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ROI of Classical Music Training

September 17, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Over on The Baffler, Kate Wagner, takes a look at the tenuous state in which classically trained musicians operate in the face of income threatening conditions like the lock-out/strike currently occurring at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

I came across the link on Arts and Letter Daily which introduced it with, “Classical music is a high-water mark for culture. Being a classical musician, however, is a job — a crappy job.”

Reading Wagner’s account, I would have to agree. In addition to the cost of formal training with private instructors, universities and conservatories, she also lists the myriad other costs involved including summer intensives, festivals, competitions, internships, memberships, certifications and the choice of buying or renting instruments.

Last week Drew McManus pointed out the rising cost of strings his wife buys and analyzed the lifetime cost of maintaining a string instrument. His broader analysis of instrument costs, with nifty infographics, is worth a look. It is something to whip out when people say musicians shouldn’t be paid to do something they love.

Wagner had initially trained to be a violinist and she expresses some bitterness upon realizing that the ability to access the brand name training experiences that will provide access to the next tier of prestigious training was out reach of her family’s finances. She expresses anger at being encouraged onward and further into debt by teachers who knew that the path to an orchestra didn’t lay through the training she received.

One composer who currently works as an adjunct professor at a small Midwestern college decried classical music’s entrenched reputational economy. “I feel like we’re witnessing the development . . . of a two-tiered system,” he said, “with musicians who went to non-famous and poorly endowed schools on the bottom, with musicians who went to the Ivy Leagues of music on top…. What’s more, he argued, this uneven system of class and reputational privilege leads to more and more exploitation:

There’s a very strong sense of identity shame for a lot of musicians who went to non-famous schools, who got perfectly wonderful educations, but who didn’t have the grace of some famous asshole to notarize their work. Basically, it creates opportunities for exploitation. Students are told to go to these famous places to get a good degree. They live beyond their means . . . they open themselves up to labor, sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, depending on which monster they’re assigned to work with.

She mentions another colleague teaching middle school in Texas who has felt her opportunities have been limited because she doesn’t have the resources to gain the imprimatur accorded by participation in Drum Corps International competitions and workshops.

She notes that in this environment, it is pretty difficult to bring greater diversity to the industry, even with scholarships facilitating the process, due to the high debt one will accrue and low wages pretty much everyone will receive upon securing a performance position.

She ends the piece with a bit of solidarity for the striking musicians.

Sure, I may have been a failure in classical music, but as my colleagues and comrades schlep their instruments around in substitute gigs from orchestra to orchestra, unable to get a full-time job, teaching their students, paying off their debts with poverty wages from performing or adjuncting, and walking the picket line, the least I can do is write about it.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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Tell Your Tales of Advocacy

September 16, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

Question for readers- Have you ever attended an arts advocacy day at your state capital or Washington, DC?

Actually, for those readers outside the US, I would be interested in hearing about your experience as well.

I recently attended a meeting where the topic of arts advocacy day attendance came up and the experiences people related were something of a mixed bag.

I realized that while I have often been to meetings where people have been encouraged to participate in an advocacy day, I have seldom heard people discuss their perceptions of the efficacy of those experiences. This seems strange given that I have heard/read plenty of people’s thoughts on the good, bad and ugly of attending conferences.

In terms of good experiences, one person at the meeting I attended talked about participating in arts advocacy activities organized in Washington DC by Americans for the Arts where there was a type of advocacy boot camp one night and then visits to legislators the next day. Even in those meetings that were only attended by a staffer, there was a feeling of things being accomplished.

In terms of experiences that felt less than productive, people talked about attending events where no one of significance attended and no office visits had been organized. Another spoke of events that were a lot of exciting pageantry, but didn’t feel like they did anything to move the needle in a positive way.

One person brought up a situation that I hadn’t considered. Because their state arts council is organized under an economic development division, the contribution of arts and culture alone wasn’t touted separately from hotels, sports and gambling during their state’s big event.

It all made me curious about other people’s experiences collectively advocating for arts and culture at a seat of government on defined day(s).

Who does it well and why? Who could do it better?

If I get some good responses, maybe I will turn it into an ArtsHacker.com post (or arrange for someone to make a guest post.)

Advocacy

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Fine Line Between Collaboration And Exploitation

September 11, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

There was an interesting article in The Atlantic this past July about how the Navy was working on crewing ships with a few generalists who would handle many jobs rather than many experts focusing on a narrower range of functions.

At first, when they were talking about everyone being cross-trained to fill a number of different functions, I started thinking it was a good example for a post about eliminating siloed job functions in arts organizations. Basically the idea that everyone has some role in promoting shows, interacting with audiences and donors, etc., rather operating as if these things were solely marketing, front of house and development department jobs.

But as I looked at some of the examples they were providing, I realized there was a pretty thin line between eliminating silos and trying to get fewer employees to juggle more responsibility.

The article mentions Zappos

…famously did away with job titles a few years back, employees are encouraged to take on multiple roles by joining “circles” that tackle different responsibilities.

Which sounded to me like an attempt to cross-train people and eliminate silos. But in the same paragraph used the example of SkyWest airlines:

…looking for “cross utilized agents” capable of ticketing, marshaling and servicing aircraft, and handling luggage.

Which sounds more like trying to hire one person to do four jobs. Granted, Zappos may be doing the exact same thing and just found better framing language to describe it.

This is not to say there isn’t some validity for this to increasingly become a model for employment in the future, whether it feels collaborative or exploitative. The article notes that automation is causing the list of what skills are important for future employees to acquire to be revised at increasingly shorter intervals.

Testing conducted by the Navy seemed to indicate that people who were able to quickly notice a change in situation and re-prioritize tasks were better suited for their plan to crew ships with generalists than people who contentiously completed their tasks.

This group, Hambrick found, was high in “conscientiousness”—a trait that’s normally an overwhelming predictor of positive job performance. We like conscientious people because they can be trusted to show up early, double-check the math, fill the gap in the presentation, … What struck Hambrick as counterintuitive and interesting was that conscientiousness here seemed to correlate with poor performance.

[…]

The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.” To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.

High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future? If that’s the case, some important implications would arise.

The concept that short attention spans and lack of follow through are a winning combination for employability may depress a lot of readers. You may be interested to learn that quite a bit of stuff broke down on Navy ships that were crewed in this manner, requiring repairs by civilian contractors or adding about 20 people to the ship crews.

However, this doesn’t mean that the idea is unworkable. There is a good chance the concept will become viable with a revised design of the ship operating environments and crew training.

What is interesting about the article is that it presents adaptability and contentiousness as complementary skillsets, at least for the moment. Which is good because our mental capacity to juggle distinct streams of information and make decisions diminishes as we age.

Business Models, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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We Love Our Shows, And It Shows

September 10, 2019

by:

Joe Patti

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about American Theatre’s reporting in May on a Wallace Foundation supported audience building effort at Opera Theatre St. Louis. American Theatre just published another piece about a different Wallace Foundation supported effort at Portland Center Stage (PCS).

As I wrote in my earlier post, one of the things I value about these Wallace case studies is that they discuss all the unexpected outcomes, both successes and failures.

Among the insights that caught my attention was PCS’s realization that in order to achieve their goal of diversifying their audience, they should target by age rather than some definition of diversity. .

“But it became clearer and clearer to me that we should target age.” At the time, in 2013, Portland had seen a huge influx of transplants between the ages of 25 and 45, and this population was now the most diverse age group in the city. Targeting them, Fuhrman reasoned, was a way to kill two birds with one stone, “tapping the most diverse population of the city while focusing on the age group.”

Most of the efforts discussed in the article are those focused on connecting with this age group. In surveying 25-45 year old current and lapsed audience members as well as non-attendees whom they identified as being inclined to attend, they collected some good information about where and how to advertise shows.

They also made an effort to provide all sorts of pre- and post-show events in an effort to enhance attendee experience in every possible way. Managing Director Cynthia Fuhrman says, “The theory was that the value add would deepen people’s commitment to return.”

However, they ended up discovering that less is more.

But interestingly, feedback from the focus groups actually led PCS to reduce the number of engagement programs in the grant’s second year. “We thought we had to do something every night,” says Furhman, which proved “exhausting on staff. But when we pulled back on programming, the numbers actually went up. It was deeper engagement. Quality of the program was more important than quantity.”

Another discovery they made that ran counter to their expectations was that people didn’t necessarily want to see stories set in the Northwest or written by playwrights in the region, despite the fact these were the best attended shows.

Interestingly, market research from the Wallace Foundation grant found that audiences in Portland were in fact not inherently more interested in plays set in the Northwest or written by Northwest playwrights, despite the fact they brought in larger audiences. Results like this, that disconfirm expectations, call for critical analysis. PCS hypothesized that perhaps the greater turnout had to do with better marketing, which might reflect their own internal investment in these shows more than audiences’ enthusiasm, but there is as yet no solid conclusion about why they outperformed.

Personally, I would credit internal investment in an event as being a stronger factor in the success of shows than we imagine it is. Which is not to say that shows we really adore won’t be flops. The subject matter may not resonate with the community at large or we may speak of the event in terms that aren’t relevant to people outside our profession.

On the other hand, I am sure we can all identify events that suffered due to our lack of enthusiasm or succeeded despite our worst efforts. Love isn’t the only ingredient in the success of a show, but advocacy sounds a lot more organic when there is authentic enthusiasm behind it.

The fate of PCS’s loyalty program provides something of a lesson about making sure technology will be compatible before investing a lot of time and money into development and implementation.

PCS hired a web developer to create an online loyalty portal which would allow members to earn rewards by attending shows and interacting with PCS online. But, while its launch attracted 3,500 sign-ups, PCS recently put the portal on hiatus, as the program did not integrate with the ticketing platform Tessitura. Because the loyalty app and the database couldn’t talk to each other, it became unwieldy for audience members to use and staff to manage. Fuhrman and the portal developers still hope that integration might be possible in the future.

As I have written before, I really appreciate the fact that the Wallace Foundation provided grantees with the funding and permission to try things out and make mistakes that provide valuable insights to both the grantees and the rest of the arts and culture community.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts, Working In The Arts

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