Bootstrap Conducting

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Continuing on with the theme of young artists forging places for themselves, I was recently reading about a young conductor, Alondra de la Parra and couldn’t help being impressed. The interview I read was in the Arts Presenters’ magazine, Inside Arts. I don’t know what the general consensus of her abilities is in the orchestra world, but that hardly prevents her bootstrapping efforts from being inspirational to other young artists and administrators.

Apparently the transitional moment in her career came when the Mexican consulate asked her to put on a concert and she ended up as a one person “manager, press agent, producer, presenter, fund raiser and conductor” for the event. She describes the experience as a nightmare and had decided to go back to school. However, so many people saw the event as a success and told her she had to continue on. That is how she ended up founding the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas which describes its mission as “a laboratory for artistic expression, embracing our responsibility to support promising young performers, composers, instrumentalists, conductors and all kind of diverse artists from Latin America and beyond.”

Watch the video here to learn more about their philosophy and the way they are involving school children in composing music for the orchestra.

One of the benefits of having had gone through that initial trial by fire is that Alondra feels “it makes me relate to almost every person that goes into a symphony orchestra, from the PR director, to the stagehands to the librarian.” Reading Adaptistration all these years, this is apparently a rare quality among musical directors. She says as much in detail in a 2008 NYT article. (2nd page, 3rd column)

At the end of the Inside Arts piece, she is asked what she would like presenters to know about orchestras. She makes the oft mentioned points about demystifying the music so that people don’t feel they need to know every detail about the piece and the composer–and of course the appropriate time to clap–to enjoy the performance. At the end she comments, (my emphasis) “When you go to a rock concert, nobody is going to ask you do you know who the band is and do you really know their first album in ’82. Nobody cares as long as you yell and jump and enjoy it. The next time, you’ll know the song. You’ll sing the song.”

I would like to think that there is a chance for orchestras if more leaders like her start emerging. There is a lot of excitement surrounding Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic. El Sistema has come to the US and will perhaps manage to transform the lives of young people here as it has in Venezula. (Is it my imagination, or does Latin America seem poised to save classical music?)

As I read about the Honolulu Symphony facing bankruptcy, and the problems other orchestras are facing it seems that the excitement generating can come none to soon.

“Creativity Is Time-Consuming”

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Last week I received an email from a Patricia Martin who was apparently trying to spread the word about a survey of American Life and Culture she had recently released. I get a lot of these emails but don’t often feel the subject is relevant to my blog. This time it was. What I liked about the survey results is that they are written to convince people to involve culture in their business whether it be in regard to employees, part of their customer relations or both. The format is easy and quick to read and every page has a “take away” for that section in the margins.

Since I had been reading about the feeling that the youngest generation of arts professionals didn’t have a good work ethic in the Americans for the Arts leadership salon, I was encouraged to read the following and hoped the methodology of their survey made it true.

“We found some 60-year-old bloggers held the same opinions as 24-year-old poets: they are willing to work hard in their creative endeavors. Content creators say they spend a lot of their time producing and spreading their creative expressions. They don’t spend time gaming online.This may be because creating original content is demanding—as is mastering and maintaining a social network online. Creativity is time-consuming. The time demands of a creative life, no matter what age a person is, require allegiance to one’s art.”

Other sections talk about this group valuing education and living within one’s means. I understand that there are always going to be at least some people who match these descriptions. I am hoping the percentage of those embracing these philosophies is high. I look around and it doesn’t seem it is so. We hear all about how young people are using social media technologies to spread the word about their passions, but I haven’t seen it yet. Or rather, I haven’t seen it done effectively.

The cast of the show going up in two weeks has Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages set up for the show. I have been keeping an eye on them and except for the Youtube page, none of them are very well developed. This isn’t a case of their approach not appealing to me. This is a matter of there not being even the most basic content on the pages to make people interested in the performances. The twitter page more or less says “going to rehearsal tonight” over and over again. They are handing out flyers with all the social media page addresses on them but there is nothing there to see. My hope is they are actually handing out the flyers we printed up with information about the show along with them.

It is said that very few people create online content and the majority consume it. I suspect that just like everything else in life, there is only a small percentage of those producing who have the capacity to create something worthwhile. The idealism of the millions exercising their creative powers doesn’t hold up to reality because a lot of them are playing video games rather than investing the time to hone their skills.

Perhaps I haven’t come across those dedicated to becoming effective because they are off working on getting better.

Talkin’ Bout Emerging Leaders

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Okay special double blog post today. Since my other entry was dealing with education and arts people following their passion, I felt I needed to call attention to the Emerging Leader conversation that has been transpiring in a special blogging salon on Americans for the Arts website. It started October 16 and just finished today.

There are a lot of great entries on the blog, including ones that question the definition of Emerging Leader in terms of age and experience. American’s for the Arts defines Emerging Leader as “either new to the field, with up to five years of experience, or are 35 years of age or younger.”

Ian Moss’ post on Generation Y and Entitlement garnered a long series of comments and is worth reading if have any young people working for you or ever plan to. Other participants add to the conversation like Ruby Classen’s entries on why jobbing hopping by a younger generation seeking a broader skillset can be viewed as lack of loyalty by long time arts leaders.

What was also interesting was reading that a number of veteran arts leaders were contacting people involved with organizing Emerging Leaders at Americans for the Arts and 20UNDER40 who saw these efforts as a storm the Bastille and kill the old folks.

Just as great to read the rebuttals from the veteran leaders too both as entries and comments. It shows that people from many stages in their careers are aware of these issues and engaged in these conversations.

It was also a little disconcerting to learn that because of the internal politics of some organizations, people who wanted to participate felt they had to remain silent.

People share their stories about lack of confidence they have had about their career choices and direction. This includes difficulties in finding jobs in the first place, of course. As many entries as I have linked to, it ain’t near all of them. If you have any interest in arts administration at all, bookmark the site and resolve to spend a couple minutes everyday reading a few entries until you have gotten to them all.

J-Schoolers Now With The Rest of Us Doing It For Love

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Crunchy Conservative Rod Dreher, an editor for the Dallas Morning News, ponders the fate of J-school students suggesting they had better be in it for the love.

“Can you imagine going into debt and devoting two years of your life to earning an advanced degree in a field in which you have very little chance of earning a living? I mentioned this to my wife, who, like me, holds an undergraduate journalism degree. “Can you believe people are actually going to journalism school anymore?” I said. She responded, “You and I, when we were that age, would have been completely romantic about it, and wouldn’t have listened to older people who told us there would be no jobs for us.'”

Hmm, sounds like some other industry I know of. What was it again?

He goes on to talk about writing a grad school recommendation for a young journalist he knows.

“And yet, I warned him not to go to journalism grad school, because of the job market, to no avail. He’s got passion, and he’s got hope. I can recommend him to these schools with great confidence in his ability to do the work required of him. He will emerge an even more capable journalist than he already is. Any magazine or newspaper would be lucky to have this guy working for them. If only potential paid the bills! Sigh.”

Ha ha! Finally we get our revenge on those two bit critics who panned our shows! Now they shall be brought low and learn how it feels to ply your craft out of pure love of doing it and have people who have little understanding of their work tell everyone it stinks!

Actually, that sounds a lot like what playwrights and novelists go through. In reality, journalists are really just talented writers who found a format for expression that would pay them regularly for exercising their art. Unfortunately, it seems that time has passed and what was an exception looks to join the rule of the arts and humanities where there are a lot of hard working and talented practitioners and few notable successes that everyone believes they can become.