June 8-10
Americans for the Arts Convention
Grand Hyatt San Antonio
600 E. Market Street
San Antonio, TX
Info and registration
(I’ll be speaking as part of the session entitled “From Nice to Necessary: Local Arts Funding and Collective Impact” on Saturday the 9th from 11am-12:30pm, along with ArtsWave’s Mary McCullough-Hudson and The Boston Foundation’s Javier Torres.)

June 13-16
Chorus America Conference
Radisson Plaza Hotel Minneapolis
35 South 7th Street
Minneapolis, MN
Info and registration
(I’m moderating a session called “Audience = Participants: The Arts’ Search for Relevance and How Choruses Can Help” from 3:30-4:45pm on Friday the 15th. Alan Brown and Sunil Iyengar will be on the panel with me. This will be my first time moderating a panel since college, I think – let’s see if I’ve gotten any better at it in 10+ years!)

Finally, C4, the collaborative chorus that I founded in 2005, has its final concerts of the season in New York City this week. This edition is a co-presentation with Fireworks Ensemble, an “amplified chamber band,” and features four new pieces ranging from a proggy setting of Victorian poetry to a rock musical Requiem to something that’s perhaps best described as an random word generator on crack. The concerts include our debut at (Le) Poisson Rouge on May 30, though I’ll be singing only in the June 2 performance. More information and tickets are available here.

Sunday, February 26
State of NYC Dance Symposium
Gina Gibney Dance Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY
10am – 5:30pm
More info; event is SOLD OUT
(I’ll be speaking on the “Data on NYC Dance” panel from 11-12:15 about Fractured Atlas’s research on fiscally sponsored dance projects with Carrie Blake.)

Saturday, March 10
“Innovative Strategies in Arts Leadership”
organized by Emerging Leaders of New York Arts and the Pratt Institute Arts & Cultural Management Program
Gina Gibney Dance Center
890 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, NY
6:30 – 8pm, reception to follow
Info here

March 23-25
Arts Enterprise Summit
Claremont Graduate University
160 East 10th Street
Claremont, CA
Info and registration
(I’ll be giving a workshop on “The Well-Informed Arts Professional” from 1:30-2:45pm on Saturday the 24th.)

During this time period, I’ll also be guest lecturing on “Arts, Economics, and Community Development” for Maria Guralnik’s “Making the Case for the Arts” class at Purchase College this coming Monday, and participating in a student colloquium at NYU on the subject of “Social Entrepreneurship in the Arts” on March 30. Unfortunately, those events aren’t open to the public, but wish me luck anyway!

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that C4, the collaborative chorus that I founded in 2005 and rejoined this past fall, isperforming twice next week in New York City. The concert is called “A Loss for Words” and features all music with either no or nontraditional lyrics, all composed within the past 25 years. You can learn more and buy tickets (powered by Fractured Atlas’s artful.ly ticketing system) here.

PS – this post was inspired in part by my recent discovery that a couple of panels that I’ve participated on in yesteryear were recorded and were subsequently posted to the web for public consumption. If you’re curious, here are a few that I didn’t know were available. If I find more, I’ll post them here or create an archive elsewhere on the site.

• “What Makes a Good Arts Leader?” at American University’s Emerging Arts Leaders Symposium, April 3, 2011
• “Defining Impact: Building a Case for Arts Support,” ELNYA Creative Conversation, October 5, 2010

“mirage” by Flickr user Punchup

For a long, long time (as in, literally, months now), I’ve been meaning to respond to an essay by Philadelphia’s Chief Cultural Officer Gary Steuer lamenting what he sees as “the greatest sacrifice arts workers make” – the inability to recapture one’s first, “innocent” experiences of the arts, the ones that presumably convinced the person in question to pursue a life in the arts in the first place. Here’s the crux of his argument, succinctly:

No, I think the more significant – and unique – sacrifice arts workers make is that we lose the capacity for full, innocent and glorious enjoyment of the very art that our passion for drove us to make our life’s work in the first place.  What do I mean by this?  Think about your earliest experiences with the arts, your first encounter with Matisse, or Chuck Close; your first time in the audience for Sondheim, or Verdi; that time you first saw Baryshnikov on stage, or Judith Jamison. Remember that childlike joy – even if you were not a child – that total immersion in the art where the whole world disappeared and you were unaware of time, of the person chewing gum next to you? Now tell, me when was the last time you felt that?  Sure, you are still passionate about the art form or all art forms, you still go to museums, or opera, or theatre, but something has been lost. Admit it.

Culturebot’s Andy Horwitz had more to say here. Gary’s essay drew a strong and enthusiastic response from more than two dozen arts professionals on his own blog and Huffington Post, with much agreement that the arts experiences those individuals were having were by and large uninspiring. Most commenters seemed convinced that this phenomenon was the result of their own position, a casualty of getting so caught up in day-to-day drudgery that they could no longer take a step back and let the art work its magic like it always did before.

Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that at all. I don’t think the problem is with us, or our jobs. I think it’s with the art. Or to put a finer point on it, I think the problem is with our expectations for what art can do for us.

My memories of my earliest experiences with the arts are a bit fuzzy, but I can tell you with certainty that they were not that special or amazing. I recall being taken to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts a couple of times and finding it utterly boring. I had some mild enjoyment of and fondness for The Nutcracker, but otherwise classical music left me cold. During my tween years, my older sister was involved in a few dance performances and a family friend participated in a play or two; I attended them or watched videos, but remember being more confused than inspired.

I didn’t really experience the arts’ magical properties until much later, when I was a senior in high school. I’d had no formal musical training up to that point, although my violin-maker downstairs neighbor did teach me how to read music at the age of 12 when I was looking for cool songs to program into my computer’s internal speaker. But previous music appreciation classes and a lot of singing in the shower had been enough to convince me to try giving music more of a role in my life, at least for that year. So all at once, I enrolled in a music theory AP class, joined the high school Glee Club, and started composing on my own (to the point where I decided to spend my independent senior project – a five-week stretch of no classes during which most students completed an internship – composing and recording a primitive “rock symphony”).

That year completely changed my life. First of all, I loved singing in chorus. Hearing the music come together from the inside, over time, was a totally different experience than listening to the finished product from a seat in the audience. I felt like I gained a much deeper understanding and appreciation of each piece by virtue of so intimately being a part of it than I ever could as a spectator. But even more than that, I loved being a composer. I loved the process of imagining a sonic landscape, articulating it in a common language, working with other people to bring it to life (I found that music was a wonderful vehicle for helping this socially anxious soul make new friends), and most of all, hearing my creation in my own ears, given breath by a community of people who were inspired to share their time and talents with it.

For me, that was magical. But none of it involved being in the audience for anything. It involved doing art: actively involving myself in the creation or production of an arts experience. (Not to say that all of my early experiences with that were magical either. I acted in a school play around the same time and hated it. Why? Because I sucked at acting, that’s why. I enjoyed music in no small part because I was good at it, and part of the magic no doubt lay in self-validation.)

When we limit our discussion of arts experiences to ones in which we participate passively, I imagine that the bar for something “transformative,” something magical, is far higher. It does happen, don’t get me wrong. But how often, really? The first truly transformative live arts experience that I can remember in which I was solely involved as an audience member did not occur until I was 21 years old – long after I’d already decided that the arts were going to play a big role in my life. I was traveling in Europe for a couple of weeks on a summer fellowship, and happened to catch a Japanese guitar-bass-drums trio called Altered States at an experimental record store in Rotterdam. They played a two-hour, 100% improvised set of jazz-rock fusion that was unlike any music I had ever heard before, and I can honestly say it changed my life in profound ways. Some months later, I saw renowned Polish conductor Jan Szyrocki perform with the Szczecin Technical University Choir at Yale in a concert that just blew me away and totally reframed my concept of what was possible in choral music.  Since then, I can report that I’ve had deeply moving or inspiring arts experiences like that as an audience member at a rate of perhaps one every other year. To be sure, that’s a lot more than I experienced during my teenage years – but it’s also only one out of every several dozen events I attend!

I think that the people who had transformative arts experiences as youth of the kind that Gary talks about – where they heard Verdi or saw a Matisse and were hooked right then and there – just got lucky. They were in the right place at the right time and were bringing to the table just the right cocktail of personal background, talent, and curiosity to have a magical moment. I bet if you polled arts professionals more broadly, though, the vast majority would report having their minds first blown by the arts during an active state of engagement. Laura Zabel, now executive director of Springboard for the Arts, just recently wrote a lovely thank-you note to the Tulsa Ballet for visiting her small town in Kansas when she was growing up and getting her hooked on the arts. Not by performing, mind you – though they did that as well – but by welcoming her into their production of the Nutcracker.

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.

(Speaking of which, if you haven’t filled out the survey yet – COUGHprocrastinatorCOUGH – you’re almost out of time. I’m closing this baby down at the end of the day Friday, so if you want your voice heard, you better click this here link now. Nearly 80 people have already chimed in – can we push it past 100?)

OK, back to the music. Way back when I was a senior in college, I composed a piece for our all-night new music marathon concert almost as a lark. It was easy to write and I didn’t think much of it at the time, but in retrospect it marked an important creative turning point for me. It was my first (completed) composition for what was, essentially, a rock ensemble: electric guitar, bass, saxophone, drums, and voice. Rather than a typical linear composition, the piece consisted of measure-long fragments that were to be repeated by each performer according to the performer’s discretion. In this way, it was rather like Terry Riley’s In C (which we also performed later that evening, or to be exact, the following morning as the sun came up), except that each instrument has different material and the “cells” don’t need to be played in order after the first one. Nevertheless, there’s a fairly long list of rules governing what’s played when, resulting in a performance that is similar every time but never the same.

excerpt of Drum Cells (2002-03), guitar part

When I graduated from college and moved to Philadelphia, I ended up falling in with a group of jazz musicians who were part of a collective called Risk Taking Type Music. They had monthly performances at the High Wire Gallery in Old City at which your $6 cover charge included a complimentary beer. I think those concerts are really what kindled my love for underground creative improvisation. They were so informal and friendly and yet the music was so good. Or if was ever not good, at least it was always different. Anyway, at the end of that year, a local band called the Way Blue Bucket joined by a friend of mine on electric bass gave the first public, non-university performance of one of my compositions. I contributed improvised, wordless vocals that were run through a series of effects processors. It was a strange day, as I found out literally as I was on my way to the concert that a very close friend’s father had just passed away suddenly. Nevertheless, it’s still my favorite live performance of this piece. The section starting at around 12:45 or so might be some of the best music I’ve ever created.

When I got to New York the following autumn, I decided to put together my own band, and Drum Cells was the first piece we learned to play. Here we are on our debut album, a second guitar added to the mix. This recording is an amalgamation of two different improvisatory sessions held together by the fast middle section, which required multiple takes.

You can hear the difference; it’s a little more studied this time, with some of the rough edges smoothed out but on the whole more contained. It’s almost like the piece got older with me.

For this Virtual Choir performance, of Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque,” 185 singers recorded videos of themselves singing the parts and sent them in to be visually and sonically mixed into the final product. It’s not surprising to me that Whitacre would be the one to pull this off (though it seems this is actually the second such video; the first was done 8 months ago to the composer’s “Sleep”). I’ve been wanting to write about him for years; maybe someday I’ll finally get around to it. Back when Myspace was a thing, as my friend from high school likes to say, Eric Whitacre had by far the most friends of any “new music” figure around, and the intensity of fan worship on his page was simply mind-boggling to behold.

Anyway, if you can get past the cheesy conductor faces and the 1994-era 3D animation, it’s pretty cool. In fact, the most interesting ramification for me is the potential for composers to use this model to crowdsource demo recordings of their large ensemble or even chamber pieces. All you need is a conductor (yourself?) and perhaps a MIDI recording of part and score, and you could be well on your way.

Given that just getting the piece from the page to the ear in a credible way is one of the biggest challenges for the emerging composer, this could be a game-changer.

For comparison, I also have a recording from the New York premiere at the first Sequenza21 concert, later in 2006. This one is performed by Jeffrey Phillips, violin, and Bill Solomon, marimba. The pinched sounds in the violin part about 45 seconds in are in the score.

Ian has an additional performance by his own “bandsemble,” Oogog, on his website. It’s a bit cleaner than ours, but I’d like to think the drums add something special. I hope he’s able to get a studio recording of it someday. (Note: listen on headphones for the best effect.)

(Reminder: click through to the post if you’re using a feed reader or email and don’t see the sound file.)

Our inaugural flashback track is the first off of the debut album for my experimental rock/jazz/minimalist/metal band, Capital M, which came out in 2005. It’s called “Reinventing the Wheel” and its composition followed a month of pretty intensive study of the score to Steve Reich’s masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians. Throw on some headphones and have a listen!

Here’s your roundup for the week:

• As a reminder for the teabaggers out there, top marginal tax rates were over 90% from 1944 to 1963, including the entire Eisenhower administration. It took the administration of noted small-government advocate Lyndon Johnson to cut them below that level. (For comparison, under Obama’s plan, the top tax rate will rise to 39.6%. Taxes in the aggregate would still be lower than they were under Reagan.)
• The L3C is gaining momentum, having been passed now in Michigan, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, and the Indian Crow Nation.
• Uh oh: IMG Artists Chairman Barrett Wissman is guilty of securities fraud.
• Sean Stannard-Stockton marries my two favorite topics in talking about how philanthropy is like music.
• Here’s a sort of funny video from Network for Good about fundraising.
  

  “Let’s just keep it simple,” responds the donor/girlfriend. “I’m breaking up with you.”

  “I give and I give and I give, and I don’t hear anything from you,” she complains.

  “I sent you a plain-text e-mail receipt. It had your name on it, for God’s sake!” he counters.

  Yup.

• Via Americans for the Arts, the new Serve America Act includes new (paid) service opportunities for artists. Not sure if it’s related, but the Music National Service Initiative, a new social enterprise, is hiring MuiscianCorps Fellows.
• Speaking of AftA, they’ve just released their 2009-11 Strategic Plan and the results of an environmental scan conducted by AMS Planning & Research. (h/t @lisa_hoang)
• Good news? There are expected to be 24,000 management-level nonprofit job openings in 2009, according to a new report from Bridgespan. The bad news? That’s down from 77,000 in 2008.
• Steve Reich finally wins his Pulitzer.
• Two contrasting takes on blogs and profitability from two formerly employed journalists. In one corner, ex-Backstage editor and Createquity reader Leonard Jacobs is profiled in Crain’s New York, sharing his plans to turn the Clyde Fitch Report into a revenue-generating machine. And over there, we have ex-Boston Globe critic Thomas Garvey calling into question whether anything on the internet can be revenue-generating over the long run. The latter essay is a really powerful, challenging critique of much of our received wisdom about the wonderfulness of the information age.
  

  In fact, people are finally beginning to come to terms with the way in which the Internet actually destroys value rather than creates it. Indeed, the web may be the most efficient wealth-destruction machine ever devised. This was always the flip side of its immense efficiencies; the Internet made economic processes far less expensive, true, and cut out middlemen hither, thither and yon; but it also undercut the physical framework that made “value” possible. Indeed, the value of just about anything that wasn’t actually nailed down, like real estate, was quickly affected by the web. Locale, connections, knowledge – much of what made wealth possible at the individual level was attacked or simply replaced by the ever-rising tide of digital connectivity….

  So I ask myself, in this environment, how could the content of my blog have economic value? How could it be sold? It’s true a handful of bloggers, like Perez Hilton or DailyKos, have rocketed to some level of economic success. But they have done so by generating national audiences, and, perhaps more importantly, by intertwining themselves with existing real-world power structures or publicity machines.

  While not disagreeing with Garvey’s excellent points at all, Jacobs is probably in a better position than most to make it happen. Nevertheless, I am inclined to see blogs more as advertising vehicles for other services than as revenue generators in themselves. For more on this, via Seth Godin, here’s a great little pamphlet from blogger Chris Guillebeau on how he achieved overnight success in 279 days.