Holly Mulcahy

You can’t live in our society without coming across the buzzword sustainability. It has been used to sell everything from green energy to organic farming. The point of sustainability is to keep practices and strategies that meet society’s present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

So every so often when I open my mail and find a plea for money from the conservatory I graduated from, I don’t hesitate tossing the forms and expensive invites directly into the trash. Why? They are not helping to create a sustainable future for musicians. As a matter of fact, most university music programs I’m aware of have the same problem.

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My love of quality food and animal rights is no secret. Neither is my love of awesome marketing for classical music. So when I came across the Dortmund Concert Hall’s commercial claiming that playing classical music for cows produced more milk and that milk helped ticket sales for classical music, I was instantly intrigued.

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To continue where we left off in Part 1, I want to take a look at what it means to invest in an orchestra from the perspective of a donor, volunteer, and employee. Using my aunt’s guidelines for investing (she was a major co-owner in Kinko’s before it went public) you should adopt a simple criteria that is not dissimilar from deciding to buy stock in a company. She put this together with me to help me decide whether to uproot to a new orchestra job or keep the current one I had. This is what she came up with.

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Several years ago, I won a position in an orchestra that was closer to my family. While the job was a slightly better paying job which had a longer concert season and many other pluses than the job I had at the time, I hesitated. My aunt, who lived in this city and was a very successful businesswoman, was trying to help me decide whether to uproot and move or keep my current position and continue auditioning for work elsewhere. Her advice came in the form of a question:

“If you could, would you buy shares of stock in this orchestra?”

At the time, this seemed like an unusual approach for making a decision. She continued with more details.

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A couple of months ago I wrote a bit about how so many professional musicians’ bios tend to be boring and predictable. Apparently, I’m not alone as a number of readers sent private emails summing up people’s opinions on the topic.

So in a very informal fashion, I’d like to take a few of these observations and create a “list of sins”:

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