Music lessons
This weekend I was featured in the ongoing Courier-Journal series on lessons learned through work. My interview with Matt Frassica touches on a variety of challenges in the classical music business that have helped form my outlook on conducting and orchestra leadership.
Regarding orchestras:
I think orchestras have sometimes walled themselves off a little bit by saying, “This is what we do, and we don’t do other things.” We don’t have to be quite so self-limiting.
On becoming a conductor and, more essentially, a leader:
When you go through school you learn the mechanics and, hopefully, you learn about the repertoire. But as a conductor you don’t really learn how to be a leader in a larger sense of the word, whether it’s leading a performance or leading an organization. I try to build consensus and to encourage everybody I work with to buy into what we’re doing.
Tumblr shout-out!:
I really admire some of the [tech] companies for the way they do business. I think we could learn a lot from them. I love Tumblr, and I love the way they seem to be very approachable and inclusive and open. They’re very responsive to their users. I feel that orchestras can learn a lot from that.
On symphonic programming:
We do curate a tradition, but have started to realize that even though that’s one important thing we do, we also have to help establish new traditions and open our canon to new voices.
Responding to a living sound:
As a conductor it’s the sound of the orchestra that provides the greatest feedback. I’m searching for the right language or the right gesture that encourages a particular sound from the orchestra, and when the orchestra achieves that sound I immediately run back through all the steps I took to get there and find out what was it I did that helped to facilitate that.
Quote
'There [is] all this buzz on Facebook and Twitter. Audiences just don’t do that with typical orchestra concerts.'
One of my observations about the implications of orchestra collaborations with bands and other contemporary artists, quoted in today’s Cincinnati CityBeat. And as I suggest in the article this is ‘very healthy for orchestras.’
I was interviewed because I lead several of these cross-genre performances each year in Louisville and Cedar Falls [and I guess I’m becoming an authority on the intersection of social media and orchestras too].
Industry rule number 4080
To paraphrase A Tribe Called Quest, classical music industry people are shady. Case in point: I just received this unbelievable response from a classical music agency after I requested the cessation of its unsolicited emails. [It was a manual request, since none of these emails included an unsubscribe option.]
Way to stay classy, Parker Artists! Not to worry – I have many other ways of learning about ‘artists of worth’.
It’s just this type of false entitlement that makes me allergic to these artist reps. Why on earth would any musician entrust a career - not to mention their integrity - to a group like this? [And for the record, I do not use an agent.]
Reblog → Quote
'Work is more fun than fun.'
Noël Coward [via Frank Chimero]
I’m endlessly fortunate that this is true for me too.
Filesharing, remix and … orchestra?
In an interview from last fall with The Rumpus filmmaker Brett Gaylor describes what he took away from his encounter with an anti-piracy lobbying effort by the Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA] during the filming of his ‘open source’ documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto:
This was an industry that was really out of touch with not just what was going on, but actually with its place in the world.
I have found this to be true of my experience with much of the classical music industry as well, and it’s the reason why I post so frequently about our need to embrace what Gaylor explores in his own work [just replace ‘film’ with ‘orchestra performance’ and you’ll see what I mean]:
It’s not piracy I need to be afraid of; it’s obscurity. The problem is not that people are ripping off my film, it’s that nobody’s heard of my film, it’s a tiny little film. And that’s why I was very insistent that my film … be free to travel through networks.
Gaylor bases his entire approach on a fundamental notion of cultural influence which also underlies all of music history – that art springs from conversation with other art. Open sharing of recorded musical product doesn’t seem so dangerous from that perspective, does it?
Go make things
The ‘alt classical’ brouhaha sparked by the piece I linked to in my last post seems, like the term itself, to have generated plenty verbosity of questionable utility. I’m partial to the less-is-more approach to being an contemporary musician, as expressed by composer Dennis DeSantis in a Twitter conversation on this issue:
