that, in the real world, the subject of the autopsy was, in fact, very much alive, went unaddressed.)

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The headlines trumpeting layoffs and salary givebacks aren't evidence of the failure of a business model. They're a demonstration of how the model bends without breaking.
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Again, forest for the trees: orchestras, when they're being run correctly, function according to the broader economies they are a part of. Since we're dependent on donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations, we function as a tiny subset of the larger "charitable giving" economy, so what we can spend in a given year (on salaries, benefits, day-to-day expenses, whatever) is directly tied to how much our supporters can afford to give us.

We also function as part of the distinct American orchestral economy, in which a small number of "major" orchestras compete (through the salary and benefits offered) for the services of the most elite musicians emerging each year from music schools, in the same way that elite law firms compete for the best law school grads. 99% or more of the students who emerge from college with a music degree will never earn anywhere near the amount of money that the alarmists cite - most won't even wind up with careers as performers at all.

So taken in a broader context, pronouncements of the unsustainability of our business model (and if history is any guide, there will be many more of these in the coming months) are more or less entirely contradicted by the self-evident ability of most orchestras to adapt to changes in our specific economies. The headlines trumpeting layoffs and salary givebacks aren't evidence of the failure of a business model. They're a demonstration of how the model bends without breaking.

Earlier today, I was riding Minneapolis's light rail line, and I overheard a conversation between two businessmen in town for a conference. Neither was from Minnesota, but one of the two had apparently been here a number of times before, and he was attempting to give his friend a general orientation of where things in the Cities can be found. Over the course of five minutes or so, the "expert" managed to impart that Dinkytown is an area of St. Paul, south of Minneapolis, situated fairly close to a well-known neighborhood called Woodbury. He also responded to his friend's question as to what the "Hiawatha Line" might be by stating confidently that it was "some sort of highway."

Now, if you live in California or New York, and your closest connection to Minnesota is that you enjoy listening to A Prairie Home Companion of a Saturday evening, that all sounds perfectly reasonable, and if you'd overheard this conversation, you might even repeat the information to a friend if you were asked about the subject. (After all, who would ever have reason to lie about geography?) But your confidence in what you'd heard from someone who clearly considered himself knowledgeable on the subject wouldn't change the inarguable facts that a) Dinkytown is in Minneapolis; b) St. Paul is east of Minneapolis, not south, c)Dinkytown is a 20-25 minute highway drive (in good traffic) from Woodbury, which is a suburb, not a neighborhood; and d) the Hiawatha Line is the train we were all riding on when I overheard the conversation.

My point? There are a lot of self-styled experts out there. Make them prove to you that they actually know what they're talking about before you assume that they do.

The Long-Awaited Silver Lining?

NPR's All Things Considered ran a great story on Tuesday's program asking experts of various stripes (futurists, historians, urbanists and the like) to imagine what America might look like when it emerges from what appears likely to be a transformative recession. And there, in the midst of all the gloomy theories, I heard what sounded to me like a major opportunity for those of us who make our living in the arts.

One of the experts pointed out that recent surveys of affluent Americans indicated that they are responding to the recession by cutting back on what they spend on "things," but not what they spend on "experiences." In other words, people who still have some pocket change to spend on luxury items are continuing to go out to movies, plays, concerts, and restaurants, but they're cutting back on the amount of actual stuff they acquire.

The same expert who pointed out this phenomenon goes on to speculate that America's retail sales may take a permanent hit even after the economy returns to positive growth, and that bankrupt chain stores like Circuit City and Linens 'N Things are unlikely to be replaced by similar stores if this recession results, as many believe it will, in a fundamental shift in American attitudes about money and what we do with it. If we no longer find it necessary to acquire as much physical stuff as we once did, there simply won't be a need for as many stores to peddle that stuff.

Now, economic shifts are always painful, and I don't mean to suggest that those of us peddling Experiences instead of Stuff should be rejoicing at the closing of our local big box retailers. Fewer stores obviously mean, at least in the short term, more people out of work, and therefore fewer people in a position to even make the choice between spending on the Minnesota Orchestra's Experiences or Best Buy's Stuff.

Still, the idea that Americans might move away from using the acquisition of material goods as a barometer of our success and happiness, and towards a greater interest in the experiences that the world has to offer, is frighteningly seductive, and it made me think of our orchestra's recent tour of Europe. While staying with friends in Vienna, I noticed that it is not at all uncommon there for people with what most of us would consider a good deal of money to live in relatively modest apartments without much in the way of material trappings.

But these same people think nothing of dropping €100 or more on a ticket to opening night at the Wiener Staatsoper. Which, of course, is no less ostentatious than spending €100 on some gewgaw for the mantelpiece of your 3000-square-foot suburban palace with 2-acre lawn. It's just different. And that difference - wealthy and even moderately well-off citizens choosing to spend their money on Experiences rather than Stuff - is what makes Vienna the cultural mecca that it is.

Obviously, no one really knows what the fallout from this period in our economic history will be, and how long it will take for everyone to define our own new "normal." But if you ask me, the possibility that Americans might choose to start leaning away from material consumption and towards experiential consumption is something that arts groups ought to be salivating over, and seriously preparing for.

Run, Ludwig, run!

Fun and frolics at the Fairbanks Symphony - their annual "Beat Beethoven" 5K run. Why not an upgrade for next year? If taken at a profoundly deliberate pace, perhaps Mahler's 3rd Symphony would be the perfect marathon benchmark.

The Uncertainty Principal

It goes without saying that times are hard in the orchestra business, although there are modest signs that we may have gotten through the worst of it in a larger sense. (Then again, I'm just an eternal optimist...).

What makes it more difficult is the built-in lag time for any large non-profit organizations; the current season is largely based on funding that was either pledged or collected last season, before the bottom dropped out of the markets last fall. The market collapse, which has a detrimental affect both on corporate and individual donations (as well as endowments), will be felt much more acutely next season ('09-'10), when, perhaps (again, eternal optimist speaking), the economy might be staggering back onto its feet.

It all creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty - which then got me thinking about volatility and change versus normalcy and routine on a more personal level in the orchestral field.

An orchestral musician's life is predicated on a high amount of certainty; rehearsal and concert schedules are largely set by the beginning of the season (and if there are additions or alterations, there are rigid requirements about lead-time before the proposed changes), most repertoire for an upcoming season is set by spring of the previous season, musicians work with the same colleagues every day with little variation, and, except for a guest conductor the ensemble has never engaged before, one has a pretty good idea what to expect on the podium all year. The tenure process assures musicians lifetime employment barring extraordinary circumstances (career-ending injury, bankruptcy of the orchestra or diminishment of playing ability that is severe enough to necessitate a review process - an infrequent and often controversial occurrence). In an era of rampant job insecurity, orchestral musicians in a well-run organization have a enviable level of professional certainty.

I'm pretty well acquainted with this perspective on musical life, as a vast number of my friends (as well as my husband) are full-time orchestral musicians. I'm also acutely aware of how a conductor's life is on the opposite end of the certainty spectrum.

First and foremost, conductor don't have any sort of tenure system (unless you're working in academia, which is a world unto itself). This means there's a built-in endpoint for every conductor/orchestra relationship. From an artistic standpoint, this makes a good amount of sense; most conductors have a preferred repertoire (or at least certain composers they are most comfortable with), favorite guest artists, a particular approach to music-making, etc. Which can all provide new perspectives, deepen understanding of certain repertoire, encourage artistic growth in particular areas, etc. There is a perceived point, however, at which music directors no longer stimulate this sort of growth and discovery, because they have imparted all of their individual expertise to their orchestra (or so goes the belief).

The average tenure of music directors these days seems to hover in the 8-12 years slot - in stark contrast to, say, Ormandy, who after a brief stint with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra) went on to helm the Philadelphia Orchestra for 44 years. As Sam has discussed, selecting and hiring a music director is a complicated, multi-year process. What this means, practically, for conductors is that once you've landed yourself a music directorship and settled in after the first couple of years, you have to start thinking about what your next gig is going to be. For staff conducting positions, where the average tenure is more frequently in the 3-5 year range, this means that the minute you're named to a position, you're already job-hunting again.

It's a strange position to be in, and the built-in job insecurity can be really wearing on the psyche. A conductor's life tends to be a complicated matrix of current positions, future positions, potential positions and guest conducting that could be a potential position (and then perhaps a future position!). The jet-setting maestro who spends little time with their home band has been much bemoaned, but in a way, how can they be blamed, if they need to secure future employment, which is what it all basically boils down to? Because, in the end, we're just free agents. (Osmo, to his defense, spends a lot more time at home with the Minnesota Orchestra that do music directors of similar stature).

No grand point to make here, save the personal reflection that built-in uncertainty in one's work becomes exacerbated by global uncertainty. My question to you; what do you think of "term-limits" for conductors?

Take Me Out (Symphonic Remix)

It's Opening Day for baseball fans across North America, and that makes it one of those days that I'm very glad to have a job where I work weekends and get Mondays off. Sarah and I sport a fair amount of allegiance to the Phillies, having both spent good chunks of our lives in the ironically nicknamed City of Brotherly Love, but I've also been a Twins fan since my grandfather showed me how to dial in Herb Carneal on his kitchen radio, so I'll be swinging by the MetroDome plaza later today to check out the madness and dream of open-air baseball, one short year away.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to think of a good musical parallel to draw to the season opener, and bemoaning the fact that, while everyone wants to write poems, odes, tributes, and even symphonies to the glamour teams (Cubs, Dodgers, Yankees, Sawx, etc.) those of us who root for outlier teams (even World Champion outlier teams - sorry, couldn't resist one last gloat) generally have to make do with horribly cheesy, if locally beloved, anthems.




Worse, some teams on the cusp of greatness try to stir fan emotion by commissioning new fight songs in whatever hideous musical vernacular is popular in TV ads at the time...



Seriously, that song existed. I remember hearing it and cringing during the '91 Series. And really, the problem here is that these embarrassing attempts at commercially manufactured musical excitement lack the timeless quality of Take Me Out To The Ballgame or Casey At The Bat.

So here's my thinking: there's nothing more timeless than a lot of the music we play on stage every week at Orchestra Hall, right? Furthermore, silly electric guitar riffs and hyper-vibrated pop star renditions of the national anthem aside, there's really nothing more musically powerful than a symphony orchestra in full cry. So why don't more teams make use of our kind of pump-up-the-volume moments? Just imagine, the hush falling over the crowd as the anthems are over on Opening Night, and this plays underneath the obligatory gauzy video about the coming of spring, the reawakening of grass and infield dirt...



...then transitioning to this as highlights of the previous year begin to play on the big screen...



...and finally, as the players take the field, the sound system erupts with...



...okay, yeah, you're right, this is Minnesota, and that might be a bit ostentatious. Let's just dial that back a notch...



Now, tell me you don't want to see Justin Morneau, Denard Span, and the boys taking their places to that. 'Cause I do.

No One's Fault, But Everyone's Problem

Sorry for the light blogging this week - it's been a very busy time at work, both on and off stage, and I haven't had much of a chance to sit down and collect my thoughts. But as I was browsing through various gloom-and-doom reports from the limited corner of the press that still bothers to cover orchestras, I was struck by how different the perspective of an observer can be from the perspective of those of us who work in the music business, and how the observer's perspective is frequently the only one that gets reported and therefore sets the public tone for the organization that's being reported on. (I suspect that the people who work for AIG could tell you a thing or two about this.)

Just for instance, I keep pretty close track of press coverage of the Philadelphia Orchestra, partly because it's the orchestra I grew up listening to and I studied with three of its musicians as a teenager, partly because I have a number of friends who play in it currently, and partly because the Philadelphia Inquirer is one of the few US papers left to still employ full-time arts writers assigned to a specific beat like the orchestra. Now, at the moment, the PhilOrch is in a tough spot - they're between music directors, between CEOs, only just appointed a new board president, and they're being walloped with the same fiscal two-by-four that everyone else in the industry is feeling.

The music director issue is a tricky one, because Philly's search for a new chief conductor has now dragged on for long enough that everyone is getting somewhat antsy about it, and even though the orchestra has placed famed Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit in a temporary leadership position, the lack of a permanent leader is becoming distracting. And in recent months, the music critic at the Inquirer has begun openly campaigning for one specific conductor to be given the job, even going so far as to say that "the search is over," and that it's only a matter of time before the orchestra realizes it.

But here's the thing: the orchestra, while it had high hopes for the critic's anointed winner, wasn't actually terribly impressed with his work on the podium as a guest conductor. (No, I'm not guessing about this, just in case you're wondering.) But the newspaper keeps putting his name on the top of the search list, so there he stays, the frontrunner. And it's not the first time this has happened in Philly, either - another of the critic's favorite guest conductors was said (by the critic) to be a strong candidate for the top job, and again, it was a conductor who the orchestra found eminently forgettable. And while a music director is hired by the board of directors, not by a vote of the musicians, no savvy board would ever consider the self-defeating proposition of hiring an artistic leader the musicians had no interest in following.

So what is the critic's role in this situation? I don't mean to imply that the Inquirer critic (whose writing I quite like) is behaving badly here, although I know that many members of the orchestra believe he is. He's in an impossible situation: major orchestras treat music director searches the way the federal government treats missile launch codes, and the press is given zero indication of what anyone inside the organization thinks about any given candidate. For that matter, most orchestras won't even acknowledge that a given conductor is a candidate when asked directly. So what can the poor beat writer do other than speculate?

The problem is that the speculation almost always turns out to be wrong. Back in 2002, the Star Tribune published more than a few articles in which it was strongly implied that conductors Yakov Kreizberg and Roberto Abbado were the frontrunners to succeed Eiji Oue as our music director. This, I'm guessing, was based on the fact that at the time, both gentlemen were guest conducting us fairly regularly, which is not generally an indication of anything. Meanwhile, Osmo Vänskä's first appearance with us, while it garnered good reviews, passed without any real notice in the press regarding whether he might or might not be a candidate, which is stunning to me. My mother happened to be in town for that first Osmo concert, and I distinctly remember saying to her as soon as it was over, "No one's saying anything outright, but I think you might have just seen our next music director." I have it on good authority that members of our board who were in attendance that night also felt an immediate spark between conductor and orchestra, so clearly, you didn't have to be on stage to know that something was up.

I don't really have a larger point to make here, and I don't mean to imply that music critics are lacking perspective or integrity. Most of them are knowledgeable people and good writers trying very hard to cover an industry that resists serious journalism the way oil resists water. But as I read story after story detailing the various troubles that arts groups are finding themselves in at the moment, I find myself constantly wondering which of the details presented as fact are actually correct, and which are the ones that are lacking a key bit of context, framing an issue incorrectly, or are just flatly inaccurate. And then I wonder what the consequences of those inaccuracies will turn out to be. Scary thought...