A Question of (Ir)relevance.

Around this time every year, I find myself reviewing the past season with its inevitable peaks and valleys, and try to process it all in some kind of meaningful way. For me it’s very helpful to think over the litany of chamber music concerts, solo dates, and orchestra concerts to try and digest what actually happened from more of a distance. Happily, this year I often find myself mentally replaying some of the high points of our orchestral season here in Milwaukee, the first under our new Music Director Edo de Waart. Clearly the orchestra is at its artistic peak (at least during my time there), and overall morale is pretty high, even with the requisite financial challenges we have in common with so many other orchestras. That’s very unusual in our business these days, as some recent articles have reminded us…

There were a great many inspired performances this year under Mr. de Waart, but that’s only part of the explanation for the generally upbeat atmosphere amongst the majority of the MSO staff and musicians at the end of the season. Along with the great playing (and usually large, enthusiastic audiences), was a feeling of purpose and connection, like we belonged here, and were a really valuable asset to the community. That’s also elusive in the classical world today, and it got me thinking (again) about the overall issue of “relevance” pertaining to classical music and the arts in general.

Just as I was pondering this, several articles popped up examining this very idea. It certainly was on the League‘s mind during its annual conference, as Marc van  Bree discusses here. Drew McManus hopes for a more inclusive structure of the discussion here. Another piece in Louisville was more general, while the New York Times sat down with Michael Kaiser as he winds down his Arts in Crisis tour.

In this discourse the fashionable buzzwords seem to be “change”, “identity”, “relevance”, and “structure”, but it also seems that nobody has any idea how to realistically implement any substantial changes. Now, I’ll acknowledge that most musicians think they can run things better than arts administrators or their marketing department (and often this may be true). But reading these various pieces, I did notice one point missing from all the chatter: the type, level, and degree of change  depends where you are and what you’re doing. One of the reasons this is such a thorny issue for many arts institutions (along with getting away from traditional dogmatic thinking) is that there is no silver bullet strategy for everyone. It takes a great deal of creativity, commitment, and intelligence to figure out what kind of change works best for your institution in your community. It also takes time and money, but even small changes can make a big difference.

In the next post I’ll look closer at how this idea can really be fundamental to the process of changing the basic trajectory of an institution.

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