As longstanding concerns about cultural equity find voice in policy initiatives like these, administrators at organizations that celebrate European art forms, which are noticeably overrepresented among the biggest-budget nonprofit arts institutions in the United States, are snapping into action. Several years ago American Ballet Theatre, better known to some as the house of Misty, launched Project Plié, “a comprehensive initiative to increase racial and ethnic representation in ballet and to diversify America’s ballet companies.” Chamber Music America released a robust new statement of commitment to racial equity earlier this year. The 2016 League of American Orchestras conference was, for the first time, devoted entirely to the topic of diversity in the field. Hosted by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the choice to convene in a majority-black city and bring in Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson as a keynote speaker did not go unnoticed. Sessions focused on helping orchestras become more reflective of the country, including diversifying boards, audiences, and the players themselves.

In case you may be wondering about the reasons behind such a focus, consider that the proportion of African American and Latino musicians in U.S. orchestras is just 4%, a number that has barely budged since 2002. (The corresponding proportion of the United States population is almost 30%.) And it’s not just musicians. According to the same research, since 2006, the percentage of top executives of color in American orchestras has fluctuated between 5.2% and 1.6%, and the percentage of board members has consistently hovered under 8% people of color during the same period.

The consistency of these numbers over time is striking, given that there are more initiatives in place than ever before to diversify orchestras. The Sphinx Organization was founded in 1996 specifically to increase the percentage of black and Latino musicians in orchestras, and has since won prestigious awards and raised millions of dollars toward that mission. Forty years’ worth of foundation-funded fellowship programs for black and Latino musicians, with the number of such programs increasing dramatically in the past 15 years, have similarly failed to move the needle.

The issue goes far beyond orchestras. According to the most recent figures from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, audiences for classical music, ballet, opera, plays, and musicals are all at least 78% white. Depending on the art form, that figure is a full twelve to seventeen percentage points above the national proportion of white people–a gap that has actually widened since 2002.

Things could still change, of course. Perhaps more time or a different approach is all that’s needed for these diversity initiatives to succeed. But at this point, it’s time to start asking the question hanging over all of this: what is the endgame? What happens if, despite the sincerest of intentions and tireless efforts to integrate, most organizations rooted in European forms of artistic expression never achieve anything close to proportionate representation of the demographics of their communities? What then?

In the wake of the protests following Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra took to the streets to play free concerts in its communities. From the BSO facebook page.

White-ish Institutions

Createquity foresaw this tension in a piece published last year entitled “Making Sense of Cultural Equity.” The basic premise was that conversations about cultural equity (and any number of associated terms and topics) are informed by underlying visions of success that can be wildly divergent, but are rarely articulated explicitly. Based on our review of the literature and our own experiences in the field, we identified four archetypal models of cultural equity that together explain a surprisingly high proportion of the debates and dialogue that occur on the topic. The dilemma described above is at the center of a conflict between the Diversity vision of success (which wants to see fully integrated, large-budget “anchor” institutions providing benefit to entire communities) and the Redistribution vision (which holds that we should be shifting the balance of arts policy and philanthropic resources toward organizations and cultural traditions rooted in historically marginalized communities, including communities of color).

By any reasonable measure, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity” is one of the most successful pieces we’ve ever done. In addition to placing among our top ten most-viewed articles, we’ve been asked to present or write about it by organizations including Americans for the Arts, Grantmakers in the Arts, Independent Sector, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, and Moore College of Art + Design. But despite the positive reception, I do think there’s one area where in retrospect we missed the mark. In the article, we stated that “[t]he one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called ‘mainstream’ institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous.” That link above takes you to our notes page, where we elaborate on the definition of “mainstream”:

Language can be a source of great confusion in conversations about cultural equity, and many commonly-used terms are highly contested. In this article, we employ several key concepts that can benefit from further elaboration. Please consider the following definitions as you read:

Mainstream institutions: In the course of our reading, we came across the term “mainstream” institutions or organizations with some frequency. Although rarely defined explicitly, we infer that this term typically denotes nonprofit organizations that 1) were founded by white people; 2) do not have a focus on an art form or an audience connected with a specific community of color or other oppressed community; 3) receive funding from foundation and government sources; and 4) have some professional staff.

This language did not escape the sharp eyes of Justin Laing, at the time a senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh who had also been a key spark behind Grantmakers in the Arts’s racial equity initiative. On Twitter, Justin shared a number of comments on the article, including the following:

Middle & upper class white America is “a stream” not the “mainstream” of America. Referring to this group as “main” is 2 overrepresent. 5/9

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

Just as referring to ALAANA arts orgs as “specific” is a marginalization or underrepresentation and perpetuates a #WesternCanon center (6/9)

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

As it turns out, we did have extensive internal discussions about the problems with the term “mainstream” as we were preparing the piece, but we ended up using it anyway, largely because it seemed fairly well established in the literature and we were trying to be careful to use the language from our readings rather than invent our own. But Justin’s feedback, and subsequent conversations that I have had with him and others on these topics, have convinced me that we should do more to interrogate the way this term is used.

In the research literature, the term “mainstream” is often contrasted with the language “culturally-specific” (a term that we did avoid), and it is this combination that provokes the fiercest resistance from cultural equity advocates. The logic on researchers’ part is that “culturally-specific” organizations explicitly target a specific demographic population, whereas “mainstream” organizations target everyone. On its face, this seems perfectly reasonable. In practice, though, the dynamic is asymmetric. Organizations celebrating European art forms tend to have been founded earlier than organizations that primarily serve communities of color and benefited from the structural advantages enjoyed by white culture at the time (and since), enabling them to capture much of the sector’s wealth. And yet virtually none of these institutions identify as “culturally-specific,” despite what the statistics shared at the beginning of this article might suggest. Indeed, aficionados of these art forms often wax poetically about their universal appeal, pointing proudly to the way that classical music, for example, has become a national symbol of pride in Venezuela through the famous El Sistema program, the way that it has spread like wildfire in East Asia, and the extensive outreach and education initiatives many American orchestras have undertaken in low-income, black and brown communities. But many cultural equity advocates see orchestral music as unabashedly and irredeemably white: it originated in Europe, the vast majority of composers presented (even by Latin American and Asian orchestras) are European or European-descended, and most of the people who enjoy it are of European origin. To them, when we talk about culturally-specific organizations, that includes symphony orchestras–and ballets, and operas, and encyclopedic art museums. And it’s not at all obvious to them why certain culturally-specific organizations should continue to receive such a disproportionate share of public and philanthropic support compared to other culturally-specific organizations. In fact, they think it’s pretty obvious that the balance is out of whack.

Now, some readers might blanch at the application of so stark a label as “white” to organizations like orchestras, especially at a time when they are trying so hard to attract more diverse audiences and workforces. And truth be told, I share some of these reservations. While I’m generally skeptical of claims to universality, I struggle deeply with the way that essentializing art forms by race, and the organizations that practice those art forms, seemingly erases the people of color who do participate in and have fallen in love with European-derived traditions. According to the NEA’s figures, more than a million African Americans saw a classical music concert at some point in 2012; nearly 600,000 Latinos took in a ballet performance; and the list goes on. That’s a lot of people. Do opera singers of color agree that opera will always be a white art form? Whose place is it to judge whether someone’s choice of profession might be (as I have seen suggested by some) a manifestation of internalized racial inferiority?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and can’t speak for people of color working in these traditions. That said, even if we stop short of labeling Shakespeare theaters and the like “white,” it seems obvious that they are, and will likely remain for some time, at the very least “white-ish.” In the end, we can’t force people to love Beethoven, Balanchine, Botticelli, Brecht, or anything else, no matter how much educating, exposing, coaxing, and pleading we do. And in today’s United States, it is increasingly art forms that did not originate in Europe that are getting the love: as of this year, the most popular genre of music to listen to is hip-hop. (From that link: “Classical music was in last place with just 1 percent of all music consumption in the year-to-date.”)

Difficult Choices

In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we defined mainstream institutions, in part, as “…founded by white people.” But it may be more helpful to consider mainstream institutions and Eurocentric institutions as two different things. Professional orchestras, ballet companies, and operas not only have a mandate to serve a broad audience, but must do so via a particular art form. Many other large-budget nonprofit organizations–performing arts centers, festivals, and some museums, to name a few–are not necessarily so constrained. It’s somewhat easier to imagine this latter group of institutions transforming in ways that authentically serve an entire community, service that would in fact justify disproportionate subsidy from a local arts agency or an impact-minded philanthropist. Separating our concepts of “mainstream” and “white” could allow us to treat European art forms as just one of many types of cultural expression within a mix of organizations and communities, instead of privileging them as the historical default. Just as importantly, that distinction would make it easier to justify allowing some organizations to continue maintaining a largely white identity when that is the most authentic expression of their mission. The problem arises only when such organizations seek and receive disproportionate philanthropic resources on the pretense of serving or speaking for an entire community that’s much more diverse than they are.

Were the field to adopt this new understanding, an unavoidable question would face every organization celebrating European cultural heritage in the midst of a substantial nonwhite population: is our foremost loyalty to our art form or our local community? In answering, boards and executives would need to realize that true commitment to the latter could mean dramatic changes, changes that would make their organizations unrecognizable to the individuals who founded them. Yet reaffirming a primary commitment to an art form with clear ethnic roots–which, I want to emphasize here, is an equally valid choice under this paradigm–would be a signal to the world that the organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts can only reach so far. And yes, that may make it untenable to go after large sums of money from foundations and government agencies on the premise of being a local “anchor institution.”

Unity in Diversity?

Ultimately, this discussion highlights the importance of clarifying what we really mean by cultural equity, and what we want for our communities and our sector. In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we noted the tension between integration and cultural ownership as one of the central fault lines separating the Diversity vision from other definitions of cultural equity:

Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

If we adopt a cultural policy that stereotypes organizations practicing European art forms as hopelessly foreign to anyone who doesn’t share ethnic roots with their founders, we leave behind millions of people of color who want to engage with those art forms and make them a part of their lives. But if we are so committed to providing African Americans and Latinos with opportunities to participate in classical music that we write those expectations into law, does that imply a corresponding expectation that organizations practicing traditions like mariachi and Butoh will likewise reach beyond their immediate communities? As a society, how much do we want our cultural policy to emphasize affirming identity vs. broadening horizons?

Again, I don’t know where that balance should be. But I feel certain that we ignore the question at our peril. Every diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative that fails to grapple with the inherent tensions living within those words risks birthing strategies that sound wonderful on their own terms but work at cross purposes in combination. Until we rise to the challenge of understanding and articulating our goals at the system level, we’re going to keep running into the same issues, and having the same arguments, over and over again.

This piece was adapted and expanded from material originally cut from “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” by Clara Inès Schuhmacher, Katie Ingersoll, Fari Nzinga, and Ian David Moss, as well as from a keynote speech I delivered to the Orchestras Canada conference in May 2017. I’m grateful to Clara, Katie, and Fari along with many others for helping to shape my thinking on this topic, and to Justin Laing for challenging me to dig deeper. Justin and I will be presenting a session exploring these issues in further depth at this year’s Grantmakers in the Arts conference.

Metropolitan Opera House – Photo by Flickr user Zio Paolino, Creative Commons license

Never fear, Wagner lovers: the largest opera company in the US will open its season on time. Faced with what it called an unsustainable financial strain, management had threatened a lockout this fall if labor representatives refused to accept drastic pay cuts. In the end, General Manager Peter Gelb was able to secure the first pay cuts for the Met’s unionized employees in decades, but the cuts were by no means as deep as initially proposed. Singers and orchestra members agreed to a 3.5% pay cut, effective immediately, and an additional 3.5% cut in six months’ time. That’s a far cry from the 17% reduction that Gelb had previously sought, and will be partially offset by a 3% raise in the fourth year of the union’s contract.

From the standpoint of the larger nonprofit arts field, the most significant part of the deal is a clause that allows an independent financial analyst to monitor the financial management of the organization on behalf of the employees. Experts claim this highly unusual provision could have ripple effects throughout the industry. This agreement came about when the unions, faced with the drastic cuts proposed by Gelb, developed a list of alternative cost-saving measures. While the management didn’t adopt those proposals outright, it agreed to let the employees have a say in how the overall savings are achieved.

California turns to tax breaks to reassert film industry dominance
Just as North Carolina decides to follow the examples of Michigan and New Mexico by scaling back its support of the motion picture industry, California is doubling down (actually, tripling down) on its incentives in an attempt to keep Hollywood productions in Hollywood. Governor Brown and the state Legislature have expanded California’s tax credit program from $100 million to $330 million per year. While the ability of film tax incentives to increase employment and stimulate the economy remains highly questionable (as previously discussed here at Createquity), California lawmakers have described the expanded tax program as a demonstration of their commitment to the film industry. California may indeed be in a somewhat different position than most other states in that a lot of film industry professionals are based in and around Los Angeles and would presumably prefer to work closer to home if the production costs, which can be significantly reduced by tax incentives, are roughly on par with other states.

International cultural agencies shake things up
The Australia Council for the Arts has announced what it’s billing as the most sweeping overhaul of its grant programs in 40 years in order to make them more inclusive and reduce the administrative burden on applicants. Each of the newly created funding categories will be open to artists of all areas of practice and applicants will be able to choose which discipline’s peer panel they want to assess their application. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Council England has rebalanced its portfolio of funded organizations to direct more funding to organizations outside of London at the expense of such venerable institutions as the English National Opera. Nevertheless, critics say the plan to devote 53% of the Arts Council’s budget to regions outside of London (up from 49%) doesn’t go far enough. Finally, the French Minister of Culture, Aurélie Filippetti, has resigned in protest of austerity measures that led to cuts in her Ministries budget. She will be replaced by Korean-born Fleur Pellerin.

New foundation to support American classical composers
The Chicago music critic Lawrence A. Johnson has launched a nonprofit foundation that will provide grants to ensembles and presenters that perform American classical music and commission new works by American composers. The American Music Project is still in the early stages of fundraising, but it’s already commissioned its first new work and is set to start awarding grants for the 2015-16 season. Johnson hopes to have raised $500,000 by next spring and eventually establish a standing endowment of $1 million. There’s no word yet on the size of the grants that will be doled for performances of rarely heard American works or how many organizations will be supported each year. While some might question the need for another nonprofit dedicated to classical music, Mike Scutari argues that the American Music Project will fill a gap in current support mechanisms with its focus on increasing the breadth of the American repertoire featured in concert halls around the country.

Corbett Foundation closing
Cincinnati’s Corbett Foundation, which has provided more than $70 million to arts and education nonprofits in Ohio and Kentucky since 1955, is finally closing its doors. The dissolution of the foundation has been planned for years; indeed, it was never intended to persist beyond the founders’ lifetimes. Explaining why it took until now to wrap things up after Patricia Corbett’s death in 2008, Executive Director Karen McKim said in effect that rising markets had foiled plans to spend down the foundation’s funds despite best efforts.

MUSICAL CHAIRS/COOL JOBS

• The Pittsburgh Foundation has announced its new president & CEO, Maxwell King.
• The National Association of Media Arts and Culture has a new executive director, Wendy Levy.
• The Center for Cultural Innovation’s board chair Angie Kim has been appointed interim leader as the organization’s search for its next President & CEO continues.
• Oregon Cultural Trust has hired Brian Rogers as executive director.
• Grantmakesr in the Arts has chosen Jim McDonald to be its new deputy director and director of programs, replacing the retiring Tommer Peterson.
• ArtWorks, an art therapy service provider in New York & New Jersey, is looking for an executive director. Posted August 15, no closing date.
• National Network of Consultants to Grantmakers seeks a project director; work virtually. Salary: $30-35k for 20 hrs/wk.
• McLean Project for the Arts (DC area) is in the market for an executive director. Salary: $55-70k. Posted August 6, no closing date.
• The Boston Globe is seeking an arts reporter. Posted August 21, no closing date.

NEW RESEARCH OF NOTE

• Research on the effects of video games is booming; much is unknown, but apparently Grand Theft Auto promotes bad behavior in real life and playing Voldemort makes you evil. But it’s not just video games: watching reality TV can make you a worse person, too.
• Rhetoric about a “universal language” aside, it turns out that about 3% of people just don’t like music at all, and they’re amazingly not monsters.
• A new study finds that true stories aren’t any more emotionally resonant than fictional ones, despite expectations to the contrary.
• Hollywood still lags behind in diversity. According to a new study, whites had 74% of the movie roles despite making up only 64% of the population.
• A Kennedy Center evaluation found that 4th- and 5th-graders in arts integrated classes displayed more creativity and better problem-solving skills than peers.
• A college-aged mathematician has put together a linear regression model predicting the length of Broadway show runs.

• Fractured Atlas officially comes out against the PROTECT-IP Act, also known as SOPA. The same week, the Senate and House remove the most controversial provision. Coincidence? I think not.
• The state of Connecticut is rebooting its arts agency giving strategy under new leader Kip Bergstrom.
• The mayor of Boston is “asking” local museums and other large nonprofits to pay the city 25% of the property tax they would otherwise owe if they were for-profit institutions, leading to a bill in the seven figures for some organizations. I’m a little torn on this one; it’s well-documented that cities who have nonprofit mega-institutions occupying prime real estate lose out on some pretty crucial tax revenue (New Haven, where I went to school for six years, was one example). On the other hand, so long as this isn’t a universal practice, it will put Boston nonprofit museums, universities and hospitals at a competitive disadvantage compared to similar institutions in other cities.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• The Danish Royal Theatre is cutting 100 jobs, including five leadership positions. What’s amazing is that’s only 10% of their staff.
• In last week’s post on corporate vs. government influence on the arts, I made a throwaway comment about preferring to accept subsidy from BP rather than Hu Jintao. The reason is this article by the outgoing Chinese president, which states that China is in an “ideological struggle” with the West and must invest to protect its “cultural security” by doing things like limit the number of prime-time shows on television and require people on microblogging sites (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) to register using their real names. Yes, China is pouring billions into extravagant shows of cultural force in cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, but it comes with a price beyond the yuan.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Peter Hutchinson is resigning as head of the Bush Foundation.
• After being rejected by at least six different candidates, the New York Philharmonic finally has a new chief executive: Matthew VanBesien.

IN THE FIELD

• Wow. Nina Simon. In just over half a year as head of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, she’s brought the organization from barely being able to make payroll to having a $100,000 cash reserve, increased attendance 57%, and landed a glowing front-page article in the region’s daily about the museum’s sudden renaissance. Oh, and she’s 30. If she doesn’t make Barry’s List in 2012, I will eat my hat. (By the way, said front-page article has an adorable proud-face moment in the comments from her dad!) Speaking of Nina, she  finally weighs in on the controversy involving the Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia, and makes a persuasive–and rather unexpected–argument in defense of the critics’ point of view.
• The Oregon Symphony has dropped its $17,000 membership in the League of Symphony Orchestras, and its executive director unloads on the League along the way: “Institutionally we are so tightly staffed that we couldn’t find the time to fill in some of the League’s massive surveys in the past few years – and to be honest, we didn’t find the data particularly useful when the results were released…No one else on staff has been to a conference in years – except (former orchestra spokesman) Carl Herko, who like me went one year at his own expense.” Ouch.
• Michael Kaiser is looking for arts management success stories for a new national learning tour. Michael, I have a museum in Santa Cruz to suggest…

NEW (AD)VENTURES

• Americans for the Arts is developing some new web content, including a Local Arts Classroom program for arts professionals with up to 10 years of experience in the field, and a seven-webinar series on arts education.
• Congrats to blogosphere regular Scott Walters for receiving funding to try out a rural arts pilot program in Bakersville, NC (pop. 357). You can follow his progress at the  CRADLE blog.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Interesting experiment testing violinists’ ability to pick out an ultra-valuable Stradivarius or Guarneri violin from its modern counterpart. The violinists were blindfolded while they played the instrument, and asked to guess after they were done. Tellingly, they more often got it wrong than right – reminiscent of the results of fine wine taste tests. Despite no obvious red flags in the study design, however, a professional violinist commentator isn’t buying it.
• A researcher uses the marital patterns of movie stars to test whether couples inherently prefer to mate with people of similar educational backgrounds. It turns out that they (seemingly) do, leading to an unexpected but important insight on the role of marriage and love relationships in promoting and sustaining income inequality.
• Derek Thompson offers an economic analysis of movie theater tickets with an assist from academics Barak Orbach and Liran Einav.
• Bad news: a recent study looks at the unemployment rates of recent college graduates, and architecture students and arts majors are clear outliers on the economic suffering end of the scale, with 13.9% and 11.1% unemployment respectively. Humanities students are third. The phenomenon exists for those with graduate degrees as well; arts and architecture students are unemployed at a rate of 6-8%, versus rates of less than 4.5% for all other disciplines.

THE WIDER WORLD

• I do an end-of-year wrap up of stories from 2011, but two commentators are looking ahead to predictions for 2012: Mark Robinson (who was apparently dared into it by Clare Cooper of Mission Models Money) and Brian Newman. And here’s a round-up of 2011’s top stories from the broader nonprofit sector by Nonprofit Law Blog.
• Nice perspective from Phil Buchanan on the historical basis for many of the hot new trends in philanthropy.
• This gigantic list of 2012 nonprofit and social change conferences is a fantastic resource.
• This article does a great job of summing up why Google+ creeps me the F out. I find myself trusting Google less and less these days (not that Facebook is any better, but at least it doesn’t have access to six years’ worth of my personal emails and search history).
• Did you know that a developer in the United Arab Emirates has created a huge set of man-made private islands designed to look like the world? And that as of now only one of them is inhabited?

Grand Rapids LipDub – photo by Rob Vander Sloot

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past 12 months. You can read the 2009 and 2010 editions here and here, respectively. In addition to the main list, I also identify my favorite new arts blogs that started within the past year. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world.

For the most part, 2011 saw the continuation of trends that had already been set in motion in previous years. The economy continued to be an issue for arts organizations worldwide, affecting government revenues in particular. The NEA moved in directions foreshadowed by its actions in 2010. And the culture wars, while not translating into meaningful policy change for the most part, were waged in the background once again.

10. Federal cultural funding dodges a bullet

The newly-elected Republican House of Representatives made a lot of noise this year about cutting funding to arts and culture, particularly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after a forced scandal involving NPR’s then-vice president of development. Democrats refused to take the bait, however, and even amid multiple standoffs over the federal budget this year, cultural funding survived largely intact. The NEA escaped with a 13% decrease from last year’s originally enacted funding level, and CPB and the Smithsonian actually saw increases. Notably, the Department of Education’s arts in education budget was also saved (albeit with cuts) despite an Obama administration recommendation for consolidation under other programs. That said, the saber-rattling this past year leaves little doubt about the prospects for arts funding under a Republican Congress and President in 2013 and beyond, and it will surprise no one if the same battles are fought all over again in 2012.

9. Grand Rapids LipDub shows how creative placemaking is done

By now you’ve heard the story: city gets named on a top ten list of “America’s dying cities”; college-aged filmmakers galvanize the community to organize a coordinated response. The result: “the greatest letter to the editor of all time,” also known as the Grand Rapids LipDub. Involving thousands of people and requiring a near-total shutdown of the city’s downtown area, the video went viral over Memorial Day weekend and has received nearly 4.5 million views as of December 31. But more than the feat itself, the video is notable as an incredibly effective example of cost-effective creative placemaking. The mayor of Grand Rapids was very smart to give this $40,000 production (mostly raised through sponsorships from local businesses) his complete support: it is just about the best advertising for his city one could possibly ask for, conveying a completely unforced and compelling charm while fostering community pride among local residents along the way.

8. Crowdfunding goes mainstream

Just two years ago, Kickstarter was a novelty and no one had heard of IndieGoGo. Now, these and other “crowdfunding” platforms that connect creatives with fans and financial backers have become an indelible part of the artistic landscape, particularly for grassroots, entrepreneurial projects. This July, Kickstarter alone reached the milestones of 10,000 successful projects and $75 million in pledges over slightly more than two years, numbers that compare favorably with major private foundations’ support for the arts. Meanwhile, crowdfunding is fast becoming a, well, crowded market, with new entrants lured by the profit-making potential of serving as banker for the creative economy. RocketHub, USA Projects, and the Power2Give initiative are just three of the more significant new entrants of the past two years, and similar platforms are popping up to serve technology startups and the broader charity market.

7. Orchestra unions take it on the chin

The recession has been not been kind to arts organizations of any stripe. But it’s been particularly hard on orchestras, those most tradition-bound of arts organizations, forcing musicians’ unions to cough up big concessions. The resolution of the Detroit Symphony’s six-month strike in April had minimum salaries dropping nearly 25% and a partial incentive pay system introduced. The same month, the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, seeking to avoid its unfunded pension obligations, and won 15% salary reductions from its musicians in October. The Louisville Orchestra also filed for bankruptcy late last year, hasn’t played since May due to negotiation impasse, and has started advertising for replacement players. The NYC Opera, after abandoning its longtime home at Lincoln Center, is threatening to turn its orchestra into a freelance outfit and cut its choristers’ pay by 90%.  The New Mexico, Syracuse, and Utica Symphonies all bit the dust, costing musicians hundreds of jobs.  The craziest story was perhaps the resignation of two-thirds of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra’s board because musicians took too a few days too long to accept a 9% pay cut. Breaking with tradition, the League of Symphony Orchestras this year sounded the alarm bells with a plenary session titled “Red Alert” at its national conference.

6. Another tough year for state arts agencies

The big headline, of course, was Kansas (see below). But state arts agencies, having already suffered big losses in 2009 and 2010, slipped backwards once again this year. More than twice as many saw decreases as increases, and in total appropriations dropped 2.6% as of August. Horror stories included Arizona Commission on the Arts, which lost its entire general fund appropriation (the agency stayed alive thanks to business license revenues); the Texas Commission on the Arts, which lost 77.7% of its funding; the Wisconsin Arts Board, whose budget was gutted more than two-thirds by controversial governor Scott Walker; and the South Carolina Arts Commission, which made it through with a 6% shave only because the state legislature overrode Governor Nikki Haley’s veto of the entire agency’s budget. Nevertheless, as in previous years, a few states and territories had clear victories: the Ohio Arts Council avoided a cut proposed by the Governor and instead achieved a $1 million increase, and the Utah Arts Council and Institute of Puerto Rican Culture saw increases of 50% or more. Still, state arts agency appropriations remain 40% below their 2001 peak levels – and that’s not even taking inflation into account.

5. Western Europe blinks on government arts funding, while South America and Asia embrace it

Already reeling from the UK’s decision to institute major cuts from Arts Council England and broader pressures on financial markets, Europe continued to see a move toward a leaner, more American-style cultural policy. The wave of change caught up the Netherlands this year, as Holland cut a quarter of its cultural budget. Meanwhile, as with the economy more generally, the balance of power is starting to shift toward former Third World nations. Hong Kong announced that it had hired starchitect Norman Foster to design a $2.8 billion, 40-hectare cultural district in West Kowloon; Abu Dhabi is building a $27 billion mixed-use development on Saadiyat Island featuring two gigantic museums and a performing arts center; and Rio de Janeiro has doubled its cultural budget in anticipation of the 2016 Olympics. Singapore and Shanghai are also seeing gigantic government investments in the arts.

4. Cultural equity #Occupies the conversation

It started small: just a poster in the magazine Adbusters, a ballerina dancing on the Wall Street Bull. But by the time October rolled around, Occupy Wall Street was a household name, changing the national conversation from one obsessed with austerity and the national debt to one that took a serious look at who benefits and suffers from our nation’s economic policies. Around the same time, the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy, a philanthropy watchdog organization that promotes social justice, published Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change by Holly Sidford, a broadside against the longstanding funding practices in the arts that make it hard for organizations representing communities of color to build a strong base of support. It didn’t take long for people to make the connection within both the arts community and the Occupy movement. And when news of the San Francisco Arts Commission possibly cutting its Cultural Equity Grants program hit during a national Cultural Equity Forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts – well, let’s just say it’s the most digital ink this topic has had spilled on it in a long time. I suspect, like so many times before, this particular conversation will dissipate without leaving behind any lasting change on a large scale. On the other hand, it’s a good bet that pressure will only continue to build on longstanding cultural institutions to justify the massive resources they have built up over the years.

3. Irvine Foundation gets engaged

About a year ago, I posted a comment on the myth of transformative arts experiences that struck a chord with readers. In it, I told my own “getting hooked on the arts” story and observed that “none of it involved being in the audience for anything….Getting out and seeing a show now and then is always nice. But getting to be in the show – that’s what’s truly transformative about the arts.” It turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking along these lines: in June, the James Irvine Foundation announced a wholesale change to its arts strategy that emphasizes audience engagement, including active participation. To support the new strategy, Irvine set up a new Exploring Engagement Fund that serves as “risk capital” for organizations to experiment with new programming strategies that are designed to increase engagement. Irvine is certainly not the first funder to focus its attention on audiences – the Wallace Foundation, for example, has made cultural participation a priority for years, and many have been happy to fund efforts to place cultural programming into context (“talkback sessions” and the like). But Irvine takes the concept much farther by explicitly encouraging programming that places the audience at the center of the experience, offering participants the opportunity to create, perform, or curate art themselves. It’s really quite revolutionary given the history of arts funding, and a lot of eyes will be on this initiative as it develops.

2. Kansas Arts Commission loses its funding

Proposals to eliminate state arts councils have become a dime a dozen in recent years. Just since 2009, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas, and several others have staved off threats of demise of varying seriousness. Experienced arts advocates, while taking each individual case seriously, tend to brush off the trend as a whole, seeing it as an inevitable part of the game. Except this year, the unthinkable happened: for the first time since the state arts council network was created in the 1960s, one of them actually had to close down shop completely. Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, fighting negative media coverage and his own legislature tooth and nail, followed through on his vow to destroy the Kansas Arts Commission and transfer its activities (but not its funding) to the nonprofit Kansas Arts Foundation. In doing so, he actually cost his state more money in federal matching funds than it saved in direct expenditures. National and local advocates are optimistic that this decision will eventually be reversed, but until then, Kansas has the dubious distinction of being the only state without a functioning arts council.

1. Creative placemaking ascendant

When Rocco Landesman was chosen to lead the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009, he almost immediately signaled his interest in the role of the arts in revitalizing downtown public spaces. Two-plus years into his term, “creative placemaking” has emerged as his signature issue, and the lengths to which he and Senior Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa have gone to promote it have been remarkable. Beyond the NEA’s Our Town grants, the inaugural round of which were announced this past summer, the big news this year was the formation of ArtPlace, a consortium of major foundation funders designed to extend Our Town’s work into the private sphere. Headed by former CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta, ArtPlace has already distributed $11.5 million in grants and has an additional $12 million loan fund managed by Nonprofit Finance Fund. Its recent solicitation for letters of inquiry drew more than 2000 responses. Our Town’s future at the NEA is by no means assured, but by spurring the creation of ArtPlace, Rocco has guaranteed that creative placemaking will be part of the lexicon for quite a while.

Honorable mention:

• #SupplyDemand: the economics lesson heard ’round the world
• San Francisco Arts Commission implodes
• Doris Duke’s new artist fellowships
• LINC begins to wrap it up

And here are my choices for the top new (in 2011) arts blogs:

1. Lee Streby
2. New Beans (Clayton Lord)
3. ArtsFwd (Karina Mangu-Ward and others)
4. Creative Infrastructure (Linda Essig)
5. ArtPlace blog (various) – note the RSS feed on this one is impossible to find, it’s here.

As a program that began with a few young musicians playing classical music in a garage in Venezuela in the 1970s, the phenomenon of youth orchestras known as “El Sistema” has captured the hearts and imaginations of renowned artists and arts organizations around the world. Today, over fifty organizations in the US self-identify as “El Sistema-inspired,” presumably because they have some combination of rigorous musical study, a social justice mission, or a community development mission. As these music for social action programs emerge and evolve, they are grappling with questions about how to collectively support this new movement, what informs this type of work in our communities, and what this new hybrid leader of advocate, educator, administrator, and musician looks like.

Organizations around the country are exploring partnerships as a way to achieve greater impact than they alone can accomplish. Bard College and The Longy School of Music saw a need to support musicians in well-rounded careers as extraordinary musicians with strong teaching skills, and recently announced that the two schools are in the process of merging. The Los Angeles Philharmonic saw a need to supply El Sistema programs with high-quality teachers, and has partnered with Longy and Bard to train teachers and host conferences that bring together leaders in the El Sistema movement to discuss the needs of emerging programs. The New England Conservatory continues to support 10 people each year in a rigorous program (Abreu Fellows) that prepares them to start and/or support El Sistema programs in the US.

As a current Abreu Fellow, I’m seeing this connectivity in the spirit of El Sistema first-hand. In September, the Fellows joined about 35 music teachers and El Sistema program leaders from around the country in a professional development workshop called “Enacting a Teaching Practice through El Sistema Philosophy,” a joint initiative of New England Conservatory, the Longy School of Music, and the Conservatory Lab Charter School (CLCS) in Boston, where first-year Abreu Fellows Rebecca Levi and David Malek direct an El Sistema program. This was not your garden-variety conference: we embodied the learning by making music together, singing with the children’s choir at CLCS, playing in the children’s orchestra, and learning how to play in a bucket band. By the end of the workshop, many of us felt so connected that we ended the evening harmonizing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” outside of a restaurant.

Cross-pollination from different fields is happening institutionally, as well. When Harvard University hosted a session at the Kennedy School for Public Policy with El Sistema leaders in the US to discuss possible implications of El Sistema-inspired programs on policy, the Abreu Fellows turned the group of 40 public policy grads and arts education leaders into a choir. This is the change that is happening through the inspiration of El Sistema: creative entryways into experiencing excellence, community-building, performance, and most importantly, fun.

As Doug Borwick says, “As more established arts institutions come to understand the need to establish community relevance as part of their long-term prosperity (or survival) the more necessary it will be to develop models of work with communities that produce impressive results.” The good news is, we’re just at the beginning, and the conversations and rich connections are well on their way to making relevant music for community development programs a reality. Through these connections, we’re establishing an infrastructure for the next step: gathering information to better understand the impact that these programs can have.

Classical Revolution PDX: Mattie Kaiser / photo by Mollusa

(Originally posted in three parts at ARTSBlog: I / II / II. This post is part of a series on emerging trends and notable lessons from the field, as reported by members of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council.)

In the past half century, there are some things that haven’t much changed in classical music. Big, well-established orchestras (several high-profile recession-induced bankruptcies and closures notwithstanding) continue to attract the lion’s share of dollars from funders, individual donors, and ticket-buying patrons alike. Prestigious conservatories such as Juilliard and Curtis continue to pump out soloists who are snapped up by artist management companies and shopped to those same orchestras, increasingly hungry for top talent. In the background, however, the rest of the classical music field is rapidly evolving in new directions.

Despite a long-term general stagnation in ticket-buying classical music audiences, more and more young people are taking a shine to the 400-year-old art form and wanting, nay, expecting to make a career out of it. Americans for the Arts’s National Arts Index reports a 61% increase in the number of visual and performing arts degrees awarded between 1998 and 2009, far outpacing population growth during that period. Empowered and ambitious, this new crop of conservatory graduates has emerged professionally during a time of extraordinary operational and technological change in the field. In just one generation, the young classical musicians of today have seen public funding for the arts drop precipitously in real terms; the democratization of music production and distribution through technologies such as notation software, ProTools, digital file-sharing, and Kickstarter; and the decimation of arts education programs across the country. Perhaps most importantly, the current generation of classical musicians in their 20s and 30s is the first to have grown up with genre-bending as a given – that trail having been blazed, in part, by the Minimalists and Bang on a Can crowd in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

It’s not hard to see why this combination of factors may have contributed to an increased sense of entrepreneurship in the field. Classical musicians throw themselves into creation and performance with a ferocity many of us may find hard to imagine – a deep, sustained, and personal engagement with an art form predating just about everything else they encounter in their lives besides the earth itself. And yet the language they speak is not shared by more than a tiny fraction of the people around them. Unless they have virtually no contact with the outside world, they are likely to have friends, family members, and colleagues who listen to no classical music at all and have no desire to do so. Faced with this dichotomy, one can only imagine how frustrating it must be to know that the sincere joy and fulfillment they get from their art is not being communicated to people they care about.

Not only that, but today’s conservatory graduates are less likely than ever to have illusions about the world that awaits them upon graduation. They know that the dream of a soloist career is out of reach for most. They know that steady orchestra gigs are getting harder and harder to come by, and that the ones that do exist are getting less comfortable. And they know that if they are the ones calling the shots, they can pursue their highest artistic vision without interference from directors, boards, or teachers.

Not surprisingly, then, the phenomenon of classical musicians starting their own enterprises or organizations has become commonplace. Much of the time, these projects are mere extensions of the individual artist’s identity, and may travel only as far as the founder’s fame can carry them. But others reflect long-term, strategic thinking in their design and execution, and a few offer real innovations in the way that classical music is conceived, presented, and supported.

What happens when you blow up the idea of an orchestra and start all over? Alarm Will Sound, a large ensemble performing repertoire from Nancarrow to Frank Zappa to the music of its own members, may provide the answer. In the mid-1990s, composer Gavin Chuck and conductor Alan Pierson were among the co-founders of a student new music group at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester called Ossia that solicits ideas from audience members for musical programs. Upon graduation in 2001, the two formed Alarm Will Sound in order to continue making music with the same group of musicians.

Eschewing many of classical’s linguistic trappings, Alarm Will Sound calls itself a “20-member band” performing “today’s music” on its website. Often bringing in multimedia and theatrical elements to its performances, AWS revels in conceiving unexpected and ambitious presentations, executed with amazing technical precision. “In Ossia, we had seen how responsive audiences were not only to good music, but to good musical ideas presented in interesting ways beyond the conventional concert,” explains Chuck. Among some of AWS’s more adventurous ideas have been acoustic transcriptions of electronic music (an entire album of Aphex Twin covers, plus the Beatles’ avant-garde classic “Revolution #9”) and stage directions that involve dispersal across the concert hall.

For Judd Greenstein, founder of New Amsterdam Records, explorations across genre aren’t just about bringing popular music into a classical context. Greenstein and his NewAm co-directors, Sara Kirkland Snider and William Brittelle, have classical pedigree a-plenty—they’ve done time at the graduate music programs of Yale, Princeton, and CUNY—but see their work as part of a mission to launch the music that they and their colleagues write into the same stratosphere with other forms of indie music.

“One of the points of NewAm is to move around and beyond the historicism of the classical community and the self-reflection that pervades it,” Greenstein says. He points to the label’s appearance on top 10 lists and charts from multiple musical worlds (such as the NPR and New York Times Classical lists, the iTunes jazz chart, and the College Music Journal 200) as evidence of its success at positioning music that comes (at least in part) from the classical tradition as something that people who don’t think of themselves as classical lovers can enjoy.

Now, the for-profit New Amsterdam Records has become a subsidiary of a new nonprofit organization: New Amsterdam Presents.  “We had always wanted the record company to be a nonprofit, but after two years of wrangling with the IRS, we realized we couldn’t do it,” says Greenstein. Ironically, the label’s pro-artist revenue-sharing agreement – posted for the world to see on the web – was the sticking point. The presenting organization helps NewAm in other ways, however – by expanding the roster of artists that it can represent, and providing an infrastructure for year-round rather than project-based fundraising.

Unlike Alarm Will Sound and New Amsterdam, Charith Premawardhana’s Classical Revolution shies away from neither the term “classical” itself nor the music it typically represents. Premawardhana started Classical Revolution as a weekly chamber music salon series at Revolution Cafe in San Francisco. An alumnus of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Premawardhana was frustrated with what he calls the “corporate” nature of the traditional symphony orchestra world, and longed to reach a wider and more diverse audience with his playing.

Five years and 500 performances later, Classical Revolution has performed in a dizzying array of venues around the Bay Area, “from cafes and bars to backyards and living rooms to museums and concert halls,” according to Premawardhana. Recent and upcoming programming has included tangoes, an indie rock band, and a tribute to the Velvet Underground, as well as works by contemporary composers. CR has even inspired a far-flung network of 16 like-minded chapters in places from Cincinnati to Melbourne, with six more on the way. While Classical Revolution currently receives fiscal sponsorship through San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, Premawardhana talks of acquiring independent 501(c)(3) status so that CR can provide fiscal sponsorship itself to its various chapters around the country. Up until now, Premawardhana has not been paying himself due to lack of funding; he reports that almost all income goes to pay for musicians and space rental.

*

The three enterprises discussed above are hardly the only examples of conservatory musicians or classically-aligned individuals shaking up the classical world with innovative ideas.

Here are a few other notable instances of classical music entrepreneurship that I’ve come across:

• The Wordless Music Series burst on to the scene in New York five years ago, presenting a head-spinning mix of programs combining first-rate classical ensembles with esoteric indie rock bands on the same bill. Founded and curated by a former Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center staffer, Ronen Givony, Wordless Music bills have included Godspeed You! Black Emperor, composer Nico Muhly, and the United States premiere of a string orchestra piece by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. In many cases the events happen at unusual venues, such as churches, that are totally alien to the participants from the popular music realm.
• The International Contemporary Ensemble has pioneered a remarkable hybrid structure that combines elements of performance group, presenter, and producer across multiple venues and even cities.  More centralized than the grassroots chapter network of Classical Revolution, ICE is ostensibly based in Chicago and New York, but its network of ensemble members is spread out across the country. Founder Claire Chase, as well as many of the musicians, graduated from Oberlin Conservatory.
• The Sphinx Organization, based in Detroit, has adopted as its mission increasing the proportion of African Americans and Latinos in classical music. Sphinx’s “emerging” status is perhaps dubious at this point, with founder Greg Dworkin having been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” grant in 2005. Yet its example is remarkable as an ambitious attempt to address the extreme lack of racial and socioeconomic diversity among classical music practitioners and audiences alike.
• Conservatories themselves are starting to catch on to the entrepreneurial trend among their students. Ten years ago, Eastman dean James Undercofler spearheaded the formation of the Institute for Music Leadership. Much more recently, the Manhattan School of Music opened a Center for Music Entrepreneurship headed up by Angela Myles Beeching, former director of the Career Services Center for New England Conservatory. And the Yale School of Music offers a new alumniVentures program aimed at providing seed funding for recent graduates’ projects.

What lessons can we derive from these models for classical music entrepreneurship? While each of the projects is unique, I see several clear trends and commonalities among them.

• Seeking a genuine, integrative relationship with the anti-commercial wing of the commercial music industry. Blurring boundaries between classical music and “intelligent” pop (such as electronic, indie rock, and other genres) is not only an honest expression of these musicians’ diverse aesthetic interests and influences, it has come to be seen as the key to unlocking a wider (and younger!) audience.
• Not being locked into a single venue – or even city. Today’s entrepreneurial classical organizations exist all over the place. Boasting flexible ensembles that can be reshuffled for virtually any occasion, they are equally at home in a bar or concert hall. Some, including ICE and Classical Revolution, have even found ways to exist in multiple locations at once.
• Welcoming a larger artistic community under a common umbrella. Most of the organizations profiled here are remarkably generous when it comes to sharing the spotlight. They purposefully and promiscuously seek out collaborations, often with artists outside of their group, their genre, their city, even their discipline.

Equally notable, perhaps, is what I don’t see. For the most part, these groups have innovated tremendously around programming, somewhat around business models, and hardly at all with legal forms. Most of them have either stuck with traditional nonprofit status, or (in the case of New Amsterdam and Classical Revolution) are moving towards it after trying out something different. For all the talk of the 501(c)(3) being “dead” or a thing of the past, perhaps the real problem has been with the institutional structures around the legal form rather than the legal form itself.

Furthermore, for all the exciting energy surrounding the programming innovations that these groups have undertaken, they haven’t yet solved the underlying economic difficulties facing classical music as a whole. All of the groups interviewed mentioned obtaining and sustaining funding as a major, if not primary, challenge. Despite boasting leaner cost structures, these groups operate without the pedigree or institutional advantages of major orchestras, and thus revenue generation is no small task. As Judd Greenstein put it, “Being successful in a small corner of the music industry doesn’t get you a free pass in the industry as a whole…you’re still left with the same challenges that others face in an extremely competitive market that is very bad at monetizing success.”

What these groups unquestionably are doing, though, is blazing an alternate path – however uncertain – for new conservatory graduates who for whatever reason do not fit into the shrinking traditional classical establishment. Besides the literal opportunities created by these enterprises, slowly but surely, they are opening up new markets for a new kind of engagement with a very, very old art form.

Can we also apply the term “site-specific” to the work of a classical music organization that ventures out of the concert hall and into the “community”? The once critically acclaimed but recently cash-strapped Brooklyn Philharmonic is doing just that, after two years of hiatus, in a bold new program under new musical director Alan Pierson. Pierson is “shaping the orchestra’s season almost entirely around Brooklyn composers and Brooklyn communities,” with concerts in Brighton Beach (featuring music from Russian cartoons), Bedford Stuyvesant (featuring rapper Mos Def and a tribute to Lena Horne), and downtown Brooklyn (featuring Sufjan Stevens, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus), as well as a Beethoven remix contest. Each performance will also feature one “traditional” classical offering: a movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony.

This wholesale reinvention has come in for some praise. Yet what does “going site-specific” mean for the future of an orchestra—and for the communities it aims to engage and represent?

A common critique of site-specific community art is that artists and arts administrators, seeking to collaborate with communities in which they are considered outsiders, may treat these communities as fixed and homogenous.  In a New York Magazine interview, Pierson, who does not live in Brooklyn, describes how “going from one neighborhood to another is like traveling to a different world.”  Pierson’s extensive groundwork partnering with community groups to co-design the new programming is commendable.  Yet Brooklyn neighborhoods’ geographic, as well as socioeconomic and ethnic boundaries, are changing, and one neighborhood may encompass people of many different backgrounds and artistic tastes. Are these neighborhood-specific performances opening doors for cross-cultural appreciation and collaboration? Or is it dangerous to build a season around the premise that everyone in Brighton Beach will relate to Russian cartoons, or everyone in Bed Stuy enjoys rap music? And will ticket sales from these new programs, which are being offered free or at low cost, be enough to dig the orchestra out of its financial ditch?

I am curious to know whether there are other orchestras shaping their programming around specific communities to this extent—and how successful they have been selling tickets and reaching new audiences.  I am also reminded of another local institution’s struggle to re-package itself as uniquely “Brooklyn.” In 2010, the New York Times revealed that the Brooklyn Museum’s attempts at “populism” over six years—including expanding community programs, shaping exhibits around local and pop culture themes, and experimenting with open-call art competitions to generate exhibition content–haven’t boosted the Brooklyn Museum’s overall attendance, or necessarily made new people care more about fine art.  (One ex-trustee is quoted as saying, “Although I think First Saturdays are a very effective community outreach, I question whether people come to them to see art, or to enjoy music and drinks.”)

Will the Brooklyn Phil’s mixed programming actually instill an expanded appreciation for classical music—and is this the orchestra’s goal? Or, is the Philharmonic in fact departing permanently from its classical roots in favor of musical genres that are more popular, or hybrid? And will it, in turn, lose its (albeit small) base of Brooklyn classical music aficionados?

BATUTA:  THE COLOMBIAN “SISTEMA”

by Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall

The accomplishments of Venezuela’s El Sistema are greater and more far-ranging than anything we in the United States can imagine. It is not an overstatement to assert that El Sistema represents the most significant innovation in the arts and arts learning in our lifetimes. Fortunately, we in the United States and around the world are beginning to learn about it and to learn from it.

The Sistema-inspired work in Colombia called Batuta, the second largest such national program in the world, is also doing work beyond our U.S. imagining. And we have yet to begin learning from it. We hope that this essay will serve as a useful introduction to the proud history and the current accelerated growth phase of Sistema Batuta Colombia.

BATUTA: THE BACKGROUND

Twenty years ago, Maestro José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema in Venezuela, helped the Colombian government to spark the launch of Batuta (Spanish for “baton”) amidst the turmoil of Colombia, a country riven by crime, drug cartels, and political division. Colombia’s problems were similar in some ways to those of Venezuela – both countries faced, and are still facing, crushing poverty and intense pressures on young people toward gang, crime, and drug involvement. In addition, Colombia has faced the challenge of internal migration, with thousands of children living in refugee-type camps and in migrant limbo.

Batuta’s goal has been to address these glaring needs. As in Venezuela, the focus has consistently been upon the twin missions of socialization and musical development – with social learning equal to, and sometimes even prioritized over, musical skills.

Batuta has many strengths to build upon: a significant presence throughout the country; a highly developed early childhood music education curriculum; a national faculty of dedicated and motivated teachers; a wide network of affiliations with an existing ecosystem of music programs; an already exceptional national youth orchestra; and several emerging regional youth orchestras – one of which has just triumphantly completed its first international tour, to Germany and Italy.

As in Venezuela, many thousands of children in Colombia, in all of the country’s thirty-two states and in cities and towns large and small, have experienced life-empowering change as a result of Batuta’s work. In the words of its director, Juan Antonio Cuellar, “Social action is the mission; music is the tool.” Cuellar describes taking a plane across a remote area of the Andes, driving to the end of the only road, taking a boat to a small town…and finding the children singing songs and working in recorder ensembles exactly as they do in downtown Bogotá.

Several differences between the cultures and circumstances of Colombia and Venezuela have meant that Batuta’s growth has been somewhat different from the development of Venezuela’s El Sistema. Batuta’s program focuses predominantly on younger children in non-orchestral settings; of the 47,000 students currently engaged in Batuta’s programs, only 9,000 play orchestral instruments. The rest follow a program of choral singing, playing Orff instruments and recorders, and learning basic musicianship skills. This vital and beautiful work is guided by a national curriculum and a remarkably consistent pedagogy for early childhood learning. But a scarcity of trained orchestral teachers, and perhaps more crucially a scarcity of orchestral instruments, have held back the growth of an orchestral focus. The dense network of youth orchestras that characterizes Venezuela’s Sistema is still, in Colombia, very much in the process of development.

Another difference between the two countries has been Colombia’s wider and more developed infrastructure of already-existing classical music programs. Especially in Colombia’s four major cities of Bogotá, Medellin, Cali, and Cartagena, such programs have provided a range of opportunities for musical training, both for impoverished and for more-advantaged youth. Functioning within this existing music-learning ecosystem, Batuta leadership has emphasized the roles of coalition builder and service provider. For example, Batuta has frequently served as coordinator for regional gatherings of many music programs. And one of its current goals is to become the nation’s go-to source for affordable, high-end musical instruments. In its role of trustworthy national agent for coordinating, supporting, and elevating the entire field of music education, Colombia’s Batuta is without parallel in Latin America.

Unlike Venezuela’s Sistema, which is primarily government-supported, Batuta is supported by a mixture of public and private funds. Public support comes through the Presidential Agency for Social Action and International Cooperation, and from the Ministry of Culture, and constitutes about 70% of the budget. The program’s main partner in the private sector is the Fundación Bolívar-Davivienda, the largest private foundation in Colombia and part of the Bolívar Group, one of the nation’s largest consortia.  (It’s interesting to note that in Colombia, much of the funding, like many of the regional orchestral programs, is consortium-based.)  The head of the Fundación Bolívar, Fernando Cortes, is an ardent believer in the cause of youth development through music; his advocacy has helped garner major support for Colombia’s first national youth orchestra, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, and also for Batuta’s teacher training initiatives.

We had the great privilege of visiting Bogotá in July 2011, learning about Colombia’s “Sistema” through working with Batuta teachers, conversing with its leadership, observing performances and rehearsals, and teaching within its professional development program. What follows is an attempt to encapsulate our experience and learning in Bogotá, to share with all those who are interested and engaged in the El Sistema movement. Since our stay was short, our observations are necessarily quite preliminary and incomplete. Our hope is that they will serve as food for thought, inspiration, and further exploration.

NEW LEADERSHIP FOR BATUTA

In 2008, Juan Antonio Cuellar, a U.S.-trained Colombian composer and the dean of a Bogotá university music school, took over as Executive President of Batuta with a mission of change. Driven to address the sad reality that without a strong orchestral program, Batuta was losing many of its students at around age twelve – the very time when young people are most vulnerable and most attracted to the self-destructive choices that surround them – Cuellar has set about improving both Batuta’s orchestral commitment and its professional development opportunities for teachers. His aim is for Batuta and its partners to achieve results similar to the miracle in neighboring Venezuela, but in their own Colombian way.

To achieve the mission of significantly increased orchestral focus, Cuellar has set two goals as his first major priorities: the launch of vigorous and sustained teacher development initiatives, and the creation of “iconic” youth orchestras. To meet the first goal, he has tapped a wide range of resources, especially including Venezuelan teachers and overseas visitors like ourselves; professional development teachers go on tours to every Batuta site and frequently conduct regional training “intensives.” The second goal is being addressed through the formation of youth orchestras on regional levels, and also through the creation and development of a national youth orchestra under the artistic direction of U.S. conductor Matthew Sydney Hazelwood. These two goals are intertwined in many ways: students need examples to look up to, teachers need excellence to aspire to, and high aspiration raises the reach of everyone’s achievement. Integral to both priorities is the expectation that teachers perform in orchestras, so that teachers can learn by doing, and students and community can know and be inspired by their teachers as artists.

TEACHER TRAINING: THE KEYSTONE OF DEVELOPMENT

“Teachers are the motors of everything we do,” says Cuellar. “The teachers we train now will create the future of Batuta.”  In order to build the capacity of Batuta teachers to create orchestral programs and curricula, ongoing training programs are in place in all four major regions of the country. Teachers come together on a regular basis to be taught by leading educators from Colombia, Venezuela, the U.S., and elsewhere.

Rather than espousing a particular pedagogy, or even using a specific set of guidelines for hiring or retention, Cuellar proposes that there are three main elements to all good teaching – especially all good youth orchestral training. “One is improvement: are your students improving artistically, all the time? Two is engagement: Are your students engaged? Are their families engaged, and are their communities engaged? Three is ethics: are you adhering fully to the highest code of ethics, following the UNESCO Rights of Children code? And are you modeling for these students everything you want them to become? This includes artist, teacher, learner, experimenter, and socially responsible adult.”

This code of ethics, says Cuellar, is transmitted to students naturally, in the course of ensemble learning. “Children learn everything in orchestras,” he says. “Values. Habits. In this regard, the rehearsal itself is always really the point.”

As Cuellar describes these three imperatives, we can see why he emphasizes teachers and professional development as the cornerstone of his strategy for the future. Teachers with such deeply held values will necessarily have a forceful, intrinsically motivated, positive-but-relentless drive for constant improvement in their students’ capacities. They will have an equally positive-but-relentless drive for expanding their investment in families and communities. And they will have no trouble with the idea that their own lives, and the examples they set, are their most powerful teaching tools.

Teacher training, as conceived for Batuta, is an ambitious and far-ranging enterprise. In the three-day workshop we observed and participated in, Batuta teachers from across the Bogota region were invited during a morning session to reflect on the “Studio Habits of Mind,” a framework for understanding the mental habits that determine whether learning will be successful, engaged, and creative.  The model was developed by researchers at Harvard Project Zero in 2004 by studying the teaching and learning of the best visual arts teachers in the U.S. Adapted to music, the “studio habits of mind” serve as a guide to holistic learning for Batuta teachers, students, and even conductors; Maestro Matthew Hazelwood eloquently describes how the Studio Habits inform his work on the podium.

In the U.S. we often state axiomatically that intensive orchestral study develops the “whole child.” But we do not generally create structures for music learning that are pedagogically wide and artistically deep, to commit to such holism. We found it remarkable, therefore, that Batuta – uniquely among El Sistema programs, as far as we know – is developing such a holistic framework for broadening and deepening the learning experience. [1]

In the afternoon workshop we observed, the professional development focus switched to active, hands-on, master class-type learning, as Venezuelan master teacher Francisco Diaz coached the teachers in ensemble conducting. Diaz, who is from Barquisimeto and was one of Gustavo Dudamel’s teachers, has been an important figure in the work of Venezuela’s Sistema for many years. We watched him work both with the teachers and with young violinists, and his teaching style was consistent: hard-driving, exacting, insistently positive. He demanded courageous experimentation on the part of individuals, and was at the same time constantly attentive to the progress of the group as a whole.

Cuellar takes a long-term view of teacher development: the students of today are the teachers of tomorrow. The future of Batuta, he is convinced, depends upon the numbers and passion of students who choose to become teachers in the system. During our time in Colombia, we were struck by the frequency with which students are given this message. It is a great honor to be a teacher, they are told.  It is the fruition of their artistry to become teaching artists. And it is their responsibility to become teachers and to share the beauty and transformative power of their musical lives. [2]

Francisco Díaz echoed this theme in his closing remarks to the Batuta teachers in Bogotá. “Your students are the future,” he told them. “We must instill in them the passion to teach, and they will take care of everything. We are accidents in this process – we merely begin it. We must trust the future to them.”

“Trust the young” – it is one of José Antonio Abreu’s most memorable and enduring sayings. As teachers in North America, we have much to learn from this El Sistema faith in the infinite capacity of our students, and from leaders’ willingness to empower young people with jobs and decision-making authority.

A NEW NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA

Through cooperation between Batuta and other music programs, and with the support of the Fundación Bolívar-Davivienda, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia was established two years ago, in 2009. This ensemble brings together over a hundred young people aged 16-24 from across the country, under the artistic direction of Matthew Sydney Hazelwood, a busy and widely respected  U.S. conductor with deep musical ties to Colombia.  In July 2011, Maestro Hazelwood conducted a two-week training “intensive” for the young orchestra, bringing a team of his favorite teaching artists from the U.S. as well as seasoned Venezuelan educators, to fast-track the learning process. An ambitious five-city national tour followed.

Many of these young musicians had never played together before, yet because of their musical hunger and their zeal for preparation, they learned and grew in ways that were beyond the imagining of their faculty. Already they have attained the kind of improbable excellence and outsized exuberance that one sees in Venezuelan youth orchestras – albeit with a distinctly different feel, and a focus on repertoire that develops finesse and nuance in tandem with muscular intensity.

We heard the culminating performances of the tour in Bogotá, in a new performing arts center whose grand contours suggest equal parts ancient pyramid and modernist concert hall. The acoustics were splendid, and the sold-out audience was the kind U.S. orchestras dream of, a rich representation of the city that surrounds it: many young people, families, the social elite, cool twenty-somethings on dates. With Angela Kim as superb guest soloist, the orchestra gave a skillful and passionate rendition of Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No.2; they also played Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Capriccio Espagnol,” Johann Strauss’s “Fledermaus” Overture, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The concerts had the visceral excitement of performances by Venezuela’s national youth orchestras — both musically illuminating and electrifyingly fun. Like their Venezuelan compatriots, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia radiates joy.

For this culminating performance of their intense month together, in the national capital and in the best concert hall in the country, the energy level sizzled backstage. Onstage, like seasoned professionals beyond their years, they channeled that effervescence into their best and most focused performance, according to several who heard them during the tour.

Cuellar is interested in enhancing the sense of “event” in relation to the orchestra’s concerts, in order to more fully engage audiences – and the “FJC,” as they are known, are experimenting with several distinctive performance practices. Their concerts begin with a dramatic entrance, with the conductor among them: rather than sitting down to play, they stand and face the audience; they begin their first piece standing in place, and sit when the music seems to invite it. In addition, for this tour there were special lighting effects designed by Cuellar to accompany and support the Mahler symphony. The stage was sometimes nearly dark, sometimes awash with hues that varied with the progress of the music. While such experiments can run the risk of being distracting or irrelevant, we found that these simple, elegant effects were musically sound, and created light environments that enhanced the listening.

The final encore was a Colombian folk song familiar to everyone in the audience. Like the Venezuelans, but in their own distinct style, the young musicians exploded into a playground of moving, singing, clapping and improvising. Cumbia (a characteristic Caribbean-Colombian folk music) dancing broke out across the stage and moved into the audience.  The musicians who weren’t dancing began to improvise, sometimes even swapping instruments for solos. It was as ecstatic a closing as could be imagined – an unchoreographed, spontaneous, ebullient sharing of their personalities and their joy.

Since it was their final concert, there was much hugging and weeping after the encore by these tired and wired teenagers, and they did it onstage instead of hidden backstage.  A number of families joined them on the stage.  As audience members, we were moved by the quality of the music and the generosity of the artists: it felt authentic, joyous, and emphatically “iconic.”

One additional note for U.S. music educators: at the end of the tour, the musicians in Filarmónica Joven de Colombia were asked to reflect on their learning experience.  They spoke of their love and gratitude toward all their teachers, from Venezuela and the United States. And they noted that the U.S. teachers had very valuable ideas, tools, and suggestions, but that all came “from a soloist’s perspective.” They found that the U.S. teachers struggled with teaching in groups, were somewhat inconsistent in their teaching between one student and the next, and were a bit too gentle.

Since these orchestra members were raised in the El Sistema lineage, the orientation of the Venezuelan teachers naturally felt more familiar to them. They praised the Venezuelans’ skills in moving whole groups (or sections) steadily forward, and their ability to demand more and achieve more. They also praised these teachers’ consistency of approach, within a session and in general; it was clear that any Venezuelan teacher could pick up right from where a previous one had left off months before.

We in the U.S. who are involved in El Sistema-inspired work would do well to take note of these comments. We have much to learn about changing our mental and pedagogical framework away from the soloist/conservatory view to a perspective in which musicians develop in a group. We have much to discover, too, about how driving a rehearsal hard can increase the fun of it, and how repetitive practice can lead to refinement without boredom.

BUILDING ORCHESTRAL COMMUNITY:  THE ENCUENTRO TRADITION

In 2009, a music-loving Air Force colonel in the western city of Cali decided that the 90^th anniversary of the Colombian Air Force should be celebrated with a huge musical event involving every single musical child in the city. So Batuta helped to mobilize all the music programs in the area that were working with children, and brought them together in a massive encuentro – a huge gathering of orchestras and choirs.

Batuta, with the support of the Air Force and the enthusiasm of the colonel, hired some of the greatest musicians in the region to come and help Batuta with training and rehearsing the young musicians.  The encuentro brought together young people from Cali and from a Batuta music center in Buenaventura, a port on the Pacific two hours away from Cali.  Buenaventura  is a dangerous region of the country; as the country’s key Pacific port it is used as a transit hub for weapons and drug trafficking.  But the teachers traveled wherever the children were, and rehearsed them intensively for weeks. The concert itself, with seven hundred young people performing in an airplane hangar for an audience of thousands, was unforgettable. “They played Shostakovich and Borodin, they sang the Alleluia chorus from Handel’s Messiah,” says Cuellar. “And while we originally thought that beginners and advanced players would perform separately, it quickly became clear that everyone should play everything — mostly because every young musician yearned and asked to play in everything. So even the smallest children performed in all the pieces. For every single music program in the city, this concert raised the bar of excellence.”

“We don’t look for things…we find them,” he adds.  He has said this several times, and here the meaning seems clear: such an amazing event occurs not through chance, but because of a laser-like determination, a refusal to look without finding.  This adage seems to be the “Juan Antonio” equivalent of the “José Antonio” dictum about teachers’ responsibility to serve students: “No is simply not an option.”

The larger message seems to be a near-miraculous truth of El Sistema work in Colombia, Venezuela, the U.S., Scotland – wherever its seeds take root: the passionate and concentrated focus on changing the trajectory of students’ lives through music seems to prompt the appearance of unexpected, unreasonable, even impossible opportunities.  Cuellar launched an “encuentro strategy”… and then an Air Force colonel offered an airplane hangar for a concert of 700 kids.  What were the chances of that?  Cuellar hadn’t looked for it – but Batuta found the opportunity.

The encuentro was so successful that the Air Force repeated it again the following year.  After the second concert, leaders of the various music programs had developed sufficient enthusiasm for the benefits of coordinated endeavor, and sufficient trust in Batuta as a fair agent of everyone’s interests, that they agreed to launch a regional orchestra of the best students from all programs, with Batuta as manager.

The use of the “encuentro” – a gathering of musical ensembles to perform  together in a particular, high-aspiration public event – is an important tool in Batuta’s strategy of orchestral development.  When many programs join together toward a specific musical goal, teachers and students alike overcome their natural parochialism and collaborate to accomplish something extraordinary that no one program could ever accomplish alone.  As they did in Cali, program leaders usually recognize that coordination serves their students and does not diminish their programs.  Feeling the success of what they can do together, they want to make it a regular practice.

Another distinctive growth strategy in Batuta is to nurture, lead, and interconnect the many small and medium El Sistema-inspired initiatives that have emerged over the past years.  Juan Antonio Cuellar systematically helps to build up the capacity of these organizations and actively seeks opportunities for collaborative work between all of them. Such collaborations also incorporate a number of universities and conservatories.

Out of this recognition, collaboration, and shared success, “iconic” regional youth orchestras can be born.

ICONIC REGIONAL ORCHESTRAS

When a permanent regional youth orchestra emerges, drawing the most motivated and best students from all programs, it is “iconic” in that it creates an example of what can be done when programs strive together for something greater than individual institutional identities. It is also iconic in that the music students of the region can see and believe in what is possible if they strive: they are potentially those musicians onstage, if they apply themselves. The national youth orchestra provides a particularly dramatic model for this ideal, but regional orchestras increase the visibility and accessibility of the model throughout the country.

We believe this is a crucial feature in Venezuela’s El Sistema success. Children can watch performances by students just a little older than themselves … and then by another orchestra better than that … then a city-wide youth orchestra … then one of the national youth orchestras (in Venezuela, there are currently three national orchestras that book international tours).  They can envision their path to greatness, because they see and feel its power and rewards so regularly.

In each of the four main regions of Colombia, Batuta is sponsoring and building a peak regional orchestra, with membership by audition.  These orchestras nurture wider musical aspiration, and build interest in and demand for all the music programs in the region.  The work in these orchestras feels very much like the orchestral work in Venezuela’s El Sistema – with good reason: many teachers and conductors travel from Venezuela to help build the orchestras, a process often simultaneous with providing professional development for Colombian teachers.

Batuta has now established such peak orchestras in three of the four regions. In addition to the permanent ensemble that grew out of the encuentro in Cali, there is also an iconic orchestra forming in the city of Medellin. Cuellar says that because an active “web” of music schools in Medellin involves as many as six thousand children, “there is the potential for a really strong pre-professional orchestra.”  He adds that the professional orchestra in the city is eager to be involved and supportive, recognizing that a vibrant youth ensemble can help them connect with the musical life of the region – and that without making this connection, they may lose audience to the new dynamo down the street.

And then there is the Youth Orchestra of Bogotá, a large and growing ensemble with members aged 13 to 18, led by the exuberant conductor Juan Felipe Molano. We heard this ensemble in rehearsal, and found its collective zeal and musical ambition every bit as astonishing as what we had heard from the national youth orchestra. The Youth Orchestra of Bogotá was about to launch its first international tour, to Berlin and 12 Italian cities, and the young members were clearly spurred to intensify training and rehearsal.  We watched them work long, hard days. We watched them enjoying every step of the way, growing before our eyes into the kind of generous, positive, mutually supportive musical community that is so characteristic of El Sistema in Venezuela.

And we observed that teaching and learning in Colombia, as in Venezuela, often uses playful, positive competition as a way to speed learning.  In a sectional exercise, for example, one half of the violin section may try to outdo the performance of the other half.  The competition never becomes ugly; it is based in the ancient definition of the word: “to strive with” rather than “to strive against.”  It occurred to us that Batuta is using the same playful competitive strategy between regional orchestras, encouraging them to try to outdo one another in order to raise the level of everyone’s accomplishment.

A KEY PRIORITY: MAKING INSTRUMENTS AVAILABLE

“Here in Colombia, we just don’t have enough musical instruments for young people in Batuta,” says Juan Antonio Cuellar.  “It’s very difficult to find them for sale, or even to get them donated.”

Solving this problem is critical, of course, for the large-scale orchestral development that is top priority for Cuellar and Batuta. “This is completely key to our vision of reaching and rescuing children through orchestral involvement,” says Cuellar. “There are many, many kids who want desperately to play instruments, but can’t.” Buying inexpensive instruments from China is not the solution, he says, because quality is unreliable; it is not unusual to place a large order for violins based on appealing samples, and then receive a delivery of violins of far lower quality.

Batuta is therefore entering the instrument-providing business in a major way.  Since it’s prohibitively costly to buy high-end instruments from abroad, Cuellar believes that the way forward is for Batuta students and teachers to develop skills in instrument assembly, maintenance, and repair.  There is support for this initiative from the Ministry of Culture, which has agreed to make Batuta the official instrument provider for all local culture centers funded by the government.

Eventually, Cuellar envisions a potential joint venture with Venezuela that would involve importing pre-made instrument parts and assembling them in South American factories.  (The natural resources and climate in Colombia make local manufacture from scratch impractical.)  In one way or another, he says, he would like young Columbian musicians to begin to see instrument maintenance and provision as a growth industry, with the door wide open for motivated entrepreneurs.

OVERARCHING STRATEGY: BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS

The presence in Colombia of a wide variety of music programs for children has meant that Batuta has developed in a collaborative and inclusive way, often serving as the catalyst for connection and cooperation between organizations.  As many arts and arts education professionals in the U.S. can affirm, getting established organizations to partner deeply and sustainably is a rare accomplishment.  Batuta has proven to be a reliable, eye-on-the-right-prize partner.  As a result, there are 38  organizations formally affiliated with Batuta, and many more such affiliations are expected. “In Colombia,” says Juan Antonio Cuellar, “the ‘Sistema’ is Batuta plus all the programs affiliated with it. We are all building something together.”

“And,” he adds, returning to his theme of teacher development, “we want all Batuta teachers to think this way.” An important goal of teacher training throughout the country is the capacity to build coalitions and partnerships. The ideal is “to build an entire community around the protection of children through music.” Batuta has much to teach consortium builders and stakeholder networks in the U.S. about how to break down institutional “silo” thinking and practice, for the benefit of students.

One very concrete way that the overarching Batuta network plans to serve its constituency is by developing a music library that will be available for use by all members.  The library will include teaching materials, curricula, and repertoire, and extra sets of orchestral parts for the repertoire being played by national and regional youth orchestras.  In this way, the growing network of youth orchestras will feel linked by materials and curricula as well as by pedagogy and mission.

Cuellar tells us the story of a huge donation of dozens of boxes of scores and music books from Boosey and Hawkes – a gift they didn’t seek, but found. Batuta couldn’t afford the shipping expenses. So they found an NGO in the U.S. that specialized in shipping aid to troubled areas of the world, and had the materials sent as “humanitarian aid.” “And that’s exactly what it was,” says Cuellar.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

At the end of the intensive teacher training workshop we attended, there was an opportunity for the Bogotá Batuta teachers and the visiting teachers to pause and share perspectives. There were many touching speeches of appreciation and praise. There were eloquent articulations of an ultimate vision of a teaching community, who can work together regularly to share visions and create standards. “We need to be a grand collective of teachers across the country, who can permanently reflect together,” said Cuellar. We noted how rare it is in music education to witness this emphasis on reflection as a primary teaching and learning tool.

And there was repeated recognition of the excellent progress made by the teenaged Youth Orchestra of Bogotá.  One participant boldly declared that within two years this orchestra could be as good as the iconic national youth orchestra, the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, whose thrilling performance we had all seen the night before.  There was general nodding in support of this ambitious goal.  And then Francisco Díaz rose to say that this orchestra didn’t need two years to achieve it – they could do it in six months!  He said this with the same breath-stopping fervor we had heard from him before. The energy in the room surged. Instantly, they all saw this was possible. And they wanted it.

This kind of unreasonable, infectious hunger for achievement has driven the success of El Sistema in Venezuela. It now grows within the Colombian Sistema. Colombia may have grown in some distinctive ways, and may be funded and organized in unique patterns, but it is definitely a younger sibling from the same gene pool. The boldness with which the impossible is imagined and then realized – the idea of ensemble performance as a crucial medium for developing high musical standards – the joy in musical aspiration and accomplishment, realized in the ideal setting of the orchestra – all these are characteristic of the spirit and vision of Batuta.  They are clearly and closely related to the spirit and vision of Venezuela’s Sistema.

At the heart of Batuta is the same core assumption that guides El Sistema in Venezuela: that musical and social goals are inseparable, and that the lives of impoverished children, families and communities can be changed through the power of ensemble music learning, the joy in musical aspiration and accomplishment, and the presence of great beauty radiating constantly in the daily lives of young people.

For further information about Batuta, please contact:

batuta@fundacionbatuta.org   or adrianamendieta@fundacionbatuta.org

NOTES

1. Eric’s professional development teaching during this trip focused on the “habits of mind” as they relate to a group learning setting and to music.  He introduced them in the interactive, inquiry-based workshop style of U.S. teaching artistry, a style new to Batuta teachers.]

2. Asked to address the members of the national youth orchestra on the last day of their month together, Eric offered remarks that might serve as a kind of summation of the view we found so widespread: “You have become an extraordinary orchestra.  You have the skill, the passion, the communication, and the joy that makes this true.  I see many orchestras with such skill, some with strong passion and communication, and a few with such joy; it is the combination of all these things that gives you the rare opportunity to grow into greatness.  With this opportunity comes the responsibility of greatness, which is to become teachers…teaching artists who can bring others into this learning system, who can raise the level of skill and joy everywhere you go, who dedicate their lives to playing and teaching music – both of them, all the time.  This is the extraordinariness that is within your reach.”

Here’s an excerpt:

What changed me the most [at business school] was the exposure to an endless panoply of other areas of human life beyond contemporary classical music. Sure, I learned about assets and liabilities and how to read a cash flow statement, but I also learned about the auction for 3G wireless ranges, competition between Target and Wal-Mart, why Turkey is an emerging power player in the Middle East, and how colleges and foundations manage their endowments. […]

In the course of this sudden immersion into what the rest of the world thinks about and does on a daily basis, I came to realize that my former existence had been focused like a laser on about 0.00001% of everything that matters. It was like the veil had been lifted on my life: the choices I faced when I voted in an election or needed to buy produce or searched for an apartment to rent or, yes, chose a graduate school had all been determined by somebody, or more often a collection of somebodies acting in somewhat predictable ways. It became clear to me that I was never going to have control over my own destiny unless I had the capacity to see and understand the external forces that were influencing my circumstances. And if that’s true for me, it’s true for you, too. So here are a couple of vignettes from my own journey into the belly of the capitalist beast, which I offer in the hopes of connecting my experiences (and perhaps some of yours) to the bigger picture. After all, we are just variations on a theme.

Read the rest over at NewMusicBox.

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.