Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Or, as we'd say on this side of the Atlantic, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Throughout my conducting career I've faced the dreaded "How is it being a woman in a male-dominated field?" question, and my customary reply is that 1) I choose not to make a big deal of it and 2) musicians are fine with anyone on the podium as long as they are prepared and competent.

My reasoning lies in my belief that we largely create our own realities; if I choose to ignore the potential minefield of the woman-as-authority-figure model, and assume that others will as well, that's the way it will be. If I act like it's no big deal, everyone else feels like it's no big deal. Classic group psychology.

On the other hand, if I ever became hyper-conscious of long-held assumptions about gender and leadership, it would probably cause me some anxiety, which would then affect both my work and relationship with the ensemble or organization in question.

In terms of the inroads women have made in the conducting field, to paraphrase - we've come a long way, baby. But as far as we've come, there are constant reminders of the underlying discomforts that still exist.

Case in point; the recent firing or conductor/Baroque specialist Emmanuelle Haïm. Slated to conduct a run of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Opéra de Paris, she was dismissed and replaced by Philippe Hui two days before opening night. What ensued was a she-said/they-said unusual in the music world in that the Orchestra made a public statement in response to Haïm's declaration. Haïm claimed that the musicians were unwilling to work with her to achieve a different (Baroque) aesthetic. The orchestra countered that they were disappointed in the lack of precision in both musical ideas and in conducting style/gestures, and that all they care for is the quality of a performance.

A vote of no confidence from an orchestra is rather extraordinary. In her defense, neither a contracted rehearsal period nor musicians unaccustomed to the very particular technical and musical needs of historically informed performance is conducive to an amicable work environment. In the orchestra's defense, Haïm is a self-taught conductor who, while generally highly regarded for her musical expertise in the Baroque repertoire, is admittedly not a technically adept conductor.

The situation is fully outlined in this article from Le Monde; for the non-Francophones, a translation of most of the article here.

What struck me about this commotion is the inclusion of an obvious fact that the author of the article decided to add at the end of a paragraph (I'm using Charles T. Downey's translation from Ionarts):

The orchestra, "called out" by Mme Haïm, broke its customary silence -- a very rare thing -- by the means of the commission elected by the musicians, which declared on January 22: "The musicians were delighted to try a Baroque approach, [but] there was great disappointment in the lack of precision as well of musical ideas in the conducting style." In other words, the orchestra, which wanted only "to guarantee the excellence of the performances," denounced a lack of competence, for this production, of one of the few woman conductors in the world. (emphasis mine)

We don't need to be reminded that there are not a whole lot of female conductors in the world. Anyone not living under a rock is aware of this. So, assuming that the goal was not simply an unnecessary statement of the obvious, I can only infer that this phrase was added as some sort of snide insinuation.

Yes, I'll admit, I'm probably more sensitive to gender slights than your average male conductor. It's simply a matter of experience; I've been on the receiving end of backhanded commentary and dealt with interactions fraught with undercurrents of chauvinism countless times. Again, as I said earlier, my response is to completely ignore it, and when one ignores it, one at least has the possibility of neutralizing an unfriendly environment.

But when publicly presented in international media, it seems gratuitously provocative (a conductor declared incompetent - and she's a WOMAN!). And let me be clear here; it's the author of the article that rankles me. I know nothing about the actual situation and can only assume a conductor would be ousted only because a production was in serious jeopardy and was artistically compromised.

I strive to dispel any notion that my gender marks my work. In fact, most of the time I pay it no heed (yes, even in the four-inch heels). And, again, when one endeavors to disregard traditional societal norms, with enough time one can establish new norms. Media insinuations like this one merely do a disservice to the very real work we've undertaken to eradicate those boundaries and assumptions.

Just when you think we've made progress, all you need to do is scratch the surface to discover the underlying bias. Plus ça change... (and do read down through all the comments; the vitriol is extraordinary.)

And you thought our Symphony Magazine cover photo was awesome...

...check out this very stylish poster by the Berlin Philharmonic:



Or even better, take a look at each individual portrait that makes up the poster - "128 Soloists".

More $$ For Less Music? Think Again.

For the past few days, we've been performing one of the more difficult and exhausting concerts of our season: a string orchestra arrangement of Beethoven's massive Grosse Fuge, Chopin's 2nd Piano Concerto (with the amazing Garrick Ohlsson,) and Mozart's 40th Symphony. There are a lot of different things that can make a concert seem difficult, and this particular rep covers most of them.

In fact, the moment our first concert of the week (a Thursday morning matinee) was over, my stand partner turned to me and said, "Wow. This feels like a really long program." I agreed. Though, in fact, the concert was right around our usual two hours from start to finish, it felt like a marathon. My shoulder ached, and I saw a number of other musicians massaging sore limbs as well.

So you can imagine how surprised a number of us in the orchestra were to read this paragraph at the end of the Star Tribune's otherwise positive review of the concert:

"It is distressing to note that this program contained barely an hour of music. For people paying top price, that works out to more than a dollar an [sic] minute. This increasing brevity is a disturbing trend."

Now, first off, I don't know what trend he's talking about. A local trend? A national one? I haven't done any research on this, but in the ten years I've been in the orchestra, it seems like the vast majority of our subscription concerts have hovered around the two hour mark, including a 20-minute intermission. Add in the time it takes the orchestra to tune before each piece, the audience to clap before and after each, and the stage crew to reset the stage between pieces, and you're generally talking about something like 90 minutes of actual music per show, give or take.

Second, and more importantly, the reviewer (who I don't actually know personally, but he's a respected music writer of long standing in this town) is just flat wrong about the length of the music on this particular concert. I know because the paragraph above so shocked me that I timed each piece the next night. Here was the breakdown:

Beethoven - 18 minutes

Chopin - 32 minutes

Various encores by Ohlsson: 5-7 minutes

Mozart - 33 minutes

So not counting intermission, stage moves, applause time, tuning, or the entertaining five-minute speech violist Mike Adams gave at the top of each show to introduce the Grosse Fuge, that's 88 minutes of music. In fact, when all the extraneous stuff was factored in, all the concerts but Thursday morning ended north of the two-hour mark. Thursday (the concert the Strib reviewed) ended just under two hours, because Garrick didn't play an encore that day. (Our Coffee Concert crowds tend to be considerably older and less demonstrative than our evening crowds, and they rarely clap long enough to draw an encore from visiting soloists.)

So what was the critic thinking? A glance at our program book explains part of it - we print estimated performance times next to each piece, and this week, there was a typo: the Mozart was listed at 22 minutes instead of 32. (Update: our publications editor informs me that the error was not, technically, a typo, but a reprinting of an error in a source publication we use for such things.) And all three estimates were at least a minute under our actual times, so if you went by the book, it did look like we had only programmed 69 minutes of music. Still, I find it hard to believe that anyone who was actually present at the concert could have come away finding it to be a short enough program to be worthy of comment.

But that's where the nature of deadline writing likely comes into play. A critic attending our concert has only a few hours (at most) to get his review filed for publication, so most experienced writers write a few paragraphs in advance - the basic background information on the music and the performers that won't be affected by the quality of the performance. I'm guessing that Mr. Beard also pre-wrote his objection to the program's length based on the misinformation in our book, then didn't think to revise or remove it after the actual concert.

Understandable, yes, but sheesh. Way to make us seem like we're nickel-and-diming the paying public out of their rightful amount of music...

Traversing La Mer

"Immerse yourself in classical music aboard a luxury Caribbean cruise". Symphonic Voyages is planning a 12-night cruise in January of '11, departing from Baltimore and visiting St. Croix, Antigua, etc. On the agenda:

Join a community of music lovers and world-class artists on a unique vacation experience. Attend daily performances by a full symphony orchestra, chamber music concerts, and solo recitals by the artists in residence. Enjoy opportunities to socialize with the professional musicians who will be your fellow passengers.

I'm curious as to who members of the orchestra will be, as well as what the clientele is like...

Want Ad Fail

This turned out to be one of those relatively rare years when the actual Super Bowl was better than the much-anticipated Super Bowl ads. (And Vikings fans - didn't it take away a little bit of the sting when you watched Peyton Manning throw essentially the exact same late-4th-quarter interception that Brett Favre threw in the NFC championship game?) But I couldn't help but notice one particular ad that resulted in a virtual blizzard of Facebook and Twitter updates from pretty much every musician I know...



Now, I'll be the first to admit: that's a cute ad. Who doesn't love a good fiddling beaver/rags to riches story? Just one problem, and this is what got everyone a-twittering the moment the ad aired last night: Monster.com doesn't actually have ads for violinists. Or for any other instrument. Seriously, they don't - go look. (You'd think they would have at least keyed that particular search term to redirect to a video of the beaver ad, wouldn't you?)

Of course, since the ad also winds up with the beaver relaxing with his fiddle and a bikini-clad babe in a hot tub in the bed of a pickup truck (if only the gig that results in that level of celebrity existed...) perhaps accuracy was not the #1 concern. Or maybe, just maybe, as my friend Jo suggested, Monster had a whole bunch of ads for violinists, but the beavers got to 'em all before the rest of us could jump online. Stupid beavers.

All together now

Marin Alsop conceived of and presented some unusual concerts this week, featuring nearly 600 amateur musicians playing alongside the professionals in the Baltimore Symphony in a program called "Rusty Musicians with the BSO". The requirements? Simply to be over the age of 25, play an orchestral instrument and be able to read music.

In terms of community-building, I don't think it gets much better than this. I keep harping on the fact that people crave experiences in which they feel involved in the process, and this kind of thing is a fantastic example of how orchestras can be inclusive of their audiences (current and potential). The logistics of this particular program sound daunting - 600 amateur musicians signed up - but instead of a single mammoth concert, the amateurs were broken up in groups over several days. It's some good outside-the-box thinking.

Although a Washington Post article claims that only the Pittsburgh Symphony has tried anything similar, many smaller orchestras (mostly regionals) have experimented with these types of concerts (for instance, one of my ex-orchestras, the Richmond Symphony, has been doing one for several years). It's always fascinating for me to see how the higher-profile orchestras often pick up on projects that smaller orchestras produce, and also how mainstream media rarely give credit to those smaller organizations. The regional and small per-service groups that make up the backbone of the network of American orchestras most often work in relative anonymity, but they are where much of the creative thinking in our field comes from.

What I particularly love about the whole amateurs-playing-with-pros idea is that it touches on the fact that most people who play an instrument in their youth don't then go on to become professional musicians. But that's not to say they ever lose the enjoyment of playing an instrument; in fact, I would venture to say that it's probably more "fun" for amateurs to play, at whatever level, because their livelihood and sense of self aren't bound up in it.

In a not-so-distant past, people gathering for impromptu amateur chamber music parties was a regular occurrence; even in my childhood, I remember how much fun it was to gather around the piano to sing songs (admittedly, my family was a little...old-fashioned). But how wonderful to maintain a childhood hobby into adulthood, and then be able to share the stage with a top American orchestra! It's empirically and good thing...and it doesn't hurt an orchestra's PR either.

Insta-hit

So, to keep up with the levity here lately, have all of you been following the whole "Pants on the ground" phenomenon?

If not, in a nutshell; last week on American Idol, contestant Larry Platt busted out with this incongruously catchy ditty:



Note that Simon says, "I have a horrible feeling that song could be a hit". Prescient words...

Of course, it went viral. Everyone's talking/writing about it; YouTube is filled with remixes.

A sure sign that you've gone totally mainstream? You're being covered by...Brett Favre:



Further proof that you've become a cultural phenomenon; being covered in the style of someone else (in this case, by Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young - one of the most dead-on impressions I have ever, ever heard):



On one level, this kind of thing simply feeds into our (collectively) short attention span, and it's certainly a fantastic distraction (hey, focusing on the latest YouTube hit sure does keep our mind off of real news).

But in a larger sense, maybe it's just the simple human desire to have something to discuss around the water cooler, to have something we can have a laugh over and gather around together.

My question is, how does this happen? How do people/events/tunes/videos/whatever capture public attention? What makes something go viral?

Labor Showdown, 21st Century-Style

If you follow the classical music business closely, you've likely read already that the vaunted Cleveland Orchestra, which many consider to be America's best symphony, is on the verge of going on strike. The musicians have been working without a contract for six months, and have decided that continuing to "play and talk" will not result in any change in their managers' insistence on a hefty pay cut, so they're willing to risk the drastic and always publicly unpopular step of refusing to perform.

Sarah and I have generally avoided commenting on specific orchestral labor actions here, and this one, if it comes to pass (and everyone is hoping it doesn't,) will be no different. Obviously, as a musician (and one who was trained in large part by a Cleveland Orchestra player,) I have a dog in this fight, but a blog hosted on the official website of my orchestra isn't the place for me to be advocating or accusing.

However, as the rhetoric in Cleveland has heated up, it's worth noting how different such situations have become in the Internet Age. In past eras, musicians considering a work stoppage were up against very long odds in terms of getting their message out. The orchestra management would have the use of its professional PR department to make its voice heard, and the existing relationships between local journalists and that office would likely trump any feeble attempt by the musicians (who, as a group, do not tend to be terribly PR-savvy) to argue their case before the court of public opinion.

Now, though, everything's changed, and the Cleveland musicians have been availing themselves of everything from social networking sites to YouTube videos to make themselves heard very, very loudly, not only in Cleveland, but around the music world. A Facebook page has been set up and has already garnered over 1000 fans. And just this afternoon, the musicians posted a very professional-looking video to YouTube, asking very directly whether their orchestra's management still believes in the core values outlined in the organization's mission statement. The video concludes with a tagline about the difference between "having an orchestra in Cleveland, and having The Cleveland Orchestra." It's a powerful statement, made possible only by the easy access to technology that didn't even exist ten years ago, and that we take for granted today.



The impact of such high-tech efforts on an orchestral labor dispute won't be known for a while, simply because this is the first time in the Facebook/YouTube/Twitter era that one of America's top five orchestras (always a highly subjective list, of course, but I don't know anyone who wouldn't have Cleveland on it) might be walking the picket line. It's possible that the tide of public opinion will be as anti-union as it almost always seems to be during strikes in America, and it's also possible that such PR efforts don't really have a lot to do with how most work stoppages are eventually resolved.

But the opposite is possible, too. And I've written before that I've never seen a decidedly blue-collar, hardscrabble, dressed-down city take more pride in a local arts institution than Cleveland takes in its orchestra. That kind of popular interest in what ordinary folks see as an institution their community cannot do without can sometimes lead to remarkable groundswells. And in 2010, those groundswells are as likely as not to begin online.

As I said at the top, if the worst happens in Cleveland this week (and people I've talked to seem to think it will,) I'll be holding my tongue here on the blog. But you can probably guess which side I'll be rooting for.

Late addendum, added January 19: The Cleveland Orchestra went on strike Monday morning, but by this afternoon, media sources were reporting that a tentative settlement had been reached. "Tentative" in the orchestra business means that the musicians' negotiating team has agreed to recommend that the entire membership vote to approve the deal on the table. It would be very, very unusual for the orchestra to reject a deal that its elected negotiators are recommending, so this likely is the end of the work stoppage.

Although Monday was technically a day off for the orchestra, the strike did lead to the postponement of a weeklong residency at Indiana University. However, Cleveland's upcoming three-week residency in Miami, which has been a major cash cow for the orchestra in recent years, will reportedly go on as scheduled, pending the ratification of the new contract.

Further update: The full orchestra has now ratified the new contract, which runs through the 2011-12 season.

Ideals vs. Reality

It usually doesn't take long for a major recession to stop inspiring empathy for one's fellow human beings, and just start getting on everyone's nerves. If you work in an affected industry (and honestly, whose industry hasn't been affected by the last two years of economic turmoil?) you've undoubtedly got co-workers whose morale has plummeted and whose attitude at work has taken a turn for the nasty, even if they started off the downturn determined to do whatever it took to help pull everyone through. The bottom line is that we all seem to have a limited supply of good will before we start looking around for someone to blame for our situation.

Those of us in the arts are no exception to this rule, and increasingly, it seems like the journalists who cover the arts are getting decidedly antsy as well. Early on in the recession, you could sense a certain amount of sympathy from the press for arts groups trapped between a fiscal rock and hard place, which wasn't surprising, given what a precarious state newspapers themselves are in. But the new year seems to be bringing a change in the winds, and I've started to notice more writers penning screeds against the cuts to artistic product being made by many of the nation's orchestras and opera companies, crippling once-in-a-lifetime-recession be damned.

What troubles me about this shift in journalistic focus isn't that writers are calling on big-budget performing arts groups to remember their artistic mandates - that is, after all, one of the more important roles of the press. But I must admit that I resent it when writers hide behind big platitudes while failing to take an interest in the nitty-gritty of their subject. Too often, arts writers implore the largest local performing arts groups to take more and bigger chances at the riskiest possible times, without acknowledging what a suicidal leap of faith it could be.

Much as I would love to live in a world where taking unpopular but principled stands is predictably rewarded by public acclaim, we all know that isn't the world we live in. Put another way: do I like that my orchestra and many others are checking every last artistic decision we make against the bottom line right now? (And then re-checking and re-re-checking it just to see if we can squeeze a few more drops of blood out of the stone?) No. I hate it. And so does everyone else in the business.

But at the risk of coming across like an apologist for the front office of a floundering baseball team, I just don't think it's responsible to expect organizations that survive on the generosity of our donors to celebrate a crippling recession by making demonstrably risky artistic decisions and then demanding even more money to fund them. And the truth is, if we did start making a habit of that, the same journalists who are now decrying a lack of originality in our programming would be lining up to demand accountability on the fiscal side.

One of the occasionally unpleasant side effects of being an arts group that caters to hundreds of thousands of paying customers per year is that you don't have the luxury of squeezing yourself into a niche market very often. Full-size orchestras employ close to 100 musicians alone, without even counting staff, and opera companies employ far more. No nonprofit theater company or dance troupe even comes close to that kind of overhead. To stay afloat, we've got to fill a 2,500-seat concert hall on an alarmingly regular basis, and that's a lot different than an organization that needs to sell 300 tickets a night.

Furthermore, much as we might like to imagine that it's possible to completely separate artistic decisions from financial ones, I've just never seen any evidence that that's a workable reality in any but the most outrageously wealthy of arts organizations. And it strikes me as odd that, at a time when much of the news media is still asking the question of how much of our previously inflated American lifestyle is still affordable post-meltdown, so many arts writers seem to be indignantly demanding an immediate return to 2007-era thinking.

P.S. You'll notice that I didn't link to any particular offending article or commentary before beginning this little rant. It's a bit gutless, I know, but I basically didn't want to seem like I was singling out any one journalist and/or risk getting into a debate over the merits of that one piece. (Besides, if you browse the music headlines on ArtsJournal on a regular basis, you could likely make your own list of such commentaries.)

Selling It

So, this past Friday night, a big group of MN Orchers made our way to the Walker for the annual celebration of salesmanship and corporate artistry that is the British Television Advertisting Awards. (For those readers not from the Twin Cities: I know. Sitting and watching 90 minutes of TV ads sounds ridiculous, and not like something a major American museum should be promoting. But you'll just have to trust us. It's awesome.) I've been going to the BTAA show for several years now, and I have to say, 2009 was one of the best reels I've seen. Very few clunkers, several amazingly poignant ads, plenty of laughs...

...and then, about midway through the show, there was this, which had everyone in the theater baffled right up to the very end...



If there is a better way to market grand opera in 2009, I don't know what it would be. And if you ask me, this is exactly the kind of thing orchestras need to be doing more of. Opera companies have gotten very good in recent years at reinventing their image, making their performances seem like not-to-be-missed events, and generally making themselves seem like the cool corner of the classical music world. And that, by extension, makes orchestras the decidedly uncool corner. They're exciting, we're sleepy, they're hip and fresh, we're stuffy and tuxedoed, they're simulcasting their biggest shows live to your local movie theater, we're stuck in a mid-20th century universe pretending that the internet doesn't exist.

You might point out that it's easier for an opera company to market itself on a visual medium like YouTube than it would be for an orchestra, but I'm not buying it. The stories behind symphonic music, even non-programmatic stuff like a Shostakovich symphony, are easily as riveting as your average opera libretto. It's just a matter of finding the part of the narrative that's going to grab people, and then retelling it in a creative way and getting it out there where people can see it. It's really not rocket science, and orchestras need to get a whole lot better at embracing that sort of idea, even if it means changing some longstanding elements of our business model...

Back on the Islands...

More bad, but not unexpected, news; the Honolulu Symphony is filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy and has canceled concerts through the end of the calendar year.

I am heartsore. Honolulu is my home town, and the Symphony holds many memories for me - I played my first concerto with them (Mozart K. 271, I think) as a preteen. They saw their heyday in the 80's under Donald Johanos, who raised artistic standards and introduced new repertoire, including an ambitious recording project with composer Dan Welcher (who coincidentally composed "Haleakala" on my parents upright Yamaha). Since the labor dispute and strike in 1993, the Symphony seems never to have regained it's footing, and the last few seasons in particularly have been disastrous from a fiscal standpoint - during the 08-09 season, musicians worked for months without pay.

I'll let someone else dissect what went wrong with the symphony. What was most upsetting to me was not so much what has happened, but reaction to it. The advent of online print media and that ever-present "comment" button means that everyone has an easy way to weigh in immediately, and as I scrolled through the responses, I realized that a vast majority expressed a similar sentiment: "Who cares? We don't need a symphony." A selection below:

It is said if a city doesn't have a symphony then it is not a Big City. Bull. If a symphony doesn't get 100 percent of its operating capital from ticket sales then it is just a failed business and should fold. Symphonys are just play toys for the rich. Honolulu will do fine with or without a symphony. The rich will just have to find another place where they can dress up in their finest and go to show off how rich they are. If symphonys were so great they would be packed to the rafters with both the rich and the average folk.

Yikes..their business plans says that only 30% of their revenue came from ticket sales and 70% from donations. It should have gone the other way around. No wonder they fail to balance their budget each year. Yes, close these dolts down.

109 yrs old, and unable to support yourself, time to die already.

The culture and traditions of the European elite are what have brought this planet to the brink of disaster.
No thank you. You can keep the music of dead white European composers. Good riddance to the symphony.

We are all sick of the fiscal mismanagement of this mediocre symphony. Please close it. We need to discuss more important groups. The economy is in a disaster.

I wish the musicians well, but symphonies are a relic of another time.

Get rid of the strings and form a Jazz band. More appealing. Maybe have a guest violinist from time to time.
Symphony = zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzz
The symphony is just a way for the rich to dress up and act rich.

Why is it that we hear from month to month and year to year how bad they are doing? How is it that they are constantly getting all this free press? I guess they are failing because !) they suck 2) noone care about them 3) they have done a miserable job of promotion...bottom line is that it is not my problem...or anyone elses but theirs.

All of these touch on the PR problems that all orchestras face - the perception that orchestras are elite bastions of the rich (and therefore not for "the people"); that orchestras are sadly out of touch with current cultural trends (and care only about "dead white European composers"); that orchestras ticket sales should represent a far higher percentage of their actual budgets.

As with anyone in this industry, I can refute (to a certain degree) all three, but the important take-away from this is not discrediting criticism but rather grasping the perception of those in the community who do NOT have a relationship with their local orchestra. And the level of local vitriol directed towards the Honolulu Symphony in all of the articles that have come out in the last week is deeply disheartening. Because it's not like the Symphony didn't have educational initiatives or community concerts or programs to reach out to the larger public; it's that these activities could not alter or overcome the more powerful notions of what the Symphony represents.

It presents a tremendous PR/branding conundrum for orchestras. On one hand, you want to celebrate your artistic triumphs abroad or your critically-acclaimed recordings. But in the end, the success of any arts organizations lies in the connections it has forged and the loyalty it has built in the community it serves.

I hope the Honolulu Symphony will be able to regroup - it's certainly possible for an orchestra to rise out these ashes (others have). From my own perspective, the Symphony was such a fundamental part of my childhood; I don't think I would be where I am now without them and can't imagine home without them. And for the Island community as a whole, what a loss, what a loss - the Symphony brought so much joy to so many, from their Waikiki Shell summer shows to their educational concerts to presenting world-class soloists at Blaisdell... I await better news with both anxiety and hope.

Overstuffed Schedules

You know how you occasionally have one or two of those days when, even though you're at work, it seems like there's not enough to do? And then, just when you're starting to get used to that, a year's worth of projects seem to come due all at the same time?

Well, that happens to musicians, too, and it doesn't always come from overscheduling ourselves (though that does happen.) I bring it up because I think it's safe to say that Sarah and I are both finding ourselves gasping for air this month, trying desperately to get our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season ready for prime time, while simultaneously planning the 2010-11 season, moving halfway across the country (her), orchestrating a pretty large fundraising party for a music-related non-profit group (me), dealing with a busted furnace in a newly purchased home (her), fighting off the piggy flu (me), being named principal pops conductor of a major orchestra (duh), and trying to squeeze in enough practice time to still be able to claim that one plays the viola for a living (me).

Our October ItC show is a bit trickier than usual, too, because the Friday concert will be carried live across the region on Minnesota Public Radio, who were kind enough to agree to this without technically having ever seen one of our concerts before. They're very trusting people, those MPR folk, and we're hoping they won't need to regret that fact, so we're taking the unusual step of sharing our work with them as we go. The radio thing, of course, also means that we can't do any purely visual gags on this program, which is a bit limiting, but also makes it easier to focus in on the sound world we want to create on the first half.

At the same time, as I said, we're starting to work on next season, which means a lot more that just picking repertoire. Thanks to the grant we received last year from the Wallace Foundation, we've been able to gather a rather stunning amount of information from people who've attended our concerts, and the fruits of that labor contribute to a very wide-ranging discussion about the continuing evolution of the series. I make a point of saying at each concert that we really do listen to all the feedback we get from our audiences, and this is the time of year that that pile of info comes most into play. Everything, from what time the concerts should start to what days of the week they should be held to how many sets of concerts we ought to be doing, gets batted around at this time every year, and this year, with a 95% subscriber renewal rate and a hefty increase in overall ticket sales from this time last season, we've got a lot to talk about.

Still, tired as I might be tonight, these are nice problems to have. The Beethoven show is really starting to come into focus (though, as usual, it's gonna need about 10-15 minutes chopped between now and October 29,) and I'm starting my now-traditional transition from fearful/stressed to excited/stressed. And on the planning side, I'm still somewhat incredulous at the audience support this series has garnered in two short years, which makes the job of figuring out where we go next enticing rather than intimidating. And that fundraising party I'm planning - I'm sure that'll mostly just take care of itse...

....

...oh, lord. the invitations.

gotta go.

-------------------------------------

CONTEST DEADLINE: You guys have been unbelievably creative in your submissions for the contest we launched on Monday, and we've got nearly 20 entries as of this writing. So here's official notification that we'll close the contest Friday night, accepting any entry submitted before midnight. Sarah and I will take the weekend to reach a consensus on a winner, and with any luck, we'll have the big reveal early next week. (Those of you who entered anonymously will, of course, need to contact us to claim your prize...)

Carolina On My Mind

Amid the sea of bad financial news enveloping the arts world, two happy items (both from North Carolina, coincidentally) stood out this week. First of all, it was announced today that our Ms. Hicks has added another orchestra to her business card - she's starting immediately as the new associate conductor of the Raleigh-Durham-based North Carolina Symphony! (No, that doesn't mean she's leaving Minnesota. In fact, you'll be seeing a lot of her at Orchestra Hall this season.) Presumably, this means lots more frequent flier miles for Sarah, and regular home delivery of fresh Carolina barbecue for me. Everybody wins!

On the other end of the state, the Charlotte Symphony's mood saw a potentially devastating budget situation turn bright at the last moment, in a stunning demonstration of just how generous and goodhearted people can be in a crisis. The orchestra, which has been fighting a growing deficit problem that began long before last fall's near-collapse of the financial system, was on the brink all summer, and the CSO's musicians just agreed to a whopping 20% pay cut last week. (If my math is correct, that means that their base salary will be something like $30,000 this year.) Still, no one knew whether it would be enough to stabilize the badly listing ship, and things turned even darker when the city's Arts & Sciences Council threatened to reduce the orchestra's annual stipend from nearly $2m to $150,000.

Then, out of the blue, on the same day that the Council told the orchestra that it could have as much as $900,000 if it met tough fundraising targets, two prominent Charlotte families stepped forward to pledge $1 million each to the CSO! It's a massive amount for an orchestra Charlotte's size (and really, it's massive for anyone - million-dollar donors don't grow on trees,) and while it won't solve all the orchestra's problems, it certainly puts them in a much more positive place heading into what everyone knew would be a very tough season. And at a time like this, that's about as good as good news gets...

Perspective

I've never been an arts manager, nor have I ever had any desire to be one. I've never thought that being CEO (or even general manager) of an orchestra sounded like anywhere near as much fun as playing in one. And while there have been times that I've wished I had more of a say in how things were (or weren't) being done in the upper ranks of the organizations I've worked for, I usually find myself quite grateful that someone else has to make almost all of the tough decisions for me.

Times like this, when the economy is sputtering and spitting while trying to decide whether it's ready to overcome its yearlong tubercular coughing fit, offer up near-daily reminders of how hard the jobs of those running U.S. arts organizations truly are. And lately, as I've waded through the reams of news stories of the latest cuts, layoffs, and salary givebacks across the industry, I've begun to notice a new trend among those who analyze such data for a living. It's a wave of stories that could all be headlined, You Must Make Hard Choices (But Wait, Stop! You Can't Cut That!!!)

Basically, the formula for each of these stories is that a) everyone knows times are tough and painful cuts are necessary for arts organizations to survive, but b) arts organizations are notorious for underspending on Area X at even the best of times, and therefore c) arts groups will be dooming themselves to an even deeper and longer recession if they don't immediately start spending more on Area X.

Generally, articles that follow this basic formula are written by extremely knowledgeable people with long experience in the field. Michael Kaiser, the president of Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center and one of the widely accepted sages of arts management in the U.S., has been trotting around the country warning arts groups not to play it too safe at a time like this, and making the case that what people really want from us in a deep recession is more art, more content, and more daring programming, not less.

And just this past week, a fascinating analysis out of Stanford University suggested that the real problem with our spending priorities in the arts is that, because we're so focused on the creative side of the ledger, we perennially underfund our own infrastructure (everything from up-to-date computer equipment to the desks and chairs in our offices,) which makes it impossible for the office workers who keep us afloat to do their jobs properly. In a fiscal crisis, such infrastructure funding typically sees the deepest cuts and the longest road back from the brink, mainly because it's easier to woo donors with a pitch that involves a renovated theater or a new education program than with an office upgrade to Windows Vista.

Despite the fact that both Kaiser and Stanford are almost inarguably correct in their assessments, there's no shortage of "Yeah, but..." responses available. Some would point out that it's fairly easy for Michael Kaiser to espouse daring programming ideas from his perch atop one of the richest and most securely funded arts organizations in the world. (The Kennedy Center is a jewel in political Washington's crown, and as close to untouchable as an arts group gets.) And while the Stanford folks are correct up to a point, most arts managers would say that the cost of putting on a shoddy, underfunded show that the public can see is far higher in the long run than the cost of forcing those behind the scenes to make do for a while with outdated software and tiny, unpleasant office space.

And then there is that uncomfortable bottom line: when you're in charge of going out and finding money for the arts group you believe so deeply in, you can't just go and explain all this to each of your potential donors. Because let's be honest: with the exception of a few truly devoted individuals, your donors don't want to hear about all the tricky little Catch-22s you're faced with every time the Dow drops a few hundred points. They're happy to support you to the best of their personal fiscal ability, and most of them will take at least some interest in the overall health of the organization, but figuring out the most responsible place for each dime you take in? That's just not their job. It's... gulp... yours.

Over the last decade or two, musicians have been getting steadily more involved in how the orchestras we play in are managed, with mixed results. I'm in favor of that trend, generally, if only because I think the increased communication that results increases the likelihood that we and our staff and our board members will be forced to at least occasionally consider how the organization looks from somewhere other than where we normally sit.

But like I say, someone has to make the truly tough calls at the end of the day. And while I may not always like the calls that are made, I'm always impressed with those who are bold enough to make them, knowing that their jobs and the jobs of everyone under them could be on the line if they get it wrong. That's not a job I could ever do, any more than they could do mine. It's a tough thing to remember sometimes, but an important one for all of us in this leaky boat called The Arts.

Sick Sad System

The current national debate over health care reform is one that musicians are watching particularly closely. Certainly we're all wondering what our health insurance system will look like on the other side of the debate, but as an industry, the music business could be deeply impacted by a changed health care model.

First of all, many musicians are part of that 46 million-strong voting block that simply can't afford any insurance at all. Freelancers who bounce from gig to gig (and that's most musicians, by the way) are almost never offered benefits, even when they substitute for the same orchestra or contractor frequently. So unless they can piggy-back on a spouse's employer-based insurance plan (which frequently isn't an option, since musicians have a habit of marrying other musicians,) their only option is to purchase one of the horrendously expensive individual plans offered by private insurers. Assuming, of course, that they don't have any preexisting conditions.

Even those of us lucky enough to have full-time jobs with large orchestras (and therefore, access to pretty good insurance coverage) could benefit hugely from new controls on the system. Orchestras are the 800-lb. gorillas of the music world, yes, but as businesses go, we're pretty small. The Minnesota Orchestra employs fewer than 200 people, and that means that, when our management asks insurance companies for bids to cover us, those bids come back awfully high, because the insurance companies don't really need our business.

Contrast that with a large corporation with tens of thousands of employees: the insurance companies desperately want that large pool of policies, so they cut the corporation a break on the individual rates. Basically, the fewer employees you have, the more each individual policy is going to cost.

Then there's the fact that musicians tend to actually use our health insurance. Performance injuries are extremely common, and the kind of injuries we get tend to be the kind that require extensive rehab. So annual rate increases are often sharply higher for us than they might be at your company.

There's been talk for several years now of trying to pool together all the full-time orchestra players in the US in an effort to get one big insurance plan for all of us, but since every state has its own laws regulating health insurance, and every orchestra has its own collective bargaining agreement governing everything from how much money we make to how long the rehearsals are, no one's holding their breath for a national OrchestraCare plan.

But something's gotta change. Like so many businesses, orchestras are being financially crippled by the rising cost of insurance, and no one has yet offered a solution that can garner enough political support to become law. In fact, my understanding of the plans on the table is that the employer-based model would remain the primary insurance delivery system in most cases. That's great news for my insurance company, but it's sure not good news for me or any other musician.

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.

Pardon the Interruption

The great political satirist Molly Ivins once wrote that there was nothing in the world so irritating as someone who stops in the middle of a perfectly good argument to insist that everyone define his terms.

So you have my apologies for what follows here. A few weeks back, I wrote about the wave of articles that inevitably appear during an economic downturn claiming that American orchestras can't possibly continue to exist without massive overhauls to our business plan. My point was that such articles usually don't contain a lot of data, and that they frequently miss the point of the deep cuts that orchestras are forced to make at times like these. The money line was: "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."

I really was going to let that be the end of it, but then, this weekend, no less illustrious a paper than the Chicago Tribune ran a commentary that so completely missed the reality of the orchestral situation that I feel I have no choice but to stop the argument and demand a defining of terms.

The author's main point is nothing new: the business model for American orchestras is broken. (Evidence presented to support this thesis: none.) His solution: everyone, from music directors to guest conductors to CEOs to soloists to musicians in the better-paying ensembles, needs to take pay cuts. Big ones. Now. (He also implies that this isn't already happening, which it is.) That's it. That's his whole solution. And this is where I have a nit to pick, because, wait for it... salaries are not a business model.

That's really all I wanted to say. If you want to have a debate about the way American orchestras fund themselves and operate as organizations, let's do it. If you believe that the existing system, in which private donors and corporations make voluntary donations to support a huge (by non-profit standards) corporation that presents orchestra concerts, is unsustainable, let's talk about that. And if you (saints be praised!) have a new model you think will work better, by all means, we'd love to hear it!

But by saying that the whole organizational model has failed (again, without evidence of a failure,) and then saying that the solution is for everyone to make less money, you're making the embarrassing admission that you don't know what a business model is. What you're actually proposing is the same business model, only with everyone earning less. Which, as I mentioned, is pretty much what's already happening, orchestra by orchestra.

Honestly. It's enough to make you wish that business writers covered our beat instead of arts journalists. Almost...

Passion Play

I read an interesting post on a local blog written by some of Minnesota's best professional chefs this past week, in which baker Solveig Tofte (of the justly famous Turtle Bread Co. in southwest Minneapolis) inveighed against people whose supposed "passion" for something (food, for instance) is belied by their lack of willingness to actually put in the work necessary to make a career of it...

"Passionate people tend have a romantic idea about what it means to be a baker, and we all know how long romance lasts. So these guys work for a week or two, and then I get to work at midnight and they’re in their car crying because nothing is as they thought it would be... Or they take all day making one baguette, cut it open to analyze the crumb structure and want accolades for doing such a great job."

I imagine that Tofte's post struck some readers as cynical and mean-spirited - after all, isn't passion exactly what's supposed to drive creative types? Don't we want our chefs (and actors, and musicians, and athletes) to be passionate about their work? Why would you try to discourage people with passion from making the object of their enthusiasm their life's work?

The world is full of people who are absolutely, devotedly passionate about everything from baseball to Beethoven, which is why people are willing to shell out their hard-earned money to watch Joe Mauer hit or the Minnesota Orchestra play a symphony. Those of us who perform for a living, whether on a stage, on a field, or in a kitchen, quite simply wouldn't have careers were it not for the existence of such people, and none of us should ever lose sight of that fact for a moment.

But on balance, I tend to agree with Tofte's sentiment. When I look back at the people I went to music school with, and I assess which of us were the most vocally passionate about music, I can't deny that those tended to be the people who didn't end up making it in the professional music world, at least as performers. Like Tofte's wannabe bakers, they romanticized the idea of playing music for a living to such an extent that either a) they were unable to objectively assess whether they themselves were good enough to make it in a very tough business, or b) they found the mind-numbing drudgery of daily practice and the complicated politics that permeate the musical workplace antithetical to their notion of what the life of a musician should be. Disillusionment is the enemy of the passionate, because it robs them of of any sense that what they're doing with their life is worthwhile.

Meanwhile, those of us who took a more pragmatic view of our chosen career path (it's a very cool job, yes, but it's still a job, and you can't expect it to be great fun every single day) have tended to weather the storm better. Call it cynicism if you like, but the reality is that it is not in my job description to love the music I play. My job is to play the music that's put before me (most of which I have no hand in selecting) in such a way that it will cause the audience to love it.

Much of the time, of course, I do love the music I play, but would anyone find it acceptable for me to turn in a bored-sounding performance of a piece I happen to think is overrated or that I've played ten times before? Of course not. In other words, the job of an entertainer is not so much to be passionate as to inspire passion in others. And it's an important distinction, if a somewhat touchy subject...

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."

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...