• Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale and known to many as “Joan of Art” for her arts advocacy efforts, passed away February 3.
• After April 6, cracking jokes in the UK will become a little easier. A new UK regulation allows for the use of parts of original copyrighted material if used for parody, caricature, or pastiche.
• Over at ARTSblog, Ciara McKeown argues municipalities are commissioning too many permanent public art pieces, and suggests public art programs “generate goals that are not defined as permanent or temporary, but that are about people and experiences.”
• Well, this is one way to make it as a DIY band: Canadian electro-industrial rockers Skinny Puppy have invoiced the Pentagon for $666,000 for the unauthorized use of their music during interrogations at Guantanamo.
• Confused about the ins and outs of all those visual art lawsuits of the past few years? Daniel Grant has a detailed overview over at Hyperallergic.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Geoffrey Canada, the charismatic face of one of the most ambitious and widely watched education and anti-poverty initiatives in the country, is leaving the Harlem Children’s Zone after two decades at its helm. He will be succeeded by Anne Williams-Isom, the organization’s current Chief Operating Officer.
• The William Penn Foundation has found its new leader: Peter J. Degnan, Vice Dean of Finance and Administration at the Wharton School. The foundation’s new structure (his title is “managing director”) will allow him to “focus on aligning interconnected organizational functions, including strategic grantmaking, knowledge-building, and community engagement.”
• Ron Ragin will jump coasts from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to become the first arts program officer for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
• The National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University recently appointed Kate D. Levin, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, as its first fellow. As part of role, Levin will be responsible for raising the center’s visibility and providing input on its research. Levin will continue in her new position with Bloomberg Associates, a consulting firm founded by the former Mayor that advises local governments around the world.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Artist Pension Trust controls some 40,000 works of contemporary art as part of a risk-pooling retirement plan for the artists themselves. As it begins to sell some of them off in its tenth year, dealers express concern about the effect on the market – and others question whether the plan can possibly make money.
• Arts funders, take note: the New York-based F.B. Heron Foundation has ceased requiring its grantees to submit reports, moving instead to a “outside, cooperative data warehouse” to provide real-time information. It’s also transformed its structure and operations to maximally integrate investing with grantmaking. President Clara Miller’s annual letter describes the nuts and bolts of the foundation’s ambition to maximize the social return from every dollar in its corpus.
• Foundation transparency is all the rage this month. It emerged as a major theme in a recent arts funders’ convening on failure hosted by NYC’s The Field. GrantCraft published a new guide with tips for funders interested increasing the transparency of their day to day work. And the new site Inside Philanthropy targets potential grantees with eye-catching headlines (“Find Out How You Can Get $10,000 From the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation”), and offers subscribers insight into individual program officers’ giving preferences. It also exposes staff email directories and allows anonymous Yelp-style reviews.

IN THE FIELD

• The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) has been hard at work drafting new national arts standards for K-12 classrooms. These standards are rad for a number of reasons, most importantly 1) because they are aligned to the Common Core, and 2) they bring us into the 21st century by including media arts as a distinct discipline. A final draft of the standards is up for final public review through February 28; get on over and check them out.
• The New England Foundation for the Arts has launched a new directory mapping artists, “creative businesses” and cultural nonprofits across six states.
• Following an encouraging trend started last year, issues of race and diversity continue to spur conversation, with HowlRound devoting a week of blog posts to asking whether or not “a white person can write, adapt, direct, or perform stories from a different culture or race.” Meanwhile, new studies on how perceptions of an individual’s race change over time underscore race as a social construct.
• Even better than talk, though, is action, and there’s good news on that front: Detroit’s Sphinx Organization and management agency IMG Artists have a budding partnership aimed at creating greater diversity among classical musicians while broadening audiences for classical music. Stay tuned for the first trial run at this summer’s Napa Valley Festival del Sole where the Sphinx Symphony Orchestra will perform.

BIG IDEAS

• We’ve mulled whether computers can generate art, but a related question is whether computer programmers are artists when they dabble in code. A novelist makes an eloquent case that they are.
• Been a while since your last nerdgasm? Read up on social physics, which explores how ideas flow, evolve, and (we hope!) improve within communities — and asks whether “our hyperconnected world may be moving toward a state in which there is too much idea flow.”

RESEARCH CORNER

• Following up on the first-ever official count of the arts’ contribution to the GDP, the NEA has released more detailed estimates for individual industries, including a breakout of performing arts groups by tax-exempt status. (Most of the $526 million added by dance comes from non-profits; most of $407 million from circuses is pure capitalism.)
• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) released a study claiming that, contrary to the insinuations of Republican lawmakers, NEA doesn’t simply represent a “wealth transfer” from poorer to wealthier citizens. Michael Rushton, however, argues that the study doesn’t succeed in the argument because it looks at wealth at the level of the community, preventing firm conclusions about the wealth of individual attendees of NEA-sponsored arts. The comments on Rushton’s article contain a lively methodological debate if you like that sort of thing. In other news, NCAR officially launched its inaugural report (originally reported by Createquity back in December) on the health of U.S. arts and cultural organizations; the event was webcast by HowlRound TV.
• A new study from the College Art Association shows that visual arts professionals – scholars, curators, publishers – don’t understand fair use, and they avoid or abandon projects because of it. The CAA is working toward a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use to assuage the anxiety; such a code proved helpful to documentary filmmakers.
• Anyone who works with schools should carve out a few hours to play with this: DonorsChoose.org, which in 13 years has allowed teachers to raise more than $220 million in funding for their classrooms, is making its 20+ million project records on proposed and successful projects available via a free, interactive data analysis tool.
• Are too many of our research and evaluation efforts in the arts theoretical rather than directly applicable to practice? Nina Simon thinks so, and the comments from Peter Linett, Jay Greene, Carlos Manjarrez and others are worth checking out as well.

The Thinker at the Detroit Institute of Arts – photo by Quick fix

Each year, Createquity offers a list of the top ten arts policy stories of the past twelve months. You can read the previous editions here: 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. The list, like the blog, is focused on the United States, but is not oblivious to news from other parts of the world. I am grateful to Createquity editorial consultant Daniel Reid for contributing the entry on the arts and the GDP.

This year provided us with a mix of hope and stress. While boasting its share of concrete triumphs and failures, such as the launch of several field-building initiatives and the very high-profile flaming out of the venerable New York City Opera, 2013 was most notable for providing us with markers along the path of longer-term trends. With the struggles of the Great Recession largely behind us, arts stakeholders increasingly turned their attention to non-financial matters, planning for the future and seeking to invest wisely. Yet the specter of fear and dysfunction in Washington, DC hung over the arts field to a degree not seen since at least the Bush years, sapping enthusiasm from even the most passionate of government idealists.

10. Changing of the guard at ArtPlace

As noted in last year’s top stories roundup, creative placemaking was cruising for a bruising in 2012. While a number of factors contributed to the backlash against the signature arts policy push of Rocco Landesman’s tenure as NEA Chairman, by many accounts, the brusque style of ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta didn’t help. Under her leadership, ArtPlace – a private-sector collaboration between 13 of the nation’s largest arts funders initiated by Landesman and the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker – came under fire for failing to disclose its funders’ geographic restrictions, missing opportunities to thoughtfully measure creative placemaking’s impact, being cavalier about gentrification and other social justice considerations, and supporting a project that alienated the people it was trying to help. In the midst of all this, Coletta decamped for a VP position at the Knight Foundation in March. Her eventual replacement announced in December, following an interim stint by former William Penn Foundation president Jeremy Nowak, was the NEA’s Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett, who had ingratiated himself with arts stakeholders across the country in his now-former position and earned widespread admiration in the process. Change is in the air at ArtPlace (the organization is moving with Bennett to New York, for one), and many eyes are watching the fledgling creative placemaking standard-bearer as we head into 2014.

9. City Opera bids farewell

Amidst near-death experiences far and wide, New York City Opera is the biggest and most famous U.S. arts institution yet to actually fail as a result of the Great Recession. The once-mighty company, which had visions of a $60 million annual budget as recently as 2008, had drastically scaled down its ambitions following a disastrous season during which it presented no full productions, lost its (brand new) general director, and managed to draw down or lose the majority of its endowment. By the time George Steel took over in 2009, most of the damage had been done, and City Opera could no longer afford its just-renovated home at Lincoln Center. A last-ditch effort to raise $7 million (including a first-of-its-kind-at-this-scale “save the opera” $1 million Kickstarter campaign) fell short, and the organization announced it was beginning bankruptcy proceedings in October.

8. Arts’ impact on GDP gets counted

Advocates at Americans for the Arts, the NEA, and elsewhere have spent years touting the arts’ economic impact, on the theory that legislators and executives will find this argument singularly compelling and respond by taking their fingers off the “defund” button. This year, their case got official recognition from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which calculates GDP. First, in July, the BEA revised its methodology for calculating GDP to include the money businesses spend to develop intellectual property, including artistic work like music and film; this added 3% to our nation’s economy overnight and underlined the economic importance of investment in creative work. Then, in December, the BEA and the NEA jointly released the first-ever official tally of the value the arts add to the U.S. economy, which they will continue to track annually (note that this does not yet take into account the methodological changes announced in July). The total – $500 billion a year, more than the entire tourism sector – impressed some mainstream news outlets and was promptly put through the spin cycle by a few creative-industry advocates, especially in Hollywood. But the bigger surprise was how little excitement the story seemed to generate in arts circles – perhaps because of the report’s bad news about the arts’ post-recession recovery, the fact that commercial fields accounted for the bulk of the value, or the omission of ancillary spending (such as on dinner before the theater) that often figures prominently in more localized economic impact studies.

7. The arts (start to) get serious about diversity

Yeah, yeah, I know. Talk is cheap, and our field has been dithering about multiculturalism, demographic change, and the need to diversify boards, staffs, and audiences for decades. Looking beneath the surface of the blogosphere debates, however, one does get the sense that momentum for action is growing. 2013 was the year of the inaugural SphinxCon, a convening on (racial) diversity in the performing arts spearheaded by a man who was almost the next Chairman of the NEA (more on that below), and the leaders of numerous relevant service organizations showed up to put their views on the record. One of those service organizations, Theatre Communications Group, is now a year into an extensive and very public “diversity and inclusion” initiative and the conversation is bubbling up at other service organizations as well now that financial survival is no longer everyone’s first priority. Meanwhile, Grantmakers in the Arts had its entire board undergo training by the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond, a leading purveyor of anti-racist thought. These are small steps in the grand scheme of things, and diversity is not the same as justice, but one can’t help but be encouraged watching the organizations charged with leading the field begin to walk and not just talk.

6. The arts research field makes halting progress toward field-building

Last year, I got so frustrated with the state of arts research that I blathered on for more than an hour to the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center about all of its problems and how to fix them. Fortunately, it turns out that I’m not alone in seeing the need and opportunity for reform of our field’s research infrastructure. The first and easiest step toward a better future was always going to be a way for people working in this area to communicate more effectively with each other, and May’s launch of the Cultural Research Network goes a long way toward checking that box. This was also the year that the arts began to flirt in a big way with Big Data. We saw the launch of two immense arts data aggregation initiatives, Philadelphia’s CultureBlocks (building off of the work of Social Impact of the Arts Project researchers Mark Stern and Susan Seifert) and Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (aggregating data from the Cultural Data Project, TRG Arts, and elsewhere). A third project, the Harvard-led Initiative for Sustainable Arts in America, is set to launch in Detroit and the Bay Area in 2014. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Cultural Data Project is taking a look in the mirror with a gigantic, year-long strategic planning process that looks like it will result in major changes for the organization and the field. We’ve got a long, long way to go, but the progress we saw in 2013 toward a smarter, more tech-savvy, and more collaborative knowledge management infrastructure in the arts is highly encouraging.

5. The NEA remains Chairless

When Rocco Landesman left his post as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in December 2012, there was no reason to think that the leadership transition would be anything but smooth. Senior deputy Joan Shigekawa, who had long been rumored to be the one running the agency behind the scenes anyway, became the acting head, and a search for a new director began immediately. Yet as the year dragged on, the process became murkier, and at this point no one seems to be sure when the Obama administration (which is in charge of the search) might get around to formally nominating a new leader. Sphinx Organization founder and National Council on the Arts member Aaron Dworkin is the only individual to have publicly confirmed being a candidate for the gig and was widely seen as the frontrunner for the post until he pulled his name from consideration over the summer; he would have been the Endowment’s first black chairman. NEA fans can take heart at least in the fact that they are not alone; the National Endowment for the Humanities has likewise been without an official leader since May.

4. A roller coaster year for the DIA

My goodness, where to begin? The Detroit Institute of Arts has had more ink spilled on it in the last two years, it seems, than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. It was just last August that the DIA was triumphantly celebrating the passage of a millage, or property tax, in three counties providing the institution with ten years of guaranteed operating support, allowing it to build its endowment and place itself on secure footing for the future. But then in July the City of Detroit announced that it was filing for bankruptcy, placing the DIA’s art collection – much of which is owned by the city – in jeopardy. The city’s state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has reportedly asked the DIA to come up with $500 million to help appease creditors and lead Detroit out of the doldrums, which is about how much the auction house Christie’s has assigned to the value of artworks purchased with city funds. The most interesting potential outcome has the city and the DIA entering into a “grand bargain” involving an effort to raise the $500 million from a consortium of local and national funders, including the Kresge and Ford Foundations, and turn the DIA into a private entity, free from city control. Regardless of how this one turns out, it’s an object lesson in the potential pitfalls of direct government involvement in arts institutions.

3. Edward Snowden shows us we’re not as free as we thought

A 30-year-old former government contractor running off with four laptops and goodness knows how many hard drives’ worth of secret intelligence documents made for a compelling news story, but its connection to the arts wasn’t immediately clear. After all, the initial disclosure – that the United States National Security Agency was working with phone companies to collect metadata (information about calls, though not the calls themselves) en masse – seemed like it might be No Big Deal. It’s helpful for our national security apparatus not to have to wait for days to know who’s called whom, they still have to get a warrant to figure out what was actually said, and it’s all cleared by the Congress and our courts. Right? But as more and more revelations from Snowden’s treasure trove have come to light, the creepier this whole thing has gotten, and the more it’s become apparent that virtually nothing we do online is secret from the government. The NSA has intercepted the fiber-optic cables that carry Internet traffic to collect information on activities without the Internet companies even knowing; the agency “repeatedly broke surveillance rules,” and there have already been cases of “willful misconduct” like stalking love interests. Here’s what’s important to keep in mind from an arts perspective: the United States has always prided itself as a country of free expression. One of the most important ways in which that freedom of expression has been possible is that the government has intentionally held back from giving itself the means to control it, letting social norms and the marketplace have influence instead. There may be little reason to think that Uncle Sam would be interested in some random artist’s work today, but imagine a change in administration, another war, and a widespread movement for social change in which artists play a big role, and all of the sudden 2013 might start to look a lot like 1983.

2. Obamacare gets off to a rocky start

For years, advocating for health care reform was a major priority of a number of arts organizations. Once the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, several of those organizations (including the one that I work for) took the opportunity to declare victory and go home. Pretty much no one considers Obamacare to be perfect, but the legislation had been widely praised and its rollout highly anticipated in arts circles because of its promise to better serve freelancers, particularly those with modest incomes (due to the subsidy provided). However, when healthcare.gov couldn’t process enrollments to save its life upon its October launch, it all started to look very, very fragile – particularly the already popularity-challenged individual mandate that is, according to economists, the linchpin to the entire system. It looks like the worst fears about Obamacare’s shaky launch have passed, but not before a small business exchange and the employer mandate were delayed for a year and other concessions were made to mollify angry citizens, many of which are arguably bad policy. Make no mistake, the Affordable Care Act is here to stay – but how much it’ll actually end up improving things is perhaps a bit more in question than it seemed a few months ago.

1. Wait, who elected these guys?

When the dust from the 2012 election cleared and Barack Obama was still president, the Senate was still Democratic, and the House was still Republican, we knew we were in for another two years (and most likely four) of divided government. But I don’t think too many people expected it would get this bad. The hyper-partisan environment, political infighting between conservative and establishment Republicans, petty power struggles between branches of government, and the determination to treat even the smallest difference of opinion as a virtual fight to the death all contributed to one of the least productive Congressional years in recorded history and a 16-day government shutdown that earned the ridicule of the world. As much as this sucked for all of us as citizens, it all but put the kibosh on any dreams of transformative arts policy coming from the Obama administration. With so many urgent national priorities getting in line to be ignored or gamed by a Congress that is far more adept at drafting press releases than passing legislation, maintaining the status quo is about the best that arts advocates can hope for in 2014.

Honorable mention:

• Scandal at the IRS
• Darren Walker lands Ford Foundation’s top gig
• The sequester hits federal arts agencies

Happy 2014 to all!

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.

• Philanthropy News Digest highlights a few examples of non-profit newspaper models around the country.
• Cool story about Lower Manhattan arts organizations banding together to improve their joint situation, to the point of actually sharing audience and financial figures with each other. Well done, and hope it yields results.
• Leonard Jacobs (proprietor of the Clyde Fitch Report) responds to my rant from the other week. I must have made an impression on him, because he says he’s a loyal reader now. (Thanks!)
• Liz Lerman proposes a “job swap to save American capitalism” — have the artists run Wall Street.
• Great story about a new minority-led orchestra in DC aiming for a much more diverse audience than the usual classical music crowd, and from all appearances so far, succeeding.
• A propos of my Disney post from the other day, did you know that the economically optimal term of copyright is 14 years?
• Former New York City Cultural Affairs Commissioner and general arts bigwig Schyler Chapin passed away over the weekend.
• Andy Horwitz of Culturebot posts a manifesto of sorts on arts policy. It’s mainly very good stuff, though I have to disagree with this:
  

  No more M.F.A.s! There is nothing more useless than a Master’s degree in arts administration or an arts administrator who possesses one. Not only does the “book learning” rarely have anything to do with the real world, it creates a peculiar breed of person who feels entitled to respect (and a senior position) without possessing any prior actual experience. Cultural institutions don’t need more MBA-style administrators who are constantly looking for the next best opportunity. Cultural institutions need administrators who are hands-on and capable. More importantly, because of the extraordinarily ephemeral nature of arts + culture, the institutions need the knowledge management which comes from long-term employee retention.

Ignoring for a moment that he seems to conflate MFAs and MBAs (for a second I thought he was advocating getting rid of conservatory drama and painting programs, which is another matter entirely), I will say in defense of my education that I’ve learned a tremendous amount about the world in my two years here at the Yale School of Management, a perspective that would have been, if not impossible, at least very difficult to acquire if I had stayed inside the industry this whole time. I do agree that prior arts experience is something of a prerequisite for senior management jobs in the arts; on that he’ll get no argument from me.