State of the Arts

Leadership Training and Discussion Moves Forward

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If you have seen Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser on his Arts in Crisis tour or read any of his writings on the matter of arts leadership training, you will know that he feels not enough is being done to teach people about how to do the job well. On occasion, I have also opined that arts leaders don’t talk to each other enough about the challenges we face and the processes we employ in pursuit of our jobs and goals.

It seems like that is starting to change now. In addition to the Emerging Leadership Institute program Arts Presenters runs, they have decided to partner with Research Center for Leadership in Action (RCLA) at NYU on a program for mid-career arts professionals with an eye toward grooming them for senior leadership positions. The Leadership Development Institute is accepting applications right now in fact. The deadline is April 19. The pilot phase of the program will employ “two series of collaborative inquiry sessions, virtual webinars, online resources and one-day action-learning seminars.”

Over at Americans for the Arts’ ARTSblog some interesting perspectives on leadership in the arts are emerging from the various contributors. Just today there was a post by Joanna Chin listing all the general arguments for the value of the arts that she could think of: “Arts = Arts; Arts = Humanity; Arts = Health/Quality of Life; Arts = Civic Engagement and Social Change; Arts = Economic Vitality; Arts = Creativity/Innovation = Growth/Vitality; Arts = Cultural Tourism = Economic Vitality; Arts = Jobs & Industry; Arts = Shared Benefit.” She expands briefly on each of these areas and wonders if this is an exhaustive list. If you can think of others, visit the entry and contribute your thoughts.

Marc Vogl offered a clever analogy of “What a Seder Can Teach Us about Arts Leadership”

“Those in leadership positions especially carry the burden of executing the plan of record which, as many E.D.s will attest, means putting out the fire that’s blazing now or shifting the pots on the stove around so that none boils over today.

So, who is responsible for periodically stepping in and asking the elemental but critical questions?

Perhaps it should be those on top of the organizational structure – whether administratively or in governance positions at the board level – but frequently those are the people who must answer the questions.

In the Seder it’s the kids who sing out to the elders: why are we doing things the way we’re doing things?

And it is for everyone around the table to respond, and hopefully, to reflect for a moment on the history that informs that response, to consider the present circumstances and how times have changed, and maybe even to look ahead and determine what we can do going forward so that we don’t spend another year going through rote motions and taking important things (like freedom in the case of Passover, or making art that has meaning for those of us in this field) for granted.”

Shannon Daut who is Deputy Director at the Western States Arts Federation and has a broad perspective on how the arts are developing regionally and I would imagine nationally, talks about the lack of leadership opportunities for younger administrators because those on the executive level continue to circulate between the available positions.

“I recently had a conversation with WESTAF’s director, Anthony Radich, and asked him what his resume looked like when he was my age—35. He rattled off a list of ED positions at various arts organizations. I think his experience is pretty typical. Because the arts field was so young, experienced arts administrators were not available to fill open positions. They made it up as they went along and were entrusted with great organizational responsibilities at early stages in their careers.

For the most part, today’s emerging (and mid-career) administrators have not been able to benefit from an environment that would take risks on “unproven” job candidates. “

Finally, Letitia Fernandez Ivins, addresses the all important issue of balancing work and personal life in an industry where it has always been expected that one suffers for ones art. Her entry primarily deals with the impact of pregnancy on a career in the arts. However, the general topic is clearly an important one. There are many comments on the entry already. One woman expresses her relief upon learning so many other people are facing the same choices.

Actually, I shouldn’t say finally regarding Letitia’s post. There have been more than 20 entries on the subject of leadership since Monday. These are just the handful that resonated with me most today. I should mention that Americans for the Arts have their own Emerging Leader Network from which I assume the drew many of these contributions. I am pleased to see such great movement in leadership training and discussion happening right now. It wasn’t that long ago that I was mentioning the lack of such activity. I didn’t think this much progress would be made in a few short years.

Dance Baby, Dance

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While there has been increasing doubts raised about the benefits to intelligence and development from exposing children to Mozart and other classical music in the womb and as infants, a new study suggests that humans may be predisposed to dancing. In the experiments conducted, infants started moving spontaneously to the beat of different musical genres. (Beat rather than melody seemed to be most important.) The babies smiles more often when they were able to synchronize their movements with the music.

I guess the kids on American Bandstand instinctively knew what mattered when they declared a song had a great beat and they could dance to it.

This study just confirmed what I already suspected. Both my nephews jiggled and wiggled to music since before they could crawl and bounced and bopped around as soon as they could get to their feet. A friend’s son went to Chinese New Year celebration in February. While he was frightened by the Lion Dancers, he was apparently entranced by the dance itself because he kept watching YouTube videos. Then he would stand out on the porch and bounce up and down and simulate the drum beat with his voice. His father bought him a little lion costume and drum. Now whenever I am over, he grabs the costume and drum and does a dance for us. Actually, judging from the state of the poor costume, he dances more frequently than when I am around.

What I would really love is if someone does a study which finds out if kids who continue spontaneous dance type movements throughout their first five years end up with better coordination and lower body strength. Actually, I imagine there might be benefits to discerning spatial relationships and cognition as well that could be studied.

My ulterior motive is to motivate parents to no only have their kids listen to music, but also provide them freedom and encouragement to get up and move. I figure an environment that gives kids permission to even informally participate in another form of creative expression is good for the arts in the long run.

Goin’ Mobile With The Orchestra

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I was driving home a week ago when I heard an interview on the radio with a couple talking about founding the Orchestra of the Hawaiian Islands. (MP3 download) Now given that the Honolulu Symphony has just declared bankruptcy after years of financial struggles, this elicited a “say what?” moment for me.

It turns out this is a program of American Music Festivals, a once Chicago and now I guess Hawaii based organization. The organization was founded in Chicago and created project based ensembles to perform cultural exchange concerts in Russia and Eastern Europe in addition to the Chicago area. Apparently this was accomplished by contracting freelance Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians.

American Music Festivals is run by a husband and wife, artistic director and executive director team. When she was offered a job at a school on the Big Island of Hawaii, they moved their operations to that state. Their intention is to utilize Honolulu Symphony musicians to increase the size of their projects from their current 12 piece string ensemble up to full symphony size.

They aren’t looking to replace the Honolulu Symphony at all. If the symphony is revitalized, they envision themselves complementing its outreach efforts. Much of their interest is in local and international outreach. Their plan is to institute cultural exchanges with Japan and perhaps other Asian countries. They hope to bring Hawaiian music to Japan and add the music to their existing exchanges in Eastern Europe.

What interested me about the interview was the concept of how technology, transportation and communications allows endeavors like this to be so mobile. Where they live seems to have little bearing on whether they can accomplish their goals.

Of course, part of this is due to the fact their organization has no fixed orchestra. When asked whether he might one day want to establish an orchestra with regular salaried members, Artistic Director Philip Simmons said, “Why would I want to do that though? Why would I want to create all those problems for myself?” The organization focuses on project driven events which provides them with the flexibility to do different things with a variety of groups locally and worldwide.

Simmons suggests that maybe the old models and formulas for a concert experience aren’t working anymore. He doesn’t say his structure is necessarily the new way, but offers it as an alternative.

Given that the Honolulu Symphony has talked about operating with a much reduced ensemble, perhaps a collaboration between them and the Orchestra of the Hawaiian Islands (OHI) can bring enough funding together to assemble the numbers the Honolulu Symphony had performing for them in the past. They wouldn’t necessarily be competing for the same funding pot. The OHI is serving an area of the state the Honolulu Symphony once did but really hasn’t had the funding to do so in recent past. OHI may be able to gain funding from people interested in supporting local performances.

The History of (Not) Clapping

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The Guardian reprinted an excerpt from a talk Alex Ross recently gave at the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS). Full text can be found on the RPS website. The subject of Ross’ talk was the history of applause suppression in classical music.

There are some amusing anecdotes like Wagner being hissed at for applauding his Parsifal. But for the most part it is a tale of the gradual socialization of people away from their impulses and how this conflicted state manifests. Ross notes the very week an interview appeared in which Arthur Rubenstein said “It’s barbaric to tell people it is uncivilized to applaud something you like,” Rubenstein hushed an audience who started clapping after the first movements of Mozart concertos.

The history of how these attitudes developed over time is actually really interesting. I was intrigued by Ross’ citation of how “the entry for “applause” in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910-11) observes: “The reverential spirit which abolished applause in church has tended to spread to the theatre and the concert-room, largely under the influence of the quasi-religious atmosphere of the Wagner performances at Baireuth.” Perhaps this is another reason religion and theater have so many similarities.

Ultimately, I would prefer to be in that place one often is when reading history where you wonder at the strange practices of your forebearers, rather than wondering how the practice has endured so long. Though Ross says there has always been resistance:

“In 1927, a letter to the New York Times mocked the practice: “See, I not only have my big orchestra well in hand, but I can also, by a mere gesture, control a manifold larger audience!” The composer and commentator Daniel Gregory Mason sardonically wrote, “After the Funeral March of the Eroica, someone suggested, Mr. Stokowski might at least have pressed a button to inform the audience by (noiseless) illuminated sign: ‘You may now cross the other leg.’”

Of course, Ross acknowledges that absence of sound is as important to some musical compositions as the music is. He notes Beethoven’s Ninth needs silence prior to beginning to create the required atmosphere. But early on in his speech, he submits that not all compositions have the same needs. Some works hint at and even demand applause of the audience.

“Indeed, in my view, the chief limitation of the classical ritual is its prescriptive quality; it supposes that all great works of music are essentially the same, that they can be placed upon a pedestal of a certain shape. What I would like to see is a more flexible approach, so that the nature of the work itself dictates the nature of the presentation—and, by extension, the nature of the response.”

Ross offers many suggestions about what is to be done, but it is his last paragraph that really caught me (my emphasis)

“I dream of the concert hall becoming a more vital, unpredictable environment, fully in thrall to the composers who mapped our musical landscapes and the performers who populate them. The great paradox of modern musical life, whether in the classical or pop arena, is that we both worship our idols and, in a way, straitjacket them. We consign them to cruelly specific roles: a certain rock band is expected to loosen us up, a certain composer is expected to ennoble us. Ah, Mozart; yeah, rock and roll. But what if a rock band wants to make us think and a composer wants to make us dance? Music should be a place where our expectations are shattered.”

When I read this last week, I intended to make this my Monday entry. However, upon seeing the Kenny Endo performance I described yesterday, I knew I had to talk about that experience as a prelude to this entry.

I thought about all the 10,000+ hours of practice rule that Endo and Semba had adhered to in order to attain their current level of mastery. I was thinking that Semba’s kabuki debut at 10 years old really wasn’t too much different than the route many symphony musicians have taken. They start working on their instruments as children and have thousands of hours under their belts by adulthood. And their reward is being straitjacketed into the role that Ross describes here.

Perhaps it is just a stereotype of Japanese culture that I am operating under. But I imagine Semba’s father might have been very concerned about his son possibly abandoning or at least not living up to the quality expected of the family that founded a famous music school when he began to seriously pursue playing Western music. Obviously, the son earned his master’s license, (Semba is his name achieved upon mastery, his real name is Takahashi), but part of me wonders if the father was always as accepting as the son says he was. Regardless, he is having a ball exhibiting his mastery in both classical and contemporary musical forms on two different sets of percussion instruments.

I have, however, been around enough to know that musicians are bound by expectations as strong as those I am, perhaps incorrectly, attributing to Semba’s family. I have heard stories of guys who would play with an orchestra then walk out the back door and do a club gig. How many bass students today are advised to spend the summers playing jazz or blues so that they build a deep base of alternative techniques and how to improvise over the years? And how many of them are told if they don’t practice or attend a summer conservatory they will never be good enough to get a spot playing music that even Presidents of the United States need to have clapping coaches to attend?

My experience this weekend got me thinking. If we are going to start kids on the 10,000 step path to mastery, they should be able to wow people in the broadest spectrum of music possible. Part of this is selfish on my part because I really think a lot of the pop music today stinks to high heaven. There are only so many orchestra slots available and I have read that the margin of difference between the person who gets in and those that don’t is pretty slim. I figure if those that don’t make it can play other genres of music, they will supplant a good portion of the flash in the pan acts we got these days and even the music for the lowest common denominator won’t be half bad.