Fish Out of Water

We're in the final days of our summer season, with two concerts left to go, and that means that we're deep into rehearsals for the most stressful show we play all year. It's the full-length semi-staged opera that brings Sommerfest to a close every year, and it's a brutally difficult thing to pull off for a variety of reasons.

The first problem with the opera is that we simply don't have nearly enough time to prepare it. During our regular season, we rehearse a concert for three days or so, then perform it three or four times before starting the next week's repertoire. During Sommerfest, we also perform three or four concerts a week, but every one of them has different repertoire. So if you've ever wondered why professional orchestras tend to play a lot of familiar old warhorses in summer, the lack of rehearsal time is a big part of it.

And that brings us to the second difficulty of the Sommerfest opera. To put it bluntly, we are not an opera orchestra. For the most part, our familiarity with operas and how to play them is very, very low, at least compared with the musicians who play them full-time. Opera really is a very different game than symphonic work - at the risk of overgeneralizing, orchestral music is Germanic, while opera is Italian. Symphony orchestras base nearly everything we do on rigid precision and rhythmic clarity, while opera swims in a much more freeform pool where rhythm is merely a suggestion, tempos shift violently back and forth at the whim of the singers and the conductor, and many of the important elements that give the work its shape aren't noted in any way in the musicians' parts.

And speaking of parts, we come now to the major reason that we'll all be sweating it out until the last note of Aida sounds on Saturday night. As anyone who's ever played in an opera pit can tell you, the printed orchestra parts for even the most famous operas tend to be horrifically, atrociously, criminally difficult to read. I've never really understood why this is, but it's a fact. What's in our part is often different from what's in the conductor's score in very important respects - dynamics might be missing, notes can be incorrect, and the publisher's main aim was obviously not to give us readable parts, but to save as much ink as possible. (For instance, our Aida parts don't have the key signature at the beginning of each line. The sharps and flats only appear when the key changes, so there are several occasions when no key signature appears in my part for several pages. That's a disaster waiting to happen when your part is 57 pages long and you haven't played the piece before.)

There are also lots of little things wrong with the parts - notes that aren't spaced properly, lyrical cues in two languages (one of which is German, for absolutely no reason at all) jammed into small spaces between staves, and then, there's my favorite bit of insanity. The markings in our parts for "piano" and "forte" dynamics are not the usual stylized and markings we're all used to seeing. The "p" is a standard lowercase letter, but the "f" is a block-printed capital letter in miniature, and if you're more than six inches from the page on your stand and playing through a fast section, the f looks exactly like the p!!! This has led to some unscheduled drive-by solos in our rehearsals, which would be hilarious if it weren't quite so terrifying.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when this is what nearly all orchestra parts looked like. But over the last several decades, some very dedicated and detail-obsessed orchestra librarians have helped publishers standardize parts, remove errors, and establish a basic "look" for symphonic scores. There's still plenty of variation from publisher to publisher and country to country (the French, in particular, are ridiculously attached to using a symbol for a quarter rest that looks like a backwards eighth rest, which the rest of the music world just hates,) but generally speaking, most of the repertoire symphony orchestras play comes with parts that are pretty easy to decipher at high speed.

I don't know why the people who publish opera scores don't hire the dedicated librarians to do for them what they did for symphonies, but they haven't. And that's pretty much fine with a lot of established opera companies, because they've owned their sets of parts for decades, and the errors have long since been corrected, and the whole orchestra could probably play Aida from memory anyway, just like I'm pretty certain I could get through Beethoven's 5th without a part. But when a bunch of musicians unaccustomed to playing opera encounters a set of parts that hasn't been opened in 20 years, well... let's just say there's a lot of frantic scribbling in the margins going on.

We'll get through it, of course. We always do (mainly because the singers who will be the main attraction are spectacular performers who actually do opera for a living,) and with any luck, no one will mistake a ppp for an fff on Saturday night. But I'll say this - it's a smart move to schedule the orchestra's annual vacation immediately after this particular performance. I need a nap.

Changing of the guard

Worth a thousand words:

Remembering Michael

The Minnesota Orchestra lost a great friend this weekend. But that seems entirely inadequate: the whole music world lost a great friend this weekend. Michael Steinberg may have belonged to my orchestra by way of marriage and geographic proximity, but he was a man whose quiet passion and boundless intellect touched the lives of an almost unimaginable number of people.

I was lucky enough to get to know Michael fairly well in the decade that I've lived in Minnesota, and even had the good fortune to share a concert stage with him on a few occasions. (He appeared in two of our early Inside the Classics shows as our "pop-up musicologist," expounding on Copland's evolving sound and Tchaikovsky's homosexuality from a first-tier box overlooking the stage.) There are few writers as comfortable and skilled at speaking their words as they are at writing them, but Michael's talks were true events, casually delivered but so full of detail and wit that you'd swear he must have spent weeks putting them together.

One of my fondest memories of Michael comes from my early years in the orchestra, when I was playing regularly in a pretty good string quartet with some friends. We'd decided to tackle Britten's fiendishly difficult second quartet, and while we were making good headway on the technical side of things, we began to feel that we could use some guidance from musicians who really understood the piece inside and out. Among those we called to ask for a coaching session was Jorja, who is as well known for her chamber music performances as for her solo and orchestral work.

Jorja was out of town for the month, Michael told us on the phone, and wouldn't be back until after our performance of the Britten. However, he continued, if it wasn't too presumptuous of him, he himself happened to be a big fan of Britten's 2nd, and while he couldn't offer much in the way of technical expertise on quartet playing, he would love the chance to sit and listen to us rehearse, and offer some general advice if we thought it would be helpful.

We thought it would be quite helpful, and showed up in due course at Jorja and Michael's elegant home in Edina with a fine bottle of scotch to present as payment for Michael's services. For nearly two hours, Michael listened to us hack away at the Britten, offering gentle suggestions and occasional stories of approaches he had heard other quartets take to the piece. What was striking was how easily this writer could slip between the very distinct languages of those who listen to music and those who perform it, and how effortlessly he could connect the larger ideas behind Britten's composition to, say, the specific bowstroke we might want to use to bring those ideas to life.

A few weeks later, Michael showed up to hear us perform the piece in front of a sparse crowd at a downtown Minneapolis church. The performance went better than we could have hoped, and it was, for me, one of those moments in life that musicians live for, when you don't care how many people have heard you play or how much you're getting paid to do it - you're just thrilled to be playing. Michael smiled warmly at us from the pews as we finished, but didn't come backstage after the concert.

When we arrived back to our violinists' house for a post-concert drink, however, we found a message from Michael already waiting on the answering machine. In his usual mellifluous (if maybe just ever so slightly tipsy) tones, he said, "I just wanted to thank you for that wonderful performance of one of my favorite pieces." He went on to say something about elegance mixed with youthful energy, then paused and said, "In fact, the only thing I can think of right now that could give me as much pleasure as your performance is this scotch that you were kind enough to present me with. I don't know whether you've sampled it yourselves, but the feeling of it is as if the Virgin Mary were sliding down your throat wearing velvet pantaloons. So good night, and thank you again."

We must have played that message back a dozen times. The Virgin Mary? Velvet pantaloons? Brilliant. The man even knew the perfect words for describing whiskey.

And that really is what made Michael such a powerful personality, and such a pleasure to be around in any situation. He was a quiet man, but when he spoke, or wrote, the words flowed from him in such effortless fashion that you almost didn't notice how profound they were. When Michael taught you something, it didn't feel like a lesson. It felt like an awakening of the mind, a new way of looking at the world that would never have occurred to you without his insight. As Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times put it, "Reading Michael, your ears -- and your heart -- grow large. "

We'll miss him terribly, of course, but I'm taking comfort in the knowledge that he went out entirely on his own terms, alert and engaged with the world to the very last. It would have been impossible to imagine him any other way.

Postscript: I wanted to give Michael himself the last word, so here he is from his box seat at Orchestra Hall, talking with me about Aaron Copland during the first season of Inside the Classics...

hmmmmm....

...well, look, I'm all for using technology to enhance performance experiences. But I'm all for finding the most efficient and organic way of utilizing those technologies; I don't think it makes sense to incorporate multi-media/electronic/communication gadgetry just for the sake of using the technology in itself.

Case in point, an upcoming Beethoven Sixth Symphony with the National Symphony Orchestra led by NSO associate conductor Emil de Cou in which program notes will be sent via Twitter at appropriate times during the performance.

I don't have a problem with real-time program notes, which some have found to enhance the concert experience (I would think particularly so for those less familiar with the repertoire/type of music at hand). I just don't think Twitter is really the right vehicle.

I love tweeting as much as the the next Gen X/Y-er, but the charm of Twitter is that posts are pithy reflections of experiences in real time, as they occur. The 140-character limitations creates the necessity of boiling down a thought or observation to its essential meaning, and posting is a matter delivering these as they occur to you, a running commentary on life as it occurs (some tweets I just read as I write this blog: "Running to USPS & bank so I can get my errands and exercise done at the same time."; "In Vegas for a meeting, believe it or not. Just saw the spot where Elvis waited in his cape before he went on."; "Just did a shot of aquavit and sight-read the "Moonlight Sonata." It's wild sharps in that sonata.").

Pre-written program notes, tweeted as carefully cultivated musical points, first and foremost, defeat the purpose of Twitter. This is an example of the use of technology as a delivery system (for mass texting) which is peripheral to the whole purpose of the technology itself (from the Twitter website: "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?").

If you want to provide real-time program notes, why not have a super-title screen?

Ok, Ok, I know some of you will say, "Well, at least with the Twittering, those of us who don't want to be distracted by the program notes don't have to see it on some screen above the orchestra." To which I answer, what's more distracting, a screen high enough above the orchestra so that you could ignore it if you so choose, or seeing the pale glow of countless phones and PDAs as people read their screens every few minutes? Are we encouraging people to read texts during a concert? What precedent does that set?

Orchestras have slowly climbed aboard the technology bandwagon, which I applaud. What I'm less enthused about is the use of the latest "sexy" thing ("Hey, everyone's on Twitter! We need to incorporate this into what we do because it's proof that we're hip and current!") just for the sake of the thing itself, when there is a more efficient and perhaps more natural way to accomplish the same ultimate goal.

I've had a long-standing relationship with the NSO (I first worked with them back in 2002), and I appreciate this attempt to think outside the box; however, for my taste, this particular foray into use of technology seems off-mark. I'll be curious to see commentary from those who attend the concert.

PS: had set this to post on a 12-hour delay without carefully proofing, sorry for the typos in the original!

Beyond The Product

Doug McLennan over at ArtsJournal has a blog post up today taking arts organizations to task for not keeping up with other entertainment venues when it comes to customer comfort.

"Despite the fact that the average concert hall was many times more expensive to construct than the new-generation movie complexes, the customer amenities inside the halls constructed over the past 20 years - how can I put this kindly - kind of suck... There's an argument to be made for preserving formal rituals in going out to see a performance. But things change. I like some of the rituals, but I have to admit I often resent the degree to which it is imposed by rigid seats and cramped legroom. And why can't I bring my drink back in to the show?"

This is the kind of issue that those of us who make our living on stage forget to think about most of the time - after all, we don't sit in those cramped seats very often, and to be perfectly frank, if you think the audience spaces are uncomfortable, you should see the backstage areas we work in. (Just for example, if we have more than three soloists on a single concert, we don't have enough dressing rooms for them.) But we should, and this ties into a much larger issue. Doug's been talking a lot on his blog lately about the need for arts groups to realize that we're no longer just competing with other arts groups - we're competing with baseball teams, rock bands, TV programs, and the almighty Internet, and we might want to start acting like we're aware of this.

As it happens, of course, the Minnesota Orchestra recently announced that we're intending to spend $40 million to upgrade Orchestra Hall, and nearly all of that money will be spent on audience spaces like our severely undersized lobby. Now, unfortunately, $40m isn't enough to suddenly transform a 35-year-old concert hall into this, but it's certainly enough to make a tangible difference in the concertgoing experience.

So what are your priorities? What, specifically, do you think we should be spending our renovation budget on? And what popular upgrades do you think would be a huge waste of resources that we shouldn't even think about bothering with?

Easier Said Than Done

There's never been a shortage of people anxious to tell those of us who work in the arts that we're a) hopelessly behind the times, b) in desperate need of making our "product" more relevant to the next generation of consumers, and c) on the verge of complete irrelevance if we don't become more cutting edge and daring right this very minute. In the orchestra business, these people are usually consultants or media pundits (frequently the same people,) and in recent years, they've become shockingly good at getting their alarmist message wide distribution within the industry.

For the purposes of civility, I'll leave aside the question of how ethical it is for someone who runs a consulting business for orchestras to double as a pundit and editorialist forever claiming in whatever publication will have them that orchestras are in crisis and need someone (someone professional... you know, to consult with) to help turn them around. That's a topic for another day. My major beef with a lot of the "future of the industry" analysis I come across (and I read a lot of it, believe me) is that it tends to be awfully long on diagnosis and awfully short on cure.

For instance, it's become almost a religious conviction on the part of some in the orchestra business that the union rules governing recording, broadcasting, and other media are antiquated, and orchestras are being terribly hurt by their continued existence. (I'm starting with this issue because I don't entirely disagree with its premise. Our media rules are antiquated, and I defy anyone to say otherwise.) So you hear a lot of noise from the consultant/pundits about how fast the media landscape is evolving, and how desperate the situation is, and how if we don't wake up and change everything, like, yesterday, we're doomed to the same fate as 8-track tapes and Betamax video.

But even assuming they're right, where's the solution? Our media agreements are a nationally negotiated rule book that individual orchestras usually don't have the right to change even if we want to. (Also, these rules are agreed to by both musicians and managers, so blaming the whole thing on the union is disingenuous and wrong. Last I heard, a new set of more progressive media rules had been tabled because a certain crucial CEO walked out of the process.) And while the consultants are great at pointing out the finish line they want you to get to, I've yet to meet one who's found a way to navigate the tangle of individual interests that stand in the way. Or, for that matter, one who's even tried.

Another supposed truism you hear all the time lately is that orchestras have just got to invest major marketing bucks in social networking. Facebook and Twitter aren't the future, they're the present, and we're missing an entire generation of potential fans by not marketing to them where they live online! I recently read an entire newspaper article by a local Minnesota entrepreneur who wants to hold symposiums to teach arts leaders how to set up Facebook groups.

Now, here again, I don't totally disagree. I've been on Facebook for years, and I even finally signed up for a Twitter account this summer (mainly because Sarah bullied me, and also because someone told me I'd get the NHL entry draft news fastest there.) Social networking is an undeniably useful way of keeping in touch with large numbers of people, and that's obviously alluring to arts groups looking to build the 21st-century equivalent of word of mouth.

But honestly, when's the last time you responded positively to a company trying to solicit your business on Facebook? Hell, the Facebook universe practically exploded when they started running small ads on the site, and flamed up anew when the rumor went around that the company was going to start using your profile info to decide which ads to show you. And last year, when Sarah and I started creating event pages for our ItC concerts and sending them to everyone we knew (as well as asking y'all to invite people for us,) the response was, quite frankly, underwhelming. I'd be shocked if we sold a single extra ticket as a result. These days, the Minnesota Orchestra's official Twitter and Facebook pages mainly link to our blog entries and offer occasional concert come-ons and ticket discounts, which I suppose is better than not doing it at all, but which I doubt has resulted in much of an uptick in sales.

Again, I'm not saying that orchestras and other arts groups don't need to face the new realities of the entertainment world head-on, or even that the arts punditocracy is wrong to be constantly chanting their Change mantra. (As Sarah is fond of saying, if you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less.) But as this awful recession drags on and the ranks of those who seem to think they have all the answers for our industry grow by the week, I'm getting a little tired of reading condescending screeds full of lofty pronouncements but no specific ideas for how we might achieve the end results that the authors are so certain we need. Quite honestly, it's making me grumpy (as you can probably tell.)

Basically, what I'm saying to the ever-expanding universe of arts consultants and commentators is this: if you're so smart, kindly pick up a hammer and jump in, rather than standing around the edge of the foundation talking about how grand it will be if we just stick to your vision. Thanks.

Postscript: I'm aware that I didn't link to any offending articles in this post, which may seem to undermine my point for those who don't spend their free time reading consultants' reports and browsing arts blogs. Trust me, these people are out there - I didn't link them because a) I didn't want to boost their page views, and b) I don't really care to hear their responses.

(Non-opposable) thumbs up

I know I've been posting a lot of videos lately, but this one is too good to pass up (this via Minnesota Orchestra Vice President and GM Bob Neu):



It's really kind of a fantastic idea, and musically it holds together with thematic threads (the closing few shots are actually repeats of the opening ones, so it gives it a nice sense of coming full circle). I particularly like the sudden harmonic shifts (appropriately coordinated with the...uh...soloist). I wonder, was the solo part notated? Or was this done purely with visual cues? In any case, a charming piece (kudos to composer/conductor Mindaugas Piecaitis) and a wonderfully innovative idea. With video screens, no less...

Happy...

...Bastille Day!

Riemenschmackdown!

Well, it was really only a matter of time before this issue hit the local press, and here it is now, courtesy of the Star Tribune's fine rock critic, Chris Riemenschneider. Ever since our orchestra unveiled our much-scaled-back $40m renovation plan for Orchestra Hall, I've been waiting for someone in the media to point out that the Day of Music, our wildly popular 8-year-old event showcasing all sides of Minnesota's diverse local music scene, was canceled for lack of sponsorship just weeks before the renovation announce. Riemenschneider obliges, and further points out just how relatively small the cost of putting on the free daylong festival was compared with a $40m outlay for a lobby expansion.

Now, as commentators tend to do, Riemenschneider chose to oversimplify and distort some important stuff for the purposes of making his point. Just for instance, his decision to blithely dismiss our PR staff's assertion that the renovation money wouldn't have been available to fund the Day of Music (or anything else program-related, for that matter) is typical of the willful ignorance arts journalists tend to apply when writing about the business side of the cultural world. His bizarre claim that our entire week of annual (and free) July 4th concerts in towns like Excelsior and Hudson somehow don't count as free concerts played in the Twin Cities metro is also a head-scratcher.

But Riemenschneider's larger point about the importance of events like the Day of Music is unquestionably solid. Yes, the Day really wasn't particularly focused on classical music (though the orchestra's centerpiece concert has always been packed to the gills with a thrillingly diverse audience,) and you could make an argument that, in times as fiscally terrifying as these, we have no business putting on expensive shows that have little to do with our core mission. But the reality is that, in a city with the kind of music scene that Minneapolis/St. Paul proudly sports, no presenting organization can pretend that we don't have a responsibility to reach out to anyone and everyone who supports live music in our community.

Riemenschneider sums things up fairly, if pointedly:

"Let the rich philanthropists putting up most of the renovation money get their cushier seats; that's fine. But at least a small fraction of that money would be better spent on more free or inexpensive programming, as would a good chunk of whatever the state puts up (which has yet to be decided by the Legislature and presidential cand, er, governor)

"Without the Day of Music and events like it -- which bring in the young and diverse crowds sorely missing at Orchestra Hall -- those cushier seats might not have anybody in them in decades to come."

Or to put it another way, our orchestra garners the level of support it does not just because there's a large contingent of Beethoven fans in Minnesota. It's because Minnesotans support arts, culture, and music of all kinds at a level that puts most larger American cities to shame. And while we might be the biggest arts gorilla in town, our long-term fate is inextricably bound up with the health of that vital cultural scene that so many here have been supporting all their lives.

Let me be clear: I understand fully why the Day of Music got canceled this year, and I actually believe it was the right call. Corporate support for the event went from generous to nonexistent at the exact same moment that we (and every other orchestra in the US) were hit by a tsunami of financial woe. The #1 goal has to be to stop the bleeding and stabilize the organization, and that means some tough calls have to be made, and those calls are going to make some people upset.

But I hope that, when the dust finally clears and the economy stops shifting under our collective feet every few minutes, people like Chris Riemenschneider are still there to remind us that we owe one to Minnesota's music scene, and that it's time to pay up.

Bless The Rains

It's been forever since we had any significant rain here in Minneapolis, which makes for a nice mosquito-free summer, but also for crispy brown lawns and impossible farming/gardening conditions. Nothing we can do about it, of course, but a little rain dance couldn't hurt, right?



That's an Eastern European choral group called Perpetuum Jazzile turning in a pretty stunning rendition of my very favorite one-hit-wonder song from my childhood in the '80s, Toto's "Africa." Gotta love the creative thunder and lightning effect at the beginning...

(Hat tip to former MN Orch personnel manager Brian Woods for bringing this clip to my attention.)

To see or not to see

A review about the opening concert of the Ravinia Festival caught my eye, primarily because a majority of content was not about the performance itself; critic Lawrence Johnson spends most of the article panning the use of the large video screens showing closeups of the performers.

One of my earliest exposures to symphonic music (besides my audiophile father and the Honolulu Symphony, which is a subject of a future blog post) was PBS's "Great Performances" - I still remember a Brahms Piano Concerto #1 with Ashkenazy/Giulini/LA Phil from the early 80's. What I loved about those programs was the up-close-and-personal sense one gets, thanks to some well-produced camera work; it's great to actually see an instrument during a solo spot, illuminating to see the cues and communication going on onstage and inspiring to see the expressions of conductor and players as they deliver an emotionally and intellectually engaging performance.

Perhaps my predilection for this kind of "produced" concert experience makes me much more sympathetic to the use of video screens in performance. We experimented with this in our final Inside the Classics concert of the season, to mostly rave review; a vast majority of responses from the audience were very favorable, while a minority pronounced the screens distracting (this data via website commentary and written survey results).

I certainly think the more conventional concert experience (of the standard, "unenhanced" variety) has its place. By the same token, I question Johnson's contention that "in its attempt to “open up” the traditional classical event, the video simulcast only serves to cheapen the concert-going experience, making it less appealing and, to be frank, irritating as hell." It may be "less appealing and...irritating" for some, but I would be curious to hear responses from the Ravinia audience; if it's anything like Minnesota audiences, many enjoyed the sense of connection to what's happening onstage. And I wonder, is there a generational disconnect here? Are those of raised on produced televised concerts in tandem with live performance more accustomed and open to different concert experiences? And does any enhancement of a symphonic presentation "cheapen" the experience (and what does that really mean?)?

Finally, Johnson wraps up with this:

Perhaps in time one can learn to tune out the video or drink the Kool-Aid and become accustomed to this MTV-ification of the classical concert experience. But I doubt it. So much contemporary pop calls for music-video flash, quick-edit dancing and assorted stimuli to distract one from the fact that the music isn’t very good. Brahms, Mendelssohn and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra don’t require such pointless “enhancements.”

What I find pointless is taking potshots/hurling veiled insults at other musical genres. This is the kind of holier-than-thou attitude that does nothing to endear those of us in the classical side of the business to...well, a vast majority of the rest of the world (because, really, less than 10% of the adult population of our country attended a classical music performance in 2008 - this according to the NEA). It's tantamount to insulting a majority of the populace for its musical tastes. Do we need to engage in this kind of bridge-burning in an attempt to elevate our preferred music?

Music is a living art; a symphony was never meant to be presented as a museum piece, with a removed reverence utterly disconnected with the era in which it is being performed (not that in which it was created). I'm not advocating for video screens for all concerts of symphonic music; I'm simply interested in keeping what I do and love vibrant and relevant for generations to come. And for that to happen, we cannot rely on business as usual.

Arts Funding & Accountability

As a general rule, the CEOs who run America's symphony orchestras tend to be regarded by orchestra musicians with a wariness that borders on outright suspicion. This mistrust (though it is often unnecessary and misplaced) is born from decades of hurtful experience at the bargaining table, and from the sad fact that, in an industry which pays its managers a fraction of what they could earn in the for-profit industry, there are far too many people running symphony orchestras who shouldn't be. (Caveat: I am in no way speaking about the Minnesota Orchestra's management team.)

That having been said, there are a select few CEOs who seem to have achieved the impossible - running their own organization competently and with a fiscally responsible hand, while simultaneously garnering the deep respect of the industry's workers (which is to say, the musicians.) At the top of this list is Michael Kaiser, the outspoken leader of Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center, which operates the National Symphony Orchestra. For years, Kaiser has espoused ideas that some of his colleagues would consider heretical, while calmly guiding one of the steadiest ships in the industry as an example of how to run a non-profit without constantly skating on the edge of the abyss. He is considered so supportive of the interests of musicians that he was once invited to be the keynote speaker at a national conference of the musicians' union, a nearly unheard-of honor for an executive.

Kaiser also makes a habit of regularly issuing pronouncements and analysis of the national arts scene, and backs up his opinions with initiatives designed to invite non-profits from around the US to tap into his knowledge and experience. This week, he's writing in the Huffington Post about the need for a federal arts policy. This is an issue that I've always considered a bit of a red herring, and suspected was based largely on the almost obsessive need of certain East Coast types to achieve token recognition from the Powers That Be in Washington, but I'm willing to give Kaiser a chance to change my mind...

"Most people do not know that no fewer than nine government agencies provide support to arts in this nation. That is not a typo... [T]here is literally no coordination between these agencies on their arts spending, nor is there any central governing philosophy or policy... What is needed is a coordinated approach to arts grants to ensure that the arts programming supported by federal funds truly serves our national interest."

Now, that's an interesting way to look at it, I think. Saying that arts organizations need to be run "more like businesses" is an old, old saw in the orchestra business, and coming from many executives, it tends to mean "we need to bust the union so we can start laying people off and slashing salaries." But here is Kaiser, actually identifying a pro-business approach that could benefit the arts: implementing a streamlined system of grantmaking that would have the ability to hold recipients accountable for what they do with federal moneys. And he also thinks we can do it with less bureaucracy, not more. Dare I say, it's an arts funding approach that a Republican could almost love...

In Which Sam Fixes The Economy

Okay, not really. But I think we've all been stunned this week as news of just how dire the economic crisis is has rolled in from states like California, Pennsylvania, and New York. Compounding the fear is the very real sense that those in power, whether at the state or national level, are more interested in fighting petty turf wars and making flowery public statements than actually finding creative ways to address what now threatens to be a fiscal and social catastrophe for many Americans.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
That's Great Now Fix the Economy
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Oh, and in case anyone's forgotten, the media are only too happy to keep churning out stories about how hard non-profit charities, social service organizations, and arts groups are being hit by the recession, just as more and more people find themselves in need of the services that many of these groups provide.

The overall sense you take away from a few days of this sort of news coverage is that the entire country is on fire, and the fire department is ignoring the alarm bells because they're too busy arguing over who's winning the hand of poker they've been playing while waiting for an alarm. It's beyond frustrating for those of us waiting outside the halls of government for the slightest hint of leadership.

So anyway, here's where I offer up a small suggestion that might beget a few other small suggestions that might (somehow) lead to someone in authority actually doing something, if anyone's still interested in that approach to governance. Basically, my idea stems from two fervently held political beliefs espoused by opposing camps here in Minnesota, and it takes the form of a potential change in state tax law that might bridge the ideological gap and help out those struggling non-profits at the same time.

Republicans in Minnesota have long complained about our state's high business taxes, saying that, by taxing corporate profits at 9.8%, we're essentially begging leading companies to locate elsewhere, thus depriving our economy of jobs that might otherwise be attracted to the state's legendarily high quality of life. Now, whether you agree with that idea or not, it's a legitimate point of view that cannot easily be dismissed.

Another belief that's hard to dismiss is one that you hear constantly from those on the Minnesota left these days: that by slashing local government aid, fending off spending increases, and holding firm against any new state income taxes at all during his seven years as governor, Tim Pawlenty has shifted the state's tax burden to urban property owners and those who can least afford to pay, and made it much harder for cities and counties to offer a social safety net, with the result that more people find themselves underwater just as the national economy is at its worst.

I see an opportunity here, and I see it in the example provided by one of Minnesota's largest companies: Target. For years, Target has had a policy of donating a full 5% of its pre-tax profits back into the community. That amounted to $169 million last year, money that went straight into the coffers of schools, hospitals, and arts groups around the US. (Full disclosure: Target is a longtime supporter of the Minnesota Orchestra, and some of its executives have served on our board.) It's a corporate policy that can't be placed in a political pigeonhole, and that (since you never hear about it in Target's ubiquitous ads) the company apparently undertakes just because it seems like the right thing to do. In other words, it's a policy that actually accomplishes something other than ideological purity.

So what if Minnesota were to offer a hefty tax break to companies that undertook a similar policy to Target's? (There could be a sliding scale on the percentage of profits a company would be required to donate to qualify, of course - 5% would be pretty steep for a small business.) Any Minnesota corporation willing to support struggling non-profits in the state at a significant level would earn the right to pay less into the state's coffers. And any company that doesn't want to participate is free to stick with business as usual, and keep on paying our 9.8% tax rate.

Now, I know - this kind of plan never makes it into law, because there's too much for the ideologues on both sides of the aisle to shriek about. True believers on the left hate the idea of replacing government support for non-profits with corporate donations, and the hardcore anti-tax crowd on the right sees charitable mandates as nothing more than a different kind of tax. Both sides commence to arguing feverishly, and eventually things get so ugly that just making the whole thing go away is actually seen as a reasonable compromise.

But seriously - hasn't the last year taught us that ideological purity is pragmatic poison? Haven't we pretty much hit the wall as far as believing that either the right or the left have all the answers? All I want at this point is for someone in authority to start implementing a few practical solutions that will help us all lift ourselves out of this mess, and I'm just not interested in hearing any more garbage about how perfect the world would be if only the Democrats/Republicans/Socialists/Fascists/French would stop screwing everything up.

So I'm laying my personal left-of-center credentials on the line to suggest that one of the answers could be for everyone to follow the example of a gigantic, multi-national corporation that a lot of people love to hate. Any takers?

Couldn't resist

I've been avoiding commentary on Michael Jackson's death (because, given the coverage on all the major media outlets, what could there possibly be to add??), but I had to share this with you:







(Organist Robert Ridgell plays a Jacksonian postlude last Sunday at Trinity Wall Street)


The (modal!) fugal treatment of "ABC" is particularly stunning. And make sure to watch through the collegial Book of Common Prayer-thumping at the end!