Inside the Classics

Now Where’s My Passport?

August 24th, 2010 by Sam

The last couple of days have been a whirlwind of the sort of mundanities one must see to before leaving the country for a while: mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, insuring I’ve packed extra viola strings and contact lenses, explaining patiently to the credit card company that yes, that charge from a London internet company is legit, and oh by the way if you freeze the card the first time I use it in Europe like you did last year because you tried to call but my phone doesn’t work over there, we are going to have issues.

But anyway, I seem to have things pretty well squared away with several hours to spare before our red-eye flight to London this evening, so I thought I’d lay out a few of the specific challenges and potential highlights of this little weekend jaunt. Every tour has some unexpected moments, and I gather that a good-sized gaggle of the local media will be traveling with us, so there’s a good chance some of those moments will be documented. I’d never run the risk of jinxing things with specific predictions, but here’s a general list of observations about the week we’re about to have.

Challenge #1: 3 cities, 4 concerts, 4 concertos, 3 symphonies, in 4 days. Yes, we’ll have a bit of time to get our bearings after we arrive in London around noon on Wednesday, but starting Friday morning, it is on, people. We’ll rehearse Friday and Saturday mornings, but time is pretty limited, so we’ll definitely need to be on the ball to pull off polished performances after having not played together since last Friday night.

And once we wrap up the Proms, the real chaos begins. We’ll split our touring party into two groups Sunday morning for the quick flight north to Scotland, but that means that a good chunk of the orchestra won’t touch down in Edinburgh until 3:55pm, a mere 2 hours before our scheduled touch-up rehearsal at Usher Hall. Throw in what I recall to be about a half-hour’s drive from the airport to the city center, the fact that one of Edinburgh’s two football clubs has a match scheduled for right around that time not far from our hotel, and the general fact that the entire city is a madhouse during festival time (there was an hourlong wait for a cab ride when we played the fest in 2006,) and you just know somebody’s gonna barely make the scene in time. (Again, not predicting. Just saying we have a history with these sorts of things.)

For those coming late to Edinburgh, they’ll have to avoid getting attached to the place, because a mere 16 hours after they arrive, they’ll be back at the airport for our early flight to Amsterdam. (And nine musicians who don’t have anything to play in the final concert of the tour will split from the group on arrival in the Netherlands, and immediately board a flight home, thus saving the cost of nine hotel rooms.) That afternoon, we’ll be bussed to the Concertgebouw (we normally stay nearby, but our normal hotel couldn’t accommodate us this time, so we’re staying way the heck out by Schiphol Airport, which, if memory serves, is actually in Belgium,) grab a bite to eat wherever we can find one, then play one last touch-up rehearsal before the 8:15pm concert.

(Why 8:15, you ask? I’ve no idea, and I’ve long since given up trying to understand why European venues have the start times they do. My first international tour with this orchestra included one concert that started at 10:30pm local time.)

Challenge #2: I mentioned that I’m making an appearance on BBC Radio 3 prior to our first Proms concert on Friday. Ordinarily, this sort of thing doesn’t intimidate me. I’ve worked in radio, I’m not intimidated by microphones or (most) audiences, and when Brian Newhouse asked whether I’d step in for this gig, I agreed immediately. But since then, our CEO, Michael Henson, who is British and quite well acquainted with the traditions of the Proms, has been regularly making some downright scary noises about what I’ve gotten myself into. Noises like: “Oh, you’re doing a Proms Plus? Very nice. Best be sure you know your history. They take those events quite seriously, you know.” Or the other night, when I asked him whether the suit I was packing was, in fact, the proper attire for the broadcast, or whether perhaps the pre-concert talks were a bit more dressed down, and Michael recoiled. “Oh, no! Definitely not less formal than a suit!” Leaving me to ponder whether some guests show up for these things in full white tie and tails.

Potential highlight: The Proms are definitely the most high-profile concerts we’ll play on this mini-tour, but I’m actually almost more excited to play the Edinburgh and Amsterdam concerts, because that’s where we’ll be playing the symphony that seems to be fast becoming our calling card: Beethoven’s 7th. Not only is it one of my favorite pieces in general, it seems to play to all our strengths as an orchestra, as well as Osmo’s strengths as a conductor. The tightly wound but sprightly first movement, the lower string-heavy second, the scherzo that gives the horns a true moment in the sun, and the finale that just goes hell for leather from the first moment to the last – it’s everything we love to do, and lately, Minnesota audiences have been going absolutely crazy for it. It’ll be fun to see whether we can recreate that level of intensity abroad.

By the way, if you’d like another way to follow the tour, our Outreach Coordinator, Mele Willis, has put together a fantastic educational site that will go live Wednesday morning is live now. You can get to it here, and if history is any guide, Mele will have a great mix of audio, video, and written travelogues to share. I’ll be trying to squeeze in a few multimedia moments as well, if quality broadband connections allow.

But for now, I need to pack a few more items (like this laptop) and grab a last stateside bite before heading off to the airport. I’ll talk to you from London…

Posted in europe festival tour 2010, inside the orchestra | No Comments »

Fair Warning.

August 22nd, 2010 by Sam

As we’ve wrapped up our preparations for this upcoming tour – packed the wardrobe trunks, mapped out the travel schedule, rehearsed the rep as completely as we have time for – I’ve slowly been coming to a realization that is as disturbing as it is surprising. In fact, it’s a personal revelation on par with the time I realized that I, a nearly lifelong Phillies fan, didn’t like Curt Schilling (who was a pennant-winning Phillie at the time,) and the time I was forced to admit that everyone else was right and I was wrong about runny egg yolks.

You guys, I think I might not hate Bruckner.

Wow, that was a hard thing to type out loud. And I may yet take it back. But as of this pre-tour weekend, I’m officially on the fence regarding Austria’s ultra-Catholic, hugely insecure, tremolo-addicted native son. Your support and good wishes will be much appreciated during this difficult time.

Posted in composers, europe festival tour 2010 | 3 Comments »

The Great Vibrato Debate

August 20th, 2010 by Sam

Ever since musicians started caring about how we play music from different eras (taking a different stylistic approach to Bach, for example, than we use for Mahler,) there’s been a spirited debate about the use of vibrato in orchestral string sections. History tells us that players in the baroque era, for instance, used almost no vibrato at all, so today’s baroque specialists do the same, usually on authentic baroque instruments, which differ slightly from modern violins, violas, cellos and basses. But in recent decades, it’s also become standard for all musicians to pay at least some amount of attention to how we choose to apply vibrato to, say, Mozart. No professional working today would think of approaching a Mozart symphony with the big, lush, wide vibration we consider essential in music by Brahms or Wagner.

On the whole, this is unquestionably a good thing, and it’s actually quite jarring to listen today to some of the recordings of Mozart or Bach by orchestras of the early 20th century, before historically informed performance became a thing. (Imagine a herd of elephants playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and you’ll have the basic idea.) But there are those on the fringes of the historical music debate who believe that we shouldn’t be using vibrato in late romantic works either, an idea that would strike most orchestra players as laughable. We think of the romantic string sound as being created largely by big, constant vibrato, but was it? Sir Roger Norrington, an eminent British conductor who led us in the Brahms German Requiem a few years back, is so convinced that we’re playing music of that era wrong that he insisted that we not vibrate a single note of the Brahms. I don’t pretend to know whether he’s right or wrong (so many of our personal musical preferences are set in stone simply because we tend to prefer the way we first heard a piece of music,) but it was definitely a very different, somewhat eerie sound – 60 string players going full bore, laying into a big romantic score without a hint of vibrato.

Anyway, I bring this up because pianist Stephen Hough was blogging about it earlier this week, and made several excellent points about why the anti-vibrato forces might be technically correct but spiritually wrong. If this is the kind of debate you enjoy, Hough’s piece is well worth a read…

Sir Roger with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony. Revelation or lacking something crucial?

Posted in orchestra culture, pointless arguments | 2 Comments »

Prom Prep

August 17th, 2010 by Sam

The orchestra is spending this week largely out of public view, but if you were to poke your head into Orchestra Hall, you’d hear plenty of noise coming from the stage. Today began a dizzying schedule of rehearsals – nearly twice as many as we have in an average week – all leading up to what should be an exciting but utterly chaotic tour of some of the top European summer festivals late next week. We’ll be playing two different concerts at the BBC Proms in London (only our second time at the world’s biggest classical music fest, and it’s a great hono(u)r to be asked to play a Friday/Saturday double bill,) and one each at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland and Amsterdam’s glorious Concertgebouw. Oh, and did I mention that these four concerts are happening over four consecutive nights, and that the set list is different for every one? Yah. Thus the extra rehearsals.

Speaking of which, for those of you who like to keep track of such things, here’s the complete list of repertoire we’re carrying for this briefest of hops to the other side of the Atlantic:

BARBER Music for a Scene from Shelley
BERG Violin Concerto
MOZART Violin Concerto No. 5
ELGAR Cello Concerto
SHOSTAKOVICH Cello Concerto No. 1
BRUCKNER Symphony No. 4, Romantic
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 7
BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9, Choral

Woof. That’s a lot of notes, and adding to the chaos was the news we received only a couple of days ago: our scheduled violin soloist, Lisa Batiashvili, is ill and won’t be able to join us for the Berg and Mozart concertos. (Alisa Weilerstein is the cello soloist, and as far as we know, she’s fine. Please knock some wood now.) This is the kind of thing that can really ruin our artistic staff’s week. But they got on the phones, called in a few favors, and landed us no less august a replacement soloist than…

…Gil Shaham.

I know. Talk about your awesome consolation prizes – and not only did Gil fly straight out to join us in Minneapolis for rehearsals today, he sweated out a canceled flight this morning, made it to Orchestra Hall just in time for the second rehearsal of the day, and proceeded to behave as if there wasn’t anywhere in the world he’d rather be.

Soloists who make a point of connecting warmly with the orchestra really do stand out. It’s not that we run into a whole lot of stand-offish soloists these days, but they live in a different universe than we do. They’re constantly packing up and flying halfway around the world, living out of a suitcase, cramming in practice time wherever they can find it, knowing that they’re expected to be more or less perfect every single night, whereas those of us in the orchestra can probably manage to hide a clunker or two inside the larger ensemble every once in a while. I don’t know about you, but that kind of life would make me awfully cranky.

But not Gil, apparently. I don’t think he stopped smiling from the moment he walked onstage ’til the moment Osmo dismissed us a few minutes after the rehearsal was scheduled to end. Even in the middle of a piece as complicated as the Berg concerto (which he’s playing entirely from memory, by the way, even in rehearsal,) he smiled broadly at whatever instrument group he might be dueting with at the moment, turned with a grin to fully face concertmaster Sarah Kwak when they played a few bars in unison towards the end of the second movement, and made a point of showing us, by gesture, every little nuance he intended to impart to the music a split second before we got there, making the usually arduous task of following a soloist seem almost effortless.

All that having been said, I believe today was the last time we’ll see Gil until we gather at the cavernous Royal Albert Hall for a brief touch-up rehearsal next Saturday morning. (Next, like next next, like the 28th.) There’s just too much rep to be rehearsed for us to spend more than a single afternoon on these two concertos. Tomorrow, we’re all about Beethoven 9 (though we won’t have the full array of sound until we get to London and meet the BBC Chorus on the 27th,) and Thursday and Friday will be a mish-mash of cello concertos, Barber, and touch-up work on anything that needs it. Friday night, we’ll play a semi-private concert for Minnesota Orchestra donors so that we won’t fly off to Europe without having played Barber and Bruckner (the least familiar pieces for us on this tour) in front of a live audience. And after that, our crack stage crew will swing into action, packing up the hundreds of tons of cargo we travel with and shipping off for London. We’ll follow on Tuesday night’s red-eye flight out of MSP, and then the fun begins.

I’ll be blogging the tour, of course. (Sarah’s not coming on this one, sadly, but I promise to be thorough.) I’ll also be making an appearance with Minnesota Public Radio’s Brian Newhouse on BBC Radio 3, which is broadcasting both of our Proms concerts throughout the UK. MPR’s classical stations (KSJN 99.5fm in the Cities, check here for your local affiliate or stream it live from their site) will also be carrying the London performances live back home, and I’ll be sure to give out details about that closer to the date.

But for now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a nasty Beethoven scherzo to take to the woodshed before tomorrow morning’s rehearsal. If there’s anything in particular you know you’d like me to focus on over the next couple of weeks, now’s the time to chime in down in the comments…

Posted in europe festival tour 2010 | 3 Comments »

Everything Old Is New Again

August 9th, 2010 by Sam

I’ve written ad nauseum on this blog about the various woes and financial afflictions that plague American orchestras during economic hard times, and honestly, even I’m getting a little sick of the subject. But I wanted to seize the opportunity to offer some clear evidence that, as dark as things often seem for non-profits in times like these, a glance at the history of our industry appears to show that we all tend to perceive these things in the moment as being more dire than they actually are.

The ray of hope, in this case, comes in the form of a decidedly pessimistic article about just where orchestras stand at a moment of economic peril. It’s from TIME magazine – go check it out, then come back here. I’ll wait…

…

Pretty dismal, eh? Sounds like the Detroit Symphony’s dangling over the precipice of insolvency, a bunch of smaller bands are either talking merger or bankruptcy, and even the Big Five are commissioning studies that make them seem pretty darn vulnerable. There’s barely a bright spot to be found.

Unless, of course, you were to check the date at the top of the article.

Yup, 1969. America was mired in an unpopular war in Asia, things at home had turned decidedly nasty on the political front, the economy was stuck in a major slump, and government had been forced to cut way back on funding for arts and culture in the name of austerity. Sound familiar?

On top of that near-perfect mimic of the conventional 2010 assessment of orchestras, check out this paragraph:

“Even though symphony-going is not dominated by the rich to the extent that it was 40 years ago, it is still a formal experience that most turned-on youth regard as static, outmoded and irrelevant. As the conservative, 19th century-oriented programming of most orchestras proves, the institutions are trapped into patterns of pleasing the wealthy patrons who support them—and by and large, the patrons like Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. This does not mean that the orchestras would automatically attract larger audiences with avant-garde programs. The real problem is attracting the young today so that there will be an audience tomorrow.”

Gee, how many times have you read something that sounded exactly like that in the last few years? It would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating. I guarantee that a little research would turn up multiple articles from the 1920s and ’30s expressing this exact same (citation-free) sentiment, begging the question: for exactly how many decades do we plan to allow the prophets of doom to continually shout from the mountaintop that orchestras are withering on the vine before pointing out that their dire predictions have been consistently, unceasingly, 100% wrong?

Bottom line: there’s not a single orchestra said to be at risk in the TIME article that doesn’t continue to exist today. Buffalo and Rochester never merged, and both are still model regional orchestras. Neither did Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and many would place both of them in the nebulous “major orchestra” category. That’s not to say that recessions don’t hurt orchestras (Detroit always struggles badly in tough times, for obvious reasons,) and certainly, some smaller ensembles that were already being mismanaged in a good economy tend to fold their tents when the seas get rough. What I’m saying is that the chattering classes are just monumentally, staggeringly bad at accurately assessing how a localized crisis applies (or doesn’t) to the wider industry. (Also, most of them never seem to learn anything much from crisis periods of the past.)

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t talk about the problems we have as an industry, or what changes could be made to our overall business model to make us less vulnerable. There are some quite reasonable things being written these days by orchestra managers, veteran union types, and others on the subject. I just think that we’d do well to take a step back whenever the drumbeat of bad news approaches soul-crushing levels, and remember just how many times this has all happened before.

Posted in all music is local, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »

A brief respite…

August 8th, 2010 by Sarah

Taking ten days off in my native state. Posting will be even spottier that it has been on my end for the next two weeks or so, hope you’re enjoying your late summer!

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Last Minute Replacement

August 4th, 2010 by Sam

And I mean seriously last minute! Courtesy of Charlotte, North Carolina gadfly/orchestra enthusiast (and regular poster to industry message boards) Delmar Williams, check out this amazing video of the NHK Symphony Orchestra, one of Japan’s leading ensembles, performing Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony back in 2004. I’ll say no more about it ’til you’ve had a chance to watch…

I know! No conductor? In a late romantic symphony involving close to 100 players?!

According to the note attached to the video, this concert was apparently being conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy (who I believe would have been the NHK’s chief conductor at the time,) but the maestro apparently stabbed himself in the hand with his own baton at some point early on in the symphony, and had to leave the stage.

Now, one never knows how one will react in such a situation until one finds oneself in the middle of one, but I feel reasonably confident that, were this to happen to Osmo, the next thing to happen would not be that the concertmaster would immediately begin conducting from his/her chair, and lead all four movements with a bow substituting for a baton while the podium remained empty. (Oh, who am I kidding? This would never happen here anyway. Osmo would need a lot more than a baton wound to get him off the podium. It would probably need to be a heart attack, or worse.)

In all seriousness, this is an astounding feat of concentration by the NHK concertmaster, Masafumi Hori. (I wish I knew his name, but I can’t find an English-language reference to this performance other than the video clip.) I know Tchaik 4 like the back of my hand, and I’d even be willing to wager that I could play most of the viola part without sheet music, but that’s a lot different than suddenly having to lead the whole orchestra on a moment’s notice! Keep in mind that he’s got no score to work from, so he’s reading off his ordinary Violin I part, and conducting everyone else from memory. And with no indication that he’s under any particular stress at all.

The funniest part of the whole thing to me is when they finally make it to the end of the piece (and this is a 55-minute symphony, by the way!) and play the final chord, and the concertmaster is so relieved to have gotten through it that he seems to momentarily forget that there’s no one on the podium to tell the orchestra to stand and take their bows. No surprise that the rest of the orchestra refuses to get to their feet until he’s gotten his due…

Posted in conductors and conducting, fun | 4 Comments »

Music theory moment

August 3rd, 2010 by Sarah

For those of you who have had a hankering for a music theory moment, here’s a Mozart sonata (K. 545) complete with running harmonic commentary (I’m particularly partial to the second inversion of the tonic, but we all have our favorites, eh?):

Posted in fun, musical dorkery, musician humor | 5 Comments »

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dominant 7ths?

July 31st, 2010 by Sam

Obsessing over food and where it comes from seems to have become this era’s answer to previous nationwide fads like blogging in the early ’00s, Bill Clinton’s sex life in the ’90s, and chasing the almighty dollar in the ’80s. I’ll admit, I’m an unashamed participant in this foodie thing. I bake my own bread, tend a good-sized backyard vegetable and herb garden, and probably spend almost as many hours cooking as I do playing music in an average week.

I also, and here’s the shameful part, am totally addicted to the Food Network. I can’t really figure out why, since I’m all about learning and perfecting new ways of making food, and the Food Network as it exists in 2010 is primarily about watching minor celebrities eat food that someone else has prepared, usually either on closed sets that you’re not invited to, or in restaurants hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live. Sure, there’s still a smattering of shows where knowledgeable people actually show you how to cook things, but they’re few and far between. Strangely, this does not seem to have dampened my interest in the channel even a little bit. I really have no excuse for this – it is what it is.

The other night, I was writing a blog post while watching an episode of one of the most polarizing shows on the Food Network. It’s called Diners, Drive-Ins, & Dives, and it’s hosted by a frost-tipped hipper-than-thou California freakshow named Guy Fieri. (For some reason, he pronounces his last name “Fietti.” I’m assuming this is an attempt to sound Italian. It doesn’t.) There are foodies out there who despise Guy Fieri. They hate his laugh, they hate his catch phrases, they hate his hair, and they particularly hate that his show celebrates big fatty slabs of American-style comfort food – heavy on the meat and dairy, please – at a time when most of the foodie culture is centered around rediscovering healthful eating and worshiping Michael Pollan as a minor god.

Figure 1: Why Foodies Hate Guy Fieri

I am not one of these people, partly because I just don’t get that worked up about other people’s eating habits, but mostly because I don’t see any reason that Guy Fieri and Michael Pollan can’t coexist. Pollan is all about balanced diets, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning America off our factory-farmed, high fructose corn syrup-soaked, genetically modified supply chain. Fieri is all about guilty pleasures, sustainable agriculture, local and seasonal eating, and weaning us off the endlessly generic and tasteless fast food chains that have replaced mom-and-pop diners across the US. (No, really, he is. Go read this if you don’t believe me.) That’s a lot of common ground, and let’s face it, Michael Pollan probably enjoys a tasty burger on occasion, too, so…

Yeah, I know. Music blog. Not food blog. Get to the point. Fine. In a minute.

See, there’s pretty obviously a disconnect right now between the hardcore world of seasonal-eating, corn-fed-beef-eschewing foodies who know what kohlrabi is, and the larger American society where most people want to eat healthier and have no interest in destroying the environment just so they can have a cheeseburger, but don’t have the time or inclination to devote huge chunks of their lives to changing everything about their food supply. (There are various class, race, and geographic issues at play here, of course, but in the interest of not boring you to tears, I’m not going to get into them just now.)

I see a very direct parallel between the food disconnect I’ve just described, and the gulf that exists between hardcore classical music lovers who refer to Beethoven String Quartets by their opus numbers and have definite opinions on Karajan vs. Bernstein, and the wider populace that, for the most part, has nothing against classical music, but doesn’t have the time or inclination to obsess over it and consequently feels completely alienated by the clublike atmosphere that pervades its core audience. And while I don’t think there’s a blessed thing wrong with knowing Beethoven’s opus numbers, I worry that the primary exposure most outsiders get to classical music these days is the same kind of exposure they get to the idea of a sustainable food system: that is to say, earnest, overly intellectual pleas and lectures from upper middle class white folks who shop at a coop, adore NPR and Al Gore, and get a CSA box delivered to their house every week.

If I’m right, that’s a shockingly limited demographic of advocates, and, I believe, one which doesn’t begin to represent the broad swath of people who actually come to Minnesota Orchestra concerts every week. And in the same way that I think the local/sustainable food movement will only really gain traction in a global way once it allows a whole lot of non-purists in the door, I think classical music needs a whole lot more advocates whose exhortations sound a lot less like this and a lot more like our friend Emily Liz from a couple of weeks back.

Figure 2: Nobody cares what this guy thinks anymore.

We’re living in the age of Ultimate Word of Mouth, where a lot of the cultural and intellectual discoveries we make come from hearing or reading someone else’s enthusiastic endorsement in some far-flung corner of the internet that we happen to frequent. Restaurants, rock bands, video games, and orchestras sink or swim based on how many well-connected people we can get to talk us up, not just to friends and neighbors, but to the much wider circle of Facebook friends, blog readers, and Twitter followers.

A lot of that sort of thing is beyond our control as performers, of course, except to the extent that we generate interest by visibly and audibly giving our all every time we step onstage. (No small consideration, since far too may orchestra musicians still seem to think looking bored or irritated while performing is okay.) But other industries are way ahead of us in using the good will and enthusiasm of our existing fans to draw in new ones, and like Guy Fieri making a point of visiting a greasy spoon that grinds its own grass-fed beef and tops it with locally made cheese, we could do a lot worse than welcoming in as many non-experts as we can find, and finding out what it takes to connect with them on a deeply personal level.

Posted in audience participation, food, marketing, state of the art | 7 Comments »

Austerity Measures

July 28th, 2010 by Sam

An article on budget cuts, layoffs, and salary cutbacks in Portland, Oregon’s arts scene this past weekend was a sad, if unsurprising, thing to read. This is happening all over, including here in Minnesota, of course, and while those of us here like to talk a good game about how much worse things could be if we weren’t lucky enough to live in a place where so many people care deeply about what we do, the frightening reality is that, based on everything we know from past downturns, the arts will be one of the last sectors to fully recover.

So yeah, we’re cutting, they’re cutting, everyone’s cutting. But hang on. There’s this guy Michael Kaiser – runs the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., became a legend in the arts biz by dragging orchestras and dance companies back from the brink and making them solvent again – who’s running around the country telling everyone that we’re doing this exactly wrong:

You can’t save your way to health. You don’t get healthy by getting smaller, by doing less… [Also,] focus on today and tomorrow not yesterday. There’s no time for blame. When things are bad many people sit around talking about where it went wrong. That’s not healthy.

Hm, okay. I guess that’s more or less what Joe Dowling was saying last week when he told MPR that it had been a mistake to cut the Guthrie’s rehearsal schedule to save money this past season. Still, that kind of broad pronouncement is easy to make in a speech, but harder to implement in the real world. If you’re not supposed to cut your way back to fiscal stability, but you have 33% less in your endowment than you did last year (and everyone else is in the same boat,) how can you possibly survive as an organization?

You have to plan your art. Most organizations plan their art too close to event. You need to plan four and five years out. First, you can make art better if you take more time. Second, you can do a better job fundraising. “I listen to the funder, find out what do they like to fund. I have a menu of five years of projects, so I can choose best event for funder.” Finally, “It helps me to educate my audience to want to see something that is not so accessible. I’m excited about projects that are transformational. But this requires some education of the audience. And with time, you can educate in advance. Creativity has been beaten out of so many arts organizations. Planning ambitious work four years out, creating big vision is what’s needed.”

Now, that makes very good sense, and it’s also demonstrably true – Kaiser will be happy to reel off the evidence for you. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. What he’s talking about is a wholesale shift in how we run our industry, and a much higher level of competence than a lot of arts leaders currently have, quite frankly. (Please note that I’m not talking about a lack of passion, or commitment. But the sad truth is that far too many American arts managers are thrown into the deep end of a very big pool without ever having been taught anything more sophisticated than the dog paddle.)

Another hard truth is that, when arts leaders who are competent and do have new ideas start talking about massive systemic change, a lot of the people who work under them (orchestra musicians, say) get very, very nervous, and even angry. Because change is scary, and to be perfectly honest, it’s very hard without the benefit of hindsight to tell the difference between a leader who’s genuinely trying to do something fantastic and new that will benefit everyone in the long run, and one who’s just in way over his/her head and has started babbling about “unsustainable business models” when what s/he really means is “My job is way too hard, so you’re all going to have take massive salary cuts to make it less hard.” (The orchestra world is littered with the carcasses of ensembles that cut and cut and cut in the name of some sort of ill-defined “transformation,” then discovered too late that they’d cut themselves out of all relevance to their community and ceased to have a reason to exist.)

Throw in the additional wrinkle that most large non-profit arts boards are made up of very wealthy and generous people from the decidedly for-profit world, and you have a recipe for combustion when times get tough. Since for-profit companies exist to make money, and to preserve capital, it can be very difficult for people used to that world to remember that cultural groups exist for entirely different reasons, and that they therefore need different strategies to weather fiscal storms. Likewise, it’s easy for those on the receiving end of a board’s largess to forget that we quite literally wouldn’t have careers without their continuing generosity. It’s a very understandable disconnect, but it does lead to a lot of frustration on all sides.

Chaos is frequently the enemy of progress, and my take on why so many orchestras, in particular, flounder in tough times is that too many of us don’t find a way to pull on the oars together when we need to most. Faced with a crisis, some musicians dig in their heels and insist everything will work itself out, some managers see an excuse to make the massive cuts they’ve been wanting to impose for years, and some board members feel caught in the middle of it all and eventually do what they would do at their for-profit firms – find the route with the least apparent risk and set a course down it.

But if Michael Kaiser and an increasingly audible chorus of others are to be believed, that less risky route might actually keep us with our heads barely above water for far longer than we can afford.

Posted in money, state of the art, the business of music | 1 Comment »