Well I have returned from Spokane, WA a bit older and wiser for the experience. There was plenty that happened so I will have ample fodder for posting. Unfortunately, the amount of work left undone while I was away may keep me from my posting. We shall see.
Let me first start by saying Spokane is a lovely city is walk around, especially near the convention center which is right on the edge of a park where Expo 1974 occurred. The conference itself was well organized and there were some procedures that had been adopted that went over very well with the membership–but more about that in a later entry.
I ended up learning quite a bit, but I was concerned that wouldn’t be so when the conference first started (and not just because of my articles on useless meetings, part 2 here). The keynote speaker was Gunther Schuller who has had a long career as a musician and has certainly shown his love and stamina for his craft (he apparently would play in an orchestra for an opera and then walk into a jazz club to continue playing into the night.) However, in my estimation, he really has no concept about what it takes to run an arts organization.
I was really rather angry at the conference coordinators for picking him and had to resist an outburst at various times during the week when I came in contact with them. (I will avail myself of the feedback forms they provided, however, and probably won’t be any more diplomatic than I will be here.)
It was probably the worst example of many of the things I have railed against the arts community over in prior posts.
His whole speech was about how great the good old days were. He didn’t say anything I didn’t know 20 years ago. He cited the miniscule proportion the NEA budget has to the entire federal budget. He spoke of low listenership and programming of classic music on radio stations and lauded NPR for having the courage to play the music. Pop music and network television are the enemies leading to illiteracy and the destruction of culture. It is a terrible thing, he says that Hootie and the Blowfish get to be on the talk shows and Beethoven is no where to be seen. It was all doom and gloom and really just very old news.
It all may be absolutely true, but nothing he said acknowledged the fact that this was the environment in which arts organizations operate today and then try to offer practical solutions that reflect this fact. His suggested solution was sandwich booking where you put a lesser known show between two popular shows. Again, this is a really old strategy that doesn’t reflect how people currently make decisions to buy tickets.
I momentarily thought I might be wrong about this being an old strategy when he started lauding the great success the Boston and Philadelphia symphonies had with this strategy–until he got around to mentioning that he was talking about men who were running the organizations in 1939! His criteria for what constituted good popular music with which to sandwich the new stuff was even more telling when he discounted the value of most of Vivaldi in an aside. In my mind, if someone isn’t comfortable or familiar with classical music, that composer’s “Four Seasons” is probably a good introduction.
The only suggestion he made that I felt had merit was that the creators of a work (composers/playwrights), the purchasers and presenters, and the performers of works communicate with each other more effectively about how to combat the apathy about the arts. He didn’t give any examples other than those I mentioned, but as a general concept it seems to have merit.
On the whole though, I was really annoyed by the talk. I am going to suggest some alternative speakers for next year (Douglas McLennan would have been perfect this year given that he is about a 45 minute flight away from Spokane). In my mind, a keynote speaker should set the stage for discussion throughout the conference–even if it is arguments. The only discussion that came out of this session was akin to churchgoers musing about why sinners didn’t see the light and come to church and congratulating one another for taking their children to Sunday school. As much as I may dislike most organized religions, to properly employ this metaphor I have to say–there wasn’t any discussion about effectively witnessing and converting the great unwashed. (The problem being that the speaker essentially derided the great unwashed for their entertainment habits.)