Look mom, I’m on the radio

By Ian David Moss | Published: July 13th, 2010

Here’s the audio from my appearance on Rosetta Thurman’s “All Nonprofits Considered” talk show with Colleen Dilenschneider earlier today. It was a lot of fun and we covered considerable ground: the justifications for subsidizing the arts, what counts as “art,” audience demographic trends, how arts organizations are faring in the recession, leadership development and transition in the arts field, and ideas for the future. Check it out below! (Email and feed subscribers, you’ll probably need to click through to the post to listen.)

Listen to internet radio with Rosetta Thurman on Blog Talk Radio
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New Blogs!

By Ian David Moss | Published: July 11th, 2010

Here’s what’s new with the blogroll:

  • Good Intentions Are Not Enough has a new URL and feed. Still not the most easy-to-type web address, but it’s an improvement over the last one…
  • GiveWell has moved from givewell.net to givewell.org. Feeds should still work for the GiveWell Blog.
  • I’ve removed several apparently inactive blogs from the list.

And here’s the new crop!

The Art Law Blog
Similar to the Nonprofit Law Blog and Nonprofit Law Prof Blog, Donn Zaretsky’s Art Law Blog is an intelligent and engaging compendium of legal news and disputes from around the globe. The major focus is decidedly on the visual arts, but the blog occasionally dips into issues that affect other art forms as well.

Leading Edge
This is Rosetta Thurman’s semi-regular column for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and boy, does she play the flame-thrower over there! A sample of recent post titles: Nonprofit CEOs Who Want For-Profit Salaries Should Work at For-Profit Companies. Do Nonprofit Boards Really Want Younger Members? How Not to Do Diversity. So far, the Chronicle readers seem to mostly be playing nice, but she’s starting to earn herself a few haters in the comments. Grab the popcorn!

Orchestra R/Evolution
Orchestra R/Evolution, you may remember, is the home of the blog conversation that took place in advance of the League of American Orchestras’s annual conference last month, for which I contributed a handful of articles. It was really one of the best online group conversations I’ve ever participated in, both in terms of structure and content, and gave me lots to think about as I entered and emerged from conference season. Still, I went back and forth on whether to include it, given that it was ostensibly created for a specific event that has now passed. On the off chance that it will continue, however, I think it’s worth adding to the blogroll – and even if not, the archived posts are well worth perusing if you haven’t seen them.

TCG Circle
This is one of three(!) official blogs of Theatre Communications Group, the primary national service organization for theater. Among the bloggers are TCG employee Gus Schulenberg, who is already on our blogroll as the primary writer for the Flux Theatre Ensemble’s blog, and Rob Weinert-Kendt, better known to Createquity readers as the proprietor of The Wicked Stage. Gus has a recent interview up with yet another blogroll denizen, 24 Usable Hours’s Devon Smith.

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Around the horn: Founding Fathers edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: July 6th, 2010

I’m going to be on Rosetta Thurman‘s show on BlogTalk Radio next Monday, July 12 at noon EDT with Colleen Dilenschneider, a graduate student who is the author of a previously-unknown-to-me arts blog called Know Your Own Bone. I’ve been an admirer of Rosetta’s for some time and I’m excited to finally be sort-of meeting her, and in front of a (virtual) audience no less! Ah, this modern world we live in.

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Four Days in Charm City

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 30th, 2010

Whew! I am not sure why seemingly every single arts service organization feels compelled to schedule their annual conferences in June, but it sure makes for a lively travel schedule for schlubs like me. This time around, I was in Baltimore for the Americans for the Arts Half-Century Summit, a much-hyped event indeed. I had an additional role this year as a member of the AFTA Emerging Leader Council, which meant that I had about a day’s worth of meetings and responsibilities interspersed throughout the proceedings.

Day 1

My odyssey began on Thursday with a morning meeting of the Council and the Goucher College Arts Leadership Symposium in the afternoon. Goucher has an intriguing non-resident arts administration degree program that employs distance learning for most of the (typically) three years a student spends in the program, buttressed by a two-week intensive in-person retreat every August. I was surprised to learn that the age of students in the program ranges from 29 to 59 – quite a bit older than your typical arts admin graduate degree crowd. Though the Symposium at times felt like a six-hour commercial – all presentations and keynotes were given by Goucher faculty, and a roundtable that was billed as a discussion of arts administration graduate degrees in general somehow ended up being an information session about Goucher specifically – I did particularly enjoy Robert Bush’s presentation on “Future Trends in the Arts.” Actually, what I really enjoyed most about it was the active and enthusiastic engagement on the part of attendees – so much so that Bush barely had time to get through his slides. It was one of the best discussions that took place all weekend. Bush summed up many of the changes rattling the arts world with a pithy diagnosis: “we all want to be the artist!” He checked off a number of issues that will be familiar to readers of this blog: demand lagging capacity/supply, the nonprofit model’s bias toward perpetuity, lack of risk-taking on the part of funders, websites that help artists raise money through microdonations, and so forth. The session ended with a hypothetical: given a quarter of a million dollars to spend on the arts however you wanted, what would you spend it on? The audience put forth several intriguing ideas, but one of my favorites came from fellow Council member David Seals: award the grants not on the basis of written proposals, but instead on site visits (and use some of the extra money to help pay for the overhead of getting out of the office).

Day 2

On Friday, the fun continued with more meetings and the opening session of the conference proper. I didn’t find Arianna Huffington’s keynote particularly compelling, but not everyone agreed with me on that – fortunately, you can judge for yourself thanks to Americans for the Arts uploading the video to its blog. It was pretty cool to be in the same room as Robert Redford though (albeit all the way at the back). Along with AFTA’s 50th anniversary (well, technically, the 50th anniversary of the oldest of the organizations that eventually merged to form the conglomerate that is now AFTA), it is also Robert Lynch’s 25th year at the helm of the organization. I am told that he recently recovered from sextuple(!) bypass surgery –  I didn’t even know such a thing existed –  so congratulations to him on his return to health.

The afternoon brought us a couple of Visionary Panels, both of which had their moments. The Future of Technology featured a great lineup of Elena Park from the Metropolitan Opera, Tim Svenonius from SF MOMA, and somebody from ReverbNation (didn’t catch the name, but he didn’t look at all like this guy) – all moderated by Blue State Digital’s Rich Mintz (aka the guys behind my.barackobama.com). I particularly enjoyed the contributions from the ReverbNation representative, showing how valuable it is to bring in perspectives from the private sector. Interestingly, some of these captains of new technology struck a conservative note when it came to wholesale change, indicating that diving in to social media is not always a good investment for an organization if the organization’s audience doesn’t really use it. It was a bit of a mind-boggler to hear two panelists extolling the virtues of email (you know, that technology that everybody’s telling us is on its way out) as a communications medium – but after all, as Mintz pointed out, it’s “free, asynchronous, instantaneous, and there are no size limits.”

The next panel, “New and Emerging Business Models,” featured Adrian Ellis of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Terence McFarland of LA Stage Alliance, Clara Miller of Nonprofit Finance Fund, and Fractured Atlas’s Adam Huttler. I wrote it up for the Americans for the Arts blog, so I won’t go into tremendous detail about it here. Suffice to say that the session brought into question some pretty core assumptions about who we are and what we do – particularly the notion that what we do in the arts is “special” compared to what people do in other walks of life (or at least special enough to deserve tax-advantaged status). This is a line of thinking I’ve been pursuing idly in the back of my head for a couple of years now, and while I do think that we are special in many ways, I’m not sure we are as exceptional as we sometimes like to believe. About a year ago I read and commented upon the well-known RAND Corporation study Gifts of the Muse, which attempts to lay out the case for the intrinsic benefits of the arts (pleasure, building social bonds, cognitive stimulation, etc.). After digging into the text, I came to the conclusion that in fact none of these so-called “intrinsic benefits” are (a) unique to the arts or (b) really all that different from “instrumental” benefits that frame the arts as a means to an end. In fact, most of what we champion about the arts can be said about any creative activity in any field, whether it’s painting, nuclear physics, or even, yes, plumbing. The main value that the arts add, as I see it, is that they create a space in society in which creativity can be exercised for its own sake. They are really R&D for the rest of us in that way. But the implications of that role are that the (subsidized) arts, to be valued for themselves alone, must always have an experimental element, must always be taking risks. Otherwise we’re just taking up space.

I had to skip the reception at the American Visionary Art Museum to have dinner with a friend in the area, but I heard it was amazing, and you can see pictures here. In general, the time and space devoted to networking at this conference was impressive.

Day 3

Saturday morning brought a stimulating (thankfully, since it occurred at 8:30am) discussion of the Leadership Green Paper at the Emerging Leaders Peer Networking session. (I never thought that just taking turns reading the damn thing out loud off of a projection screen could be so effective in getting people involved. It was like 9th grade drama class all over again!)

The Saturday morning keynote featured NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman, who used the opportunity to announce a major accomplishment. More about this anon, but he has been meeting with the Secretaries of several other federal agencies to explore how the NEA can collaborate with them to help the arts. These discussions have yielded a significant commitment of resources from agencies such as the Department of Agriculture (which has a community facilities fund), Housing and Urban Development (which just announced a $100 million Sustainable Communities Regional Planning grant program, placing “a priority on…nontraditional partnerships including arts and culture, philanthropy, and bringing new voices to the regional planning process”), and the Department of Education (which explicitly wrote arts and humanities in to the language for its Promise Neighborhoods). Exciting stuff, this. Landesman also unapologetically cast the NEA as an advocacy organization within the federal government, pointing out that it is not a regulatory agency like other government arms – its mission is to support artists.

Following a panel moderated by former NEA Chair Bill Ivey that unfortunately ran well past the scheduled endpoint, I succumbed to my tendency to session-hop for the rest of the afternoon. I caught some of “Around the Civic Block: Amplifying and Assessing the Civic Impact of the Arts” while sitting in a bit of “The Future of Leadership,” but felt like I missed the best parts of both (a common danger with session-hopping). In the next time slot I witnessed Marc Vogl’s forceful broadside for getting funders more involved in emerging leader issues and Charlie Jensen’s hilarious personal narrative of learning to lead in the “Leadership and Influence” workshop before joining in the discussion with “Arts Bloggers” Graham Dunston, Barry Hessenius, Chad Bauman (who wants you to know he’s single) and Gary Steuer across the hall. This session was evidently the most blogged-about of the conference, as attendees Rich Mintz, Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, and Devon Smith all wrote about it, as did Gary.

Day 4

After another night of networking and drinking (much of it with the boss this time), Day 4 was all about Devon and me giving advice to people seeking insight on “Branding Yourself through Technology and Social Media.” It turned out that people defined “Yourself” rather liberally – we got at least as many questions about organization branding as personal branding. I found myself continually coming back to a particular theme: social media is a tool, not a strategy. (I don’t know who coined that phrase, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me.) Figure out what you’re trying to accomplish first, and then think about how social media can help. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and more specialized applications like UStream or Foursquare all have very different advantages and disadvantages, and not all are appropriate in all contexts. Another theme that came up several times is the long, frustrating period between the time one begins building a brand online and the time one “breaks through” and achieves a critical mass of notoriety. One must consider the cost-benefit of how important a social media presence is to one’s goals and how much effort and time one is willing to put in to get to that tipping point. It was fun if somewhat exhausting to be giving advice to so many people. At one point, someone whose Career360 roundtable I attended last year came and joined us, which pretty much epitomized the novelty of the experience for me.

And with a final, effervescent performance by the New York Neo-Futurists and a rambling artist panel to cap things off, that was it! Check ArtsBlog for more conference session recaps, and look out for info about the next Americans for the Arts Convention in San Diego June 16-18, 2011.

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Three Days in Hotlanta

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 21st, 2010

at Friday's Chorus America plenary session

I’m back up North after spending the latter part of last week attending the joint Chorus America/League of American Orchestras conference in Atlanta, GA, part of a bevy of performing arts conferences this month that also included those of TCG, OPERA America, and Dance/USA. In the past when I’ve done conference wrap-ups, I’ve given more or less of a blow-by-blow of the proceedings, but I was pleased to see that my old friends at NewMusicBox were way ahead of me on that one, sending a small army of composers to report on the proceedings here, here, here, here, and here. (The last link points to Nickitas J. Demos’s kind review of my own speaking engagement at the Chorus America plenary session on Friday morning, pictured above. To have someone blogging about my own presentation at a conference is kind of a strange role reversal for me, but hey, it’s all good!)

Because of that, instead I’ll give some broad thoughts about my impressions of the event as a whole and what I’m taking away from the experience. My week began with the “town hall” event that was envisioned as the culmination of the whole Orchestra R/Evolution business that I’ve been blogging about for the last couple of weeks. I was honored to be helping with the Twitter duties during the session (rumor has it that the League has possession of some photos of me posing with my laptop over at the side of the room), which at one point included feeding questions to moderator Doug McLennan for his online-only interviews with the keynote speakers as they were taking place. The whole thing was admirably high tech, and impressively there were few glitches to mar the proceedings. Ben Cameron’s keynote was typically arresting, if now familiar from the seemingly dozens of other speaking engagements he’s had over the past couple of years (a change of pace is coming up at Americans for the Arts, where he’ll be leading what looks to be an interesting discussion on failure and experimentation in the arts). As for the Eric Booth-facilitated conversation discussing the two questions chosen by Orchestra R/Evolution users, I’ve now been to enough of these that I feel I can say this: World Cafe-style table conversations at conferences are great for raising tons of questions, but not very good if your interest is in coming up with answers. This deficiency was made more noticeable in this case by the compressed timeline, as conversation participants were not invited to “report back” their findings; the only overarching feedback provided to those assembled was Booth’s lightning attempts to synthesize what he overheard by traipsing around the room during the session. I don’t provide this criticism lightly, particularly as I’m not exactly sure what a better format to achieve consensus would look like, but I would submit that there needs to be more follow-up in order to make sure what started out as a very provocative conversation leads eventually to actionable recommendations.

*

My sense is that the orchestra field is facing something of an existential crisis right now. Why else would it so openly welcome questions of its relevance to audiences and communities in the 21st century? Everyone’s seen the numbers – subscribers and ticket buyers have been declining across the board for years, and the recession is just the latest kick in the stomach for these long-beleaguered institutions.

From an economic perspective, what’s happening to orchestras right now is pretty simple. In the past century, and especially in the past couple of decades, the number of options the average American enjoys when it comes to leisure time has exploded. Digital cable, movies on-demand, video game consoles, YouTube – none of these things existed in 1980, the year I was born, and neither did a good number of the rock bands, theater companies, and yes, orchestras that are around today for that matter. As a commenter noted on my blog the other day: “the problem orchestras are facing is that traditional subscribers are disappearing and as that happens we become more and more of an ‘occasional treat’ rather than a regular lifestyle choice.” In short, the competition has gotten much, much fiercer for an amount of leisure time that does not seem to have increased nearly as fast. Not that orchestra concerts were ever an activity for the masses (according to Baumol and Bowen’s classic treatise on the performing arts from the mid-1960s, concert attendees of the day were, then as now, drawn almost exclusively from a small, extraordinarily well-educated niche of the population), but it was easier for them when they were one of the only games in town.

These structural shifts in audience demand, though tough on all disciplines, are friendliest to those art forms that are cheap to make and/or easily replicated – witness the dramatic rise in amateur home video – and hardest on those forms that are expensive and non-scalable. And just about the most expensive and unwieldy art form I can think of is—the symphony! The instruments are expensive, the training is expensive, the musicians (can be) expensive, taking them anywhere (especially overseas) is expensive….you don’t start an orchestra unless you’re prepared to lose some serious money. And therein lies the issue: if the orchestra loses money, that means someone has to be prepared to make up the difference. Whether from foundations, individual donors, or public grantmaking agencies, those dollars represent a burden on society that needs to be justified somehow. Of course, this is true for all art forms – but because orchestras are so expensive by nature, that need for justification becomes that much more urgent.

*

Unfortunately, said justification is hard to come by when, as I learned at an engaging joint symposium on “Activating Your Audience” on Thursday, two out of three new arts patrons (at least in Philadelphia) don’t come back — and those who do typically come back once every two to three years. According to research by Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard at WolfBrown, audiences are looking for more intense fulfillment for less time than they were before. While audiences vary widely in how much “added value” engagement they seek with their performance, 4 out of 5 orchestra patrons desired at least some interpretative content along with the experience (e.g., by having the conductor introduce and talk about each piece before it is played). The WolfBrown research showed that audiences who played a greater role in the performance scored higher on a number of measures than audiences who didn’t.

These revelations, along with others at Doug McLennan’s solo session that followed (the downside of the era of infinite choice is that it raises expectations so high that pleasant surprises become a rare beast), caused me to think that I was on the right track with my post from last week, Listening vs. Doing. There have been a few concerts and arts events that I’ve attended over the years that have truly changed my life — but the vast majority haven’t. Not to say that they’ve been bad or unpleasant – they just didn’t have much of an impact. Based on informal conversations I’ve had with others who attend many concerts for a living, their experiences have been similar. So can we set aside this fantasy that orchestral or other arts events are automatic epiphanies for the audience? Isn’t it probable that for most of them, it’s just a pleasant night out? And frankly, if two out of three aren’t coming back, maybe it’s not even getting to that level?

No, for me, and I imagine for others, the most intense, fulfilling arts experiences I’ve had have all been from performing and learning music, seeing and hearing it come to life before my eyes, and the relationships I’ve formed with others who were doing the same. That’s what can’t be replicated from ordering Tropic Thunder on-demand or seeing Vampire Weekend at the park.

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I tried to bring some of these thoughts into my session at Chorus America Friday morning, “Envisioning the Choruses of Tomorrow,” relating them in particular to my experiences starting and developing C4, a unique collaborative chorus that involves the entire board of directors and many of its rank and file singers in artistic decisions. This wasn’t my first speaking engagement at a conference, but it was the one with the largest audience so far. So I’ll admit I was a little nervous – the more so because I was pretty sure most in the room wouldn’t know who I was and, given that it was a plenary session with other highlights such as the ASCAP awards for adventurous programming, hadn’t necessarily chosen to hear me and the other panelists in the same way as if it were a breakout session. I think it went pretty well – the few people I asked for feedback said mostly nice things – but it was kind of a funny experience even so. For one thing, for all of our talk about how the concert experience needs to be more engaging, it was a very non-interactive session. There was no time for questions from the audience; those in attendance mostly sat quietly and occasionally let out a nervous laugh here and there; even the panelists generally engaged in serial dialogue with the moderator instead of building off of each other’s contributions. Indeed, the one moment that got an outburst of applause from the audience was when Julian Wachner said in response to the question “What will the chorus sound like in 20 years?” something along the lines of, “Well, regardless of what else changes, I hope we’re still singing the classics, because if we’re not honoring the great music of the past, then I don’t know what we’re here for. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater!”

I didn’t spend as much time hanging out at the Chorus America conference as the League’s, but even so it was interesting to compare the two. In contrast to the League’s sessions, which seemed relentlessly focused on issues associated with the sweeping changes in our culture and how they’re affecting orchestras, by and large you wouldn’t have necessarily known from the Chorus America sessions that 2010 was a different year than any other year. Judging by the conference content alone, it seems that choruses are in a somewhat different place: certainly not immune to the digital revolution by any means, but nevertheless somewhat insulated from it by virtue of their much lighter cost structure and arguably deeper roots in local communities. Even so, choruses will still have to grapple with many of the same looming questions that the arts face as a whole over the next decade: how do we incorporate the voices and participation of a more diverse public? How do we cultivate distinct artistic and local identities for our work, and how are those linked? How do we broaden our notions of participation in accordance with the demands of a more fulfillment-hungry constituency?

*

Anyway, it was a wonderful experience to attend these events, a great recharge and reorientation for the brain, and I am grateful to Chorus America and the League of American Orchestras for making it possible. My travel odyssey continues this week at Americans for the Arts – catch you in a few days!

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Orchestrarevolution.org is taking your questions

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 16th, 2010

The opening session of the League of American Orchestras conference is beginning right now, and it’s being live-streamed at orchestrarevolution.org. I’ve been pretty impressed with the ambitious online engagement strategy that has gone into this event. Visitors to the site can actually vote on the agenda for the session itself, deciding which questions will be discussed among the attendees. There’s also a concurrent discussion going on over on Twitter using the hashtag #orch2010, and during a couple of the on-stage interviews I’ll be sending Doug questions that people are posing online. (If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can also leave your question as a comment on this post.) If you’re a musician who ever plays or works with orchestras, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you whether or not you have any formal affiliation with the League. Check it out!

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Around the horn: World Cup edition

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 14th, 2010
Hi everyone. I’m headed to Atlanta tomorrow to catch the League of American Orchestras and Chorus America conferences. If you’ve enjoyed my recent posts on orchestras, please tune in to www.orchestrarevolution.org tomorrow for the live-stream of the “town hall” event and follow along on Twitter at #orch2010. (I’ll be helping to monitor the Twitter feed, or so I’ve been told at any rate.) I’ll post my thoughts as I am able here and at the Fractured Atlas blog. Should be a fun time!
  • More good news, bad news for state arts councils. In the former column, it looks like Rhode Island’s arts advocacy efforts have paid off, with full restoration of the Governor’s proposed cuts to the state budget. Big congratulations are due to Lisa Carnevale for an extraordinarily well-executed campaign. Too bad South Carolina finds itself in a deeper pickle: Governor Mark Sanford (yeah, the one caught using state funds to cheat on his wife) has vetoed the bulk of the South Carolina Arts Commission’s budget. The veto can only be stopped by override of the legislature, which meets Tuesday.
  • Carolyn Jack’s coverage of creative economy efforts in her city has taken a bit of a dark turn lately. Not sure what exactly is behind prose like this…

    Those white-paper approaches have produced certain civic benefits in a lot of places, but a boiling overflow of creativity isn’t one of them, at least not where I live.  My metro area is no showplace of imagination- it’s desperately poor and ailing, a shocking stage-three hospice case  of shabby, empty buildings, cratered streets,  unemployed adults, endangered children, political ineptitude and venality, apathy and inertia, a culture of bland cowardice, and widening rings of smug and bunkered suburbanites.

    …but it’s important given creative economy advocates’ frequent assumption that increased investment in their favored industries is key to the rehabilitation of decaying Rust Belt capitals like Cleveland. Jack’s rant was apparently inspired by a less-than-inspiring creativity summit that suffered from a little too much of the same old thinking. Both pieces are worth reading and learning from.

  • Great story on a rapprochement between real estate developer and artist amid a backdrop of gentrification in ultra-hip Williamsburg, courtesy the New York Times. If only it could be like that all the time.
  • Richard Florida, to his credit, seems to be changing the way he talks about his work these days. For example, in releasing a new ranking of top destinations for college grads, he advises, “treat these rankings as a broad guide to interesting places and try not get too bogged down by the specific ranks.” A far cry from the original Creativity Index! He’s also been including a standard disclaimer about correlation not equaling causation in recent posts. This is good news. Research is a messy business and we are all better off when we openly acknowledge the warts. (He also links to a study by Rob Pitingolo that comes up with a very intuitive-looking creative city list by employing as its unit of analysis college degrees per square mile.)
  • Wow, a cultural economics study that Michael Rushton actually likes. Is this a first? (So as not to be too glib, the study considers “artistic originals” as a kind of capital investment that depreciates over time. Makes sense if you think about it.)
  • Congratulations to Tom Kaiden, taking over the reins of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance from the deceased Peggy Amsterdam, and to Eric Whitacre, for becoming the first choral composer to land a major-label recording contract in who knows how long. Also, kudos to Gary Steuer for doing a lot with a little at the city of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy.
  • I wonder, does any American city have a “cultural strategy” document branded in the Mayor’s name? Because London now does.
  • Chase Community Giving is back for a second round. Looks like they are aiming to spread the money a little more widely this time.
  • Via Adam Thurman, don’t miss this great article from Nonprofit Finance Fund’s Clara Miller on the Four Horsemen of the Nonprofit Financial Apocalypse. She really lays into unnecessary real estate acquisitions in particular.
  • Looks like the Hewlett Foundation communications team is making a foray into the philanthropy blogosphere by…well…writing about the philanthropy blogosphere. It’s an impressively timely and thorough article.
  • One of that article’s featured bloggers, Lucy Bernholz, reports on a new project from the Pew Charitable Trusts called SubsidyScope that tracks government payments and subsidies to the nonprofit sector. If she says it’s big news, I trust that it is.
  • Andrew Taylor coins a phrase: tax-status agnostic. I like it, even though I sometimes wonder whether the beating the 501(c)(3) is taking in some circles is really warranted. Meanwhile, still in ArtsJournal land, Jim Undercofler calls out much of the entrepreneurship we see in the arts as fundamentally ego-centric.
  • Get ready for a new tax status corporate form on the horizon: Maryland’s Benefit Corporation, promoted by B Lab (a competitor of sorts to the L3C). We’ll see if this one gets more traction.
  • This, uh, time unit’s BLOGGER ON FIRE award goes to Devon Smith for her Twitter hashtags datagasm and her on-point rant against Facebook. Read them. Hire her.
  • Really cool story about the British Museum collaborating with Wikipedia to make sure the latter website’s articles about the former’s artworks are as accurate as possible. Is this the future of crowdsourcing?
  • Add libraries to the list of cultural institutions upended by recent shifts in technology.
  • I have to admit, I thought this was pretty awesome: Laurie Anderson composes music for dogs.
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Listening vs. doing

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 12th, 2010

[originally published at Orchestra R/Evolution]

As I mentioned the other day, I think it’s critical that artists put forth their art into the world in a way that reflects their authentic selves. So what does that mean for orchestras? I mean, let’s be honest for a second: aren’t there some, even plenty of orchestras who really want nothing more than to play the old warhorses to their heart’s content and not worry about anything else?

And who wouldn’t want to do that, after all? Playing in an orchestra should be fun: you get to be on stage, you’re closer to the music (both physically and figuratively) than anyone sitting in the audience, you play a key role in manifesting a dynamic, shared creative vision in real time, and if you’re one of the very best at what you do, it can be a pretty lucrative gig too. If being an orchestra musician sucked so hard (job satisfaction below prison guards and all that), you would have a shortage of players and orchestras competing fiercely with each other to land ones who were good enough. Instead, from what I hear, the virtuosity of the best orchestra musicians is at an all-time high and all that talent goes practically to waste since the repertoire they’re playing most of the time doesn’t stretch them much beyond what a good college orchestra is capable of. Yet here are all these amazing musicians who keep applying for these jobs. What gives?

A study published by the RAND Corporation a few years back, Gifts of the Muse, took a look at research on the benefits children supposedly receive from arts education. One of the overarching themes from the literature review was that the nature of the participation is important: sustained, active participation was a lot more effective in delivering benefits like higher cognitive abilities, more self-control, etc., than one-off, passive participation (think training over a period of years vs. seeing a concert once). If that’s true for children – and it is one of the most consistent and clear findings the authors of that study identified – why wouldn’t it be true for adults? That is to say, why are we expecting people’s lives to be changed from attending a concert, when I’d bet nearly all of people we know whose lives have actually been changed by orchestral music changed because they played it?

Here’s where I’m going with all this. A survey included in the Knight Foundation’s Search for Shining Eyes report found that of 74% of adults who said they were interested in classical music had played an instrument or sung in chorus at some point in their lives. I think that the real gospel of classical music ain’t about hearing it – it’s about doing it. I think what’s happening is that our dominant “engagement strategy” for classical music – offering sustained, substantive, professionally-oriented classical music training, including in such contexts as youth and student orchestras – has not been very successful at producing listeners/fans of classical music in my generation, but has been extraordinarily successful in producing practitioners of classical music. And the only plausible explanation to me, and the one that best jibes with my personal experiences, is that being part of the action at a classical music concert is about a thousand times more awesome than merely taking it in.

This reality (if I’ve described it accurately) puts the conventional orchestral model in a bit of a bind. After all, the most authentic way for most orchestras to express their art is to play a concert. But because so much of the magic of classical music comes from making it, there is little chance that the audience can experience that concert with the same passion, excitement, and fervor as the musicians simply by taking their seats in the right balcony. So who is the orchestra playing the concert for, really? And when I say the “orchestra,” I mean not just the musicians, but the conductor, the executive director – everyone whose life revolves around the orchestra. Aren’t they pretty much doing it for themselves?

Until the model can accommodate bringing strangers in not just to listen, but to do, I’m not really sure how much that can change.

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Orchestras and Authenticity

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 9th, 2010

(Originally published at Orchestra R/Evolution)

In my last post, I encouraged readers to articulate what they liked about orchestras, so we can have a better sense of what it is exactly we are trying to preserve or pass on to new audiences and future generations. I’ll begin this one by sharing my own answer to that question.

I’ve never played in an orchestra, but I’ve seen a few orchestral concerts in my day. One of my early orchestral memories was seeing the Boston Symphony play at Symphony Hall. The red carpets, ornate architecture, and gold trim made a huge impression on me. In other early concerts at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, I loved watching the cellos move and lean and moan in unison, the conductor dancing on the podium, the battery of percussion toys, the impossibly shiny woodwinds and brass, four risers’ worth of singers standing up as one to prepare for the next entrance. The spectacle, the grandeur, the pomp & circumstance – they were all integral parts of the experience.

I feel like I’m going to make Greg Sandow’s head spin when he reads this, given that I’m a member of the younger generation who isn’t an orchestral insider, but count me firmly in the camp that says orchestras don’t need to try to be less old-fashioned. The penguin suits – keep ‘em on! The ridiculous rituals – love ‘em! Maintaining silence between movements – contributes to a special atmosphere! As I mentioned, I don’t often go to orchestral concerts, but when I do it’s often in part because the environment is not like the rest of my life, not in spite of it.

It’s not that I’m opposed in all circumstances to orchestras reaching out and trying new things – not by any stretch! But I think orchestras are most effective when they put forth their authentic selves. One non-traditional concert I recall enjoying was the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s annual Halloween extravaganza. The show started at 11:59pm and would feature an original film made by members of the orchestra, arrangements of popular theme music by the students, cameo appearances from the Dean and President of the college, and a hall chock-full of raucous, costumed, mostly drunk undergraduates. It was a PARTY. But it was able to be that party because it was a concert by students, for students. I can’t imagine how awkward it would have been to have a professional orchestra (playing past 11pm on those union contracts? Are you kidding?) try to replicate that fun-loving no-holds-barred atmosphere for an audience it wasn’t familiar with. Similarly, many noises have been made about how orchestras need to get out of the concert hall and into clubs. First of all, concert halls were built for a reason. The acoustics, seating arrangement, and optics are far superior to what you’ll find in a club. Secondly, as someone who has actually performed in a lot of clubs, I can assure you: the economics of small-venue performance are murderous for large or even large-ish ensembles. I mean, jazz is basically dying in this country right now because it is so hard for musicians to eke out a living playing these little shoebox closets with a $10 cover – and we’re talking groups of three, four, five players here. Trust me, the long-term structural issues facing orchestral performance are not going to be solved by a change of scenery.

At the end of the day, I’m skeptical that all that much change can come from the large, established institutions. To the extent that a “new kind” of orchestral experience is on tap, I suspect it will come from newer, youth-led outfits like Alarm Will Sound and Metropolis Ensemble rather than from the big guns. And, honestly, I think the big guns will be all right. People are still going to come to New York and Chicago and San Francisco to hear the symphony. And the experience they’ll be expecting will be the experience currently provided by those organizations: the experience of seeing some of the best musicians on the planet doing what they’ve spent a lifetime training to do. An experience that is tradition-bound and proud of it.

That’s not who I worry about. I worry about the regional symphonies, the semi-professional chamber orchestras, the myriad of youth orchestras. It seems to me that if you’re playing the exact same repertoire as your neighbor across town, just less well, you’re not really giving people much of a reason to come out and see you or support you in any way. I worry that we just have too many mediocre ensembles out there making the same not-very-interesting programming choices. They’re the ones who are most likely to have to decide, in the not too distant future, just what–and who–they’re really about.

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What do (orchestra people) want to fight for?

By Ian David Moss | Published: June 8th, 2010

(Originally published at Orchestra R/Evolution)

I’ve intentionally held off from commenting on the (really interesting) discussion until now, because I wanted to see how it developed. And boy, did this discussion start off with a bang of depressing self-flagellation. I tell you, it’s not often one will come to an industry conference and hear people say things like this:

Peter Sachon, May 12:

The unspoken truth behind why major American symphony orchestras have chronic funding shortfalls is that they have ceased giving concerts that interest and engage the modern audience.

Joshua Smith, May 17:

Is the current model of the symphony orchestra as we know it (created at least a century ago) still viable?

Doug McLennan, May 18:

But is there any sense that orchestras as an art form, classical music as an art form, have continued to move anywhere?  Vital communities argue persuasively for points of view, debate the fine points, set agendas and declare manifestos. But there is a reluctance to argue the art form. Why? For fear of killing it? Where’s the energy around new ideas? And how, at this point, would you be able to get traction for a good idea even if one emerged?

Colin Williams, May 26:

Over the years I have had to perfect a special state of mind for performing with passion to a less than crowded hall or obviously disinterested audience. As I rise to receive a scripted applause following a performance and stand there in my white tails (which would seem ridiculous attire in most any other circumstance), I have often wondered why I just invested all of that energy with my colleagues over the last two hours. I sometimes feel as if I had just  force fed 1000 people their vegetables. I mean, does what we have to say matter anymore?

Hot damn! Here I was ready to be the bearer of bad news, but after reading all of these I’d rather just give everyone a hug. Frankly, if someone was going to inject positive thoughts into this discussion, I certainly didn’t think that it would be me. In some ways, I’m the very picture of orchestras’ audience problem. I’m still in my twenties (for another week, anyway); I have a Master’s degree; my bachelor’s was in music (intensive track) and I have an extensive background as a composer. If there’s low-hanging fruit in audience development, I’m it. And yet I’ve only been to three orchestra concerts in the last three years—and I didn’t pay my own money for any of them. It’s very hard for me to imagine any normal concert program (i.e., one without a world premiere) that would induce me to pay as much as $40 for a ticket—and even that number would have been a lot lower a few years ago.

Clearly, though, orchestras must have something to offer, since they’ve inspired the passion of all of you and untold thousands of others for generations. I’ve been following with interest the bloggers who posed some variation of the question, “if you had to start all over again, what orchestras would you keep and what would you change?” And equally fascinated by the lack of substantive engagement those questions have received relative to others that have been posed. I think it would be instructive to take a historian’s perspective (which is not one I can offer, alas) and ask, why did orchestras form in the first place? What need were they filling, for their players, composers, or audience? And let’s not forget personal histories either. What first drew you to the orchestra? And specifically, what was it that made you decide you wanted to dedicate your life’s work, or at least a significant portion of it, to advancing and celebrating this art form? Was it a concert you attended? Participated in? Was it a particular piece? A teacher you adored? Or was it something much more mundane – a simple byproduct of having spent the lion’s share of your free time in one direction since early childhood?

To be sure, it’s important to identify and focus on the problems. But we’ll never find the solutions unless we can articulate why finding a solution is important.

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