Join me in #askaconductor on December 8

November 15, 2010 By

A month or two ago, museums and galleries around the world participated in a Twitter event called Ask a Curator. The hash tag #askacurator became a top trending topic on Twitter on the day of the event. I asked some questions myself and was amazed at the speed of response from the Van Gogh Museum.

The event sparked a conversation on Twitter among some classical music people. “Wouldn’t it be cool to do something like that for classical music?” Well, here we are…

Together with Lacey Huszcza, Director of Operations & Promotions at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, I put together an event called #askaconductor. The accompanying Web site suggests that we can expand the event to other musicians throughout the year. Maybe we can have a #askacomposer or #askacellist in the Spring?

So, #askaconductor is the first #askthemusicians Twitter event. On December 8, 2010, conductors from around the world will come together to engage with fans, first-timers and complete strangers. The concept is simple: conductors make some time available to answer questions; Twitter followers ask their burning questions, and the conductors answer the questions. All in one day.

It is an opportunity for orchestras and the conductors that lead them to connect to their community and share their stories, love and passion, one tweet at a time. And it’s an opportunity to have some fun on Twitter and debunk some of those stubborn classical music myths.

Of course, there are challenges. How many conductors can we sign up? The event requires a little bit more commitment from classical music organizations than say Marcia Adair’s tremendously successful #operaplot event. That’s why we didn’t set any rules for committing time; half an hour would be great, half a day would be even better.

We also reached out to many orchestras to see if their music directors or other resident conductors, or perhaps guest conductors that happened to be in town, would be interested in participating. It’s a great way to promote an orchestra’s Twitter presence and go beyond the cut-and-paste news release headlines streaming from many accounts.

The success of the #askaconductor event will depend on the participation from both orchestras and conductors, as well as the audience asking questions. We’ve already gotten some great responses and we’ll be updating the line up as we confirm conductors. The League of American Orchestras and the Association of California Symphony Orchestras have pledged their support in promoting the event. Bloggers can use these handy banners. It promises to be an exciting event!

If you’re a conductor, or an arts manager that might know a conductor, and you want to play; sign up on the Web site. Or e-mail Lacey or me at info (at) askthemusicians.com.

If you’re on Twitter and have always wondered how a conductor picks the music, or what exactly it means swinging a baton in front of a hundred musicians, save your questions for December 8.

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Golden Ages and Unsustainability

August 17, 2010 By

There was a minor storm in the classical music blogosphere in the last two weeks or so. What started it was Heather Mac Donald’s article Classical Music’s New Golden Age and Greg Sandow’s massive, blunt, multiple post response, which was then again countered by Mac Donald.

Mac Donald claims classical music has entered a new golden age and her central thesis is basically this:

It is indisputable that classical-music lovers have never enjoyed such an abundance of great music, performed at levels of consummate artistry.

Indeed, this is indisputable. There are some good arguments to back up her thesis too, and she lists some of them: more orchestras now than in 1937; more and higher quality recordings; more and higher quality musicians through conservatories.

By all means, it looks like Mac Donald is right. However, as Michael Bruce writes in one of the comments underneath one of Sandow’s posts: “Golden ages, by definition, do not last.”

And that’s perhaps Sandow’s central thesis: the classical music environment, such as it is, is unsustainable.

At the onset of writing this article, I thought I was going to stand somewhere in the middle. No golden age, but rather strike the golden mean between Mac Donald and Sandow. But then I realized they’re both arguing quite different things.

Mac Donald argues that sheer quality and quantity of performances must mean we’re in a golden age and Sandow argues that audience trends indicate that the current structure is not sustainable. So Mac Donald is arguing from the viewpoint of performances, whereas Sandow is arguing from the standpoint of audiences.

And that’s precisely why this matter is such a delicate issue. In business everything revolves around the customer (the audience); however, in the arts, things really revolve around the product (the performance). But of course, this doesn’t preclude the need for an audience in the arts (otherwise, what’s the point), and more specifically an audience that can sustain the art.

So where Mac Donald argues that the product is experiencing a golden age, Sandow argues that the audience for the product is declining. These two are mutually exclusive if you take a snapshot in time: one is an observation in a specific moment in time; the other is a trend over time and a prediction for the future. So it’s only when you start looking into the future, you see that the two will affect each other. This qualitative and quantitative golden age of classical music cannot be sustained if the audience keeps declining.

So, the fact that there are now more orchestras than in 1937 is a good thing in Mac Donald’s snapshot view, but it is not necessarily a good thing for long term sustainability considering the audience that can sustain this number of orchestras is trending downwards.

I’ve compared the classical music dilemma to print media many times. Despite the availability of an abundance of great journalism, written at levels of consummate literacy, one would hardly call this the golden age for print journalism. There really is an uncanny comparison in many aspects. The big difference, however, is that print media had considerably less time to react to the external environment that made it irrelevant (i.e. the Internet).

  • Growth of news organizations: organizations became bigger, more complex, more expensive, and harder to manage and sustain. These organizations could not react to the changing external environment fast enough.
  • Number of organizations: up until the recent quick crash-and-burn of print media, the number of magazines and newspapers was growing. This fragmentation looked good for the industry on the surface—more journalism, more niche journalism—but paired with a decline in audience, you are faced with less and less costumers for more and more news.
  • Number of students: what about the number of journalism students enrolled in college? Surely, this says something about the level of training and preparation for the journalistic workforce. The number of students is steadily rising, despite the industry caving. This means quality goes up, but sustainability of this quality goes down.

So what’s happening next?

  • Deprofessionalization: journalism, like classical music, will never die. But what are the trends we have seen in journalism? Citizen journalism and blogs. These are a thread to the quality of journalism (and the quantity of quality); when there is no money to support journalism, you cannot expect the same level of reporting.
  • New business models: on the other hand, there will be a handful of journalists and publishers finding new ways to sustain professional journalism.

At the core, print media, or classical music, if you will, serves the community and will always serve the community. It just won’t go away. Their original missions and purposes are still relevant and true. Who am I to define art, or to define classical music? Who am I to dictate how orchestras should bring classical music to communities?

Curt Long, in a guest post for Adaptistration, wrote a fantastic article inspired by this year’s “Orchestra Revolution” discussion at the League’s conference: Changes In The Model…Do We Need Revolution Or Evolution? He ends with:

On balance, I would suggest that

      1) in many ways the traditional model focuses on the right things, and that
      2) there are still basic building blocks which an orchestra can implement which will help to address those things effectively, but that
      3) the environment in which we operate has become sufficiently dynamic and complicated that we should abandon the idea that there is any “simple” model which captures what an orchestra needs to do to thrive, and that
      4) every community is different, and every orchestra needs to make its case for community support within the context of the resources, aspirations, and priorities of its own community.

I think this perfectly echoes what I’ve been writing: that orchestras need a structure that facilitates a purpose defined by those who use it.

So although I won’t argue against calling this a golden age for the quality and quantity of classical music performances, we must realize that, golden age or not, classical music in its massiveness and complexity cannot be sustained into the future by a declining audience.

We have more time to react than those unfortunates in print media, but react we must. Not through revolution, but through building a good structure that will facilitate a purpose specific for each unique organization.

Classical music organizations of the future will be simple: they will be a catalyst for musicians to come together and make music for the community. Just as they’ve always been at their core. But on the way to this simplification, there will likely be casualties, big and small. On the other hand, new organizations, capitalizing on the changes in the external environment, will sprout and become successful. Such is the world.

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On purpose, change, structure and relevance

June 22, 2010 By

An interesting question from the League of American Orchestra, which had its annual conference just last week. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, but that doesn’t preclude me from chiming in (I did here, here and here). In addition, the opening session was broadcasted and recorded. Find it here.

The question was “what is the most important question to discuss?” and the audience, both on- and offline was to pick from the following options:

Purpose: What makes an orchestra matter in the 21st century?

Change: If we “let go of the past” and “embrace the future,” what should we retain, release, and go for?

Structure: How should an orchestra be structured, organized, and behave to be successful?

Relevance: What does the artistically vibrant orchestra need to look like to be essential for its community?

Relevance won by a mile, followed by purpose, change and lastly structure. Those first three questions, to me, indicate that orchestras, or at least their managers, don’t quite know what they are. Ian David Moss at Createquity writes: “My sense is that the orchestra field is facing something of an existential crisis right now. Why else would it so openly welcome questions of its relevance to audiences and communities in the 21st century?”

Are we really in some kind of existential crisis? I’m not so sure. Each arts organization, each orchestra is of course unique, but they all have a broad purpose in common: art. In whatever shape or form and to be determined by more creative types. And artistic vibrancy creates relevancy. Sure, change is needed to let go of the past and embrace the future, but we’ve been talking about this for years and we’ve seen some answers: engagement. Ben Cameron, in his key note address, talked about a market less defined by consumption, but more and more by participation.

To me, it all boils down to the question: How are you going to change, how are you going to be relevant, how are you going to fulfill your purpose without the necessary structure?

Jesse Rosen, president of the League, in an online conversation with Doug McLennan, seemed to agree: “I couldn’t help but notice the lowest scoring question […] was the question about structure. […] It may be one of the elephants in the room, because it is one of the harder problems to solve.”

Although it’s perhaps something that can’t be discussed in snippets of 140 characters, on Twitter, I received some push back. Ian David Moss wrote in response to my tweet that the purpose is art: “Whenever anyone pushed the ‘what is the purpose of the orchestra’ or ‘what excites you,’ nobody took bait.” Conductor Stephen Brown wrote: “how do we know what structure is necessary?” and “an orchestra with a great structure will still die if it supports an irrelevant ‘experience/product.’”

My problem with discussions about purpose, relevance is that they are too abstract to facilitate real change. And purpose and relevance do not come in a one-size-fits-all package. What the field needs is a real, hands-on discussion about how to facilitate change and how to practically prepare for the future. The field needs a new structure in a new environment.

In this changing environment the structure would need to follow a couple of rules:

* Creativity nowadays means setting up a framework in which creativity can happen
Ben Cameron suggested in his key note that an orchestra’s role is maybe “an orchestration of social interaction.” Jesse Rosen even questioned “are we more about reenactment than creation?” Creativity not just stems from the organization anymore. The structure needs to provide a framework of resources for creativity and allow and set the stage for people, inside or outside, to become creators.

* The structure needs an organizational culture that supports it
As Joseph Jaffe writes in Flip the Funnel: “…without cultural buy-in, organizational resource allocation, system integration, and best practices are like a transplanted organ rejected by its host body.” In an older book, Strategy: Core Concepts, the authors explain how a mismatch in culture and strategy occurs. I wrote about that in an earlier blog post on organizational culture and change. I have also used the very same book to look at a decentralized organization versus a centralized organization. And for the Orchestra R/Evolution blog, I wrote about Google’s 20%-time rule, which is one idea to allow creativity to come back into the organizational culture.

In short, the new structure needs to reflect the new environment. The often heard words transparency, authenticity and sincerity are not just buzz words. Eric Booth mentioned that “anytime you engage workers in conversation about their work, productivity goes up.”

The purpose is art; vibrant art breeds relevancy; the change that’s needed is engagement; now let’s build the structure to support it.

* Update: there has been more discussion on the topic. Find it here:
Drew McManus | Adaptistration | Look Before You Leap
Stephen P Brown’s Blog | An Orchestra’s Relevance Isn’t Relevant?
Andrew Adler | Louisville Courier-Journal | Orchestra Leaders Only Talk of Change

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