Orchestras improve with more performances not more rehearsals! The act of being at your best happens at the point of contact with an audience. The challenge is:
How do we perform more with expenses rising and budgets stagnating?
Simple, if you have good musicians, TRUST THEM and don’t rehearse them to death! In fact by cutting rehearsals an orchestra can become better and fast!!…..
It’s hard to find an orchestra north of Edmonton. This is a city where around this time of year the sun seems to come up at 10 am, set by 2 pm, and never get over about 3 degrees off of the horizon. The nearest city is Calgary, some 4 hours away by car, and just try to a reasonable or convenient flight up there. But the Star of the North is the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, the small but mighty ensemble that plays 100 concerts a year for the Edmonton community. Here’s some news……………..
In the Springfield Symphony there are some musicians who have tremendous initiative when it comes to community outreach and education. One of them presented a proposal to the board last season to help fund a String Trio for a trip to our sister city in Japan as part of of a cultural exchange. It was a great proposal that already had funding attached. The board approved the funding, the trip happened and it was big success. In the background from some other musicians however there were some jealous rumblings. Not anymore…….
So, we’re stuck in the 19th century. You know it and I know it. Classical musicians are one of only two subspecies of Homo Sapien Sapien who still wear tailcoats. Innovations such as video screens, subtitles, mood lighting, etc., find it hard to be accepted in the concert hall. So we need new ways of taking advantage of the technology now available to us.
In my first post, Out of the Shadows, I mentioned that the musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony out of all the major orchestras I keep track of, truly demonstrate and care about the audience connection. Here are two instances of how they turned seemingly hopeless challenges into opportunities. Plus, the first in the series of “On the Go”, what people in the business are listening to right now…..
The question of the day – how do you satisfy an audience that ranges from 12 to 80? That is what I pondered last Thursday, 15 November, and it’s taken me this long to write about it. I’m going to tell you what happened, but I’m not going to let on how we did it until the end of the post. So there………….
This week I want to focus on the idea that challenges can become an opportunities if we don’t let ourselves be defeated. An orchestra or any arts group for that matter faces so many obstacles to becoming relevant to their community. One would think that when the local paper suddenly cuts the arts section, that it would be easy to cry “that’s it, we’re done”. Here, the paper did this recently, but instead of commiserating we are celebrating!