Playing for Free

November 17th, 2011

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Dear Edna:

I am in my last year of an undergraduate program at a conservatory in the U.S. where I have formed a string quartet with fellow students. We have only been playing together for less than a year but we have hopes to stay together after graduation. Meanwhile, our biggest challenge is to find places to perform. There are churches and even one or two art galleries in the area where we believe we could give concerts but we would not receive a fee. This doesn’t particularly bother us but we have been advised that we should never play for free. Do you agree with this approach?—Michael B.

Dear Michael:

While I understand that whoever advised you wanted to ensure that your group would not be taken for granted, it is common for ensembles who are just starting out to occasionally play for free in order to build up a fan base and gain performing experience. Performing for a public that is not familiar with you, as opposed to school where the audience is composed of friends and teachers, is a valuable and essential experience. You have to give a little extra to connect with such an audience and their reaction will be true and unbiased. These types of concerts provide important opportunities to run through repertoire that you wish to polish and maybe even perform at a competition. Whenever you play a free concert, be sure to ask the venue whether they have a mailing list to whom they might send an announcement of your concert.  You will also want to have a sign in book somewhere near the entrance that encourages members of the audience to join your mailing list by submitting their e-mail address. Should you wish to encourage voluntary donations, you can put a basket and sign next to the book. You might also want to put a sentence in your program to the effect that you are grateful to each member of the audience for coming and should they wish to support your group with a voluntary donation, it would be greatly appreciated. You might accompany this with an invitation to come backstage to meet all of you following the concert. The key point is that playing a free concert doesn’t seem like an imposition when it affords you opportunities to get the name of your quartet known and maybe even to generate some publicity. The venue that is hosting you may have some connections to the press and might be able to get some advance coverage of your upcoming appearance. While this type of performance is unlikely to be reviewed, it is possible that you or the venue know some bloggers who write about arts events and would be willing to come and share their reactions on their blog. If the venue is willing to allow you to make a video of your concert, and assuming you can do so without undertaking a major financial commitment, this could be a real plus, especially if you are lacking any exposure on YouTube. Finally, be sure to take the time to invite any people who might prove useful to you in the future and who will spread the word in the arts community about your group and its potential for a promising future. Once you consider all of these possible benefits to be gained from one concert, playing for free doesn’t seem at all like a compromise.

I would love to have YOUR question! Please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2011

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Do We Take Ourselves Too Seriously?

November 10th, 2011

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

A few nights ago, I attended a musical evening of sorts—not at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center but at Carolines Comedy Club in New York City. Intrigued by the advertisements I heard on radio station WQXR for its Classical Comedy Contest, I bought two tickets, figuring that a lighthearted evening is always welcome. The sizable club was filled to the rafters and the sense of occasion was enhanced by my first glimpse of the judges who included Robert Klein, Deborah Voigt, Peter Schickele and Charles Hamlen. WQXR’s Elliott Forrest, whose idea this was, proved to be a captivating and amusing host and was proud to introduce two members of the late Victor Borge’s family who were in the audience. What followed was a smorgasbord of eight comic acts, all including live music, ranging from a recorder virtuoso playing on five instruments simultaneously to a duo of “cranial percussionists” and a singer, somewhat reminiscent of the great Anna Russell, attempting to sing O Mio Babbino Caro while her pianist kept modulating upwards at regular intervals. The audience loved every minute and the judges even got into the act with their witty reactions. The winner was Igor Lipinski, a gifted pianist who gave a sensitive performance of a Bach fugue while simultaneously reciting the order of a deck of cards which had been shuffled and was visible to the audience, but not to him. My own personal favorite was Gabor Vosteen, the recorder player. With instruments coming out of his mouth and nose simultaneously, he amazed us with perfectly balanced chords and even a section from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, played both musically and flawlessly. I read on his website that he decided to embark on this type of antic when he wanted to form a recorder ensemble and no one wanted to play with him. He studied recorder at the Hochschule for Music and Theater in Hannover, Germany, but wanted to go beyond playing to making an audience laugh. He attended circus school in Budapest and has training as a mime. As someone who regularly talks to students about finding their own unique path, I was delighted to encounter Mr. Vosteen who was one of eight finalists in this competition that attracted eighty applicants.

This delightful evening got me thinking that fun and joy are words not often associated with musical performances. That is truly a shame. At a recent concert on Halloween at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, Brooklyn Rider topped off a substantial and thought-provoking program with an encore, their free-fantasy adaptation of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” dressed in suitable costumes. It was a pleasure seeing artists taking a risk in a serious concert venue and allowing themselves to let their hair down, to the genuine delight of their audience and seemingly, even the New York Times critic. I am not suggesting that artists should engage in comedy routines as part of serious recitals but there are often moments when a witty comment from the stage or an imaginative encore can go a long way to charming an audience and breaking down the barriers that too often exist between performer and listener.  One memorable moment for me was when I first heard Itzhak Perlman introduce a short work by Ferdinand Ries as one of his favorite “Reese’s Pieces.” As much admired for his superb artistry as for his humanity and joyful music making, this universally beloved artist should serve as a reminder that we must be personally engaged with our audiences and not take ourselves quite so seriously.

I would love to have YOUR question! Please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2011

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Dutoit’s Shostakovich in Carnegie and Verizon

November 9th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Lang Lang got the flowers, but a blistering Shostakovich Tenth Symphony dominated the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first Carnegie Hall concert this season under Charles Dutoit (10/25). It’s his fourth and final season as the orchestra’s interim “chief conductor,” between the unfortunate five-year tenure of Christoph Eschenbach and Philly’s music director-designate, the 35-year-old French Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Having conducted the ensemble regularly for three decades now, Dutoit knows how to get the best from these players, as European critics affirmed repeatedly during the ensemble’s summer tour of Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Britain. Some expressed surprise that an orchestra with its financial duress could play so superbly. Perhaps they had taken seriously Gramophone magazine’s ludicrous dismissal of the Philadelphians in its December 2008 rating of “the world’s best orchestras.”

Dutoit has always been at his best in Shostakovich, moving the music along judiciously and avoiding post-Testimony point making. The desolate end of the Tenth’s opening movement can seem interminable, for example, but here the composer’s gravitas registered without dragging. The Swiss conductor was equally adept in the first half’s lovely Fauré Pavane, Op. 50, and the crisp, reduced-forces accompaniment to Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, with Lang Lang a capable soloist. From the viewpoint of one who hears the Philadelphians each year in New York’s Carnegie Hall, Dutoit deserves all possible laurels from the orchestra.

Hearing these musicians under Dutoit on their home turf, as I did 13 months ago, is no less impressive. In a dynamite performance of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony in the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall, the absolute unanimity and tonal resonance of fortissimo Philadelphia pizzicatos was an awesome experience, and the depth and power of the lower strings when they entered in the Shostakovich’s third-movement Allegro was staggering.

What is most important to report, however, is that the acoustics of Verizon Hall now seem worthy of the Fabulous Philadelphians. Yes, this is the same hall that received mixed reviews on its official opening night, ten years ago, on December 16, 2001. Some thought it lacked resonance; others wrote that the sound was coarse. Even acoustician Russell Johnson said in a press conference the day before, “The hall is not ready to open.” The late acoustician’s design philosophy allows a hall’s sound to be “tuned” for varieties of repertoire, and he was at a performance of the Mahler Fifth under Simon Rattle that I attended in Verizon a year later. When I opined that the strings sounded richer, Johnson agreed hesitantly but said there were still improvements to be made.

Shostakovich’s pile-driving opening bars in the Fourth last October made instantly evident that improvements had been made. The winds, brass, and percussion had retained the remarkable clarity and presence I had noted at the hall’s opening night, and the strings were now in proper focus and balance. Moreover, the resonance was quite sufficient to display the famed “Philadelphia Sound,” which the orchestra’s prior home, the deadly dry Academy of Music, could never do.

Verizon Hall deserves a rehearing from all those critics who were negative on opening night.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

11/10 Kaplan Penthouse. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Harbison: Six American Painters for Flute, Violin, Viola, and Cello. Schnittke: Piano Quartet. Kurtág: Hommage á Robert Schumann for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 15d. Penderecki: String Trio. Harbison: Songs America Loves to Sing for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, and Piano (2004).

11/15 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Bernard Haitink; Carter Brey, cello; Cynthia Phelps, viola. R. Strauss: Don Quixote. Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”).  (Also 11/10, 11, 12.)

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Peter’s Principles

November 4th, 2011

by James Jorden

“I’ve almost come to the conclusion that this Mr. Hitler isn’t a Christian,” muses merry murderess Abby Brewster early in the first act of Arsenic and Old Lace, and to tell the truth I’m beginning to think I’m almost as far behind the curve as she was. Recent new productions at the Met suggest strongly that Peter Gelb either doesn’t quite know what he’s doing or else, if he does know, has some wildly inappropriate ideas about what music drama is supposed to be.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Bernstein Recordings Never Die

November 4th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

Leonard Bernstein is one of the few artists whose recordings have continued to sell after his death, and last fall Sony Classical reissued a “limited edition” set of the conductor’s 1950s-70s symphony recordings, most with the New York Philharmonic. But it sold out before I could rehear the CDs, and this write-up has been sitting in my computer awaiting a second run, which is now at hand again to beguile the Christmas gift crowd.

Many of these recordings are my favorites of the works, and those happy with a classy coffee-table presentation need look no further. It’s a beautiful looking design, to be sure, but an utterly impractical fit in a CD collection. The box is LP size and two and a half inches thick. One must lay the box flat and remove the top to get to the CDs. A plastic divider holds four stacks of the 60 CDs, each encased in a cardboard sleeve. Without long fingernails, one must often resort to an implement to pry the bottom-most CD from the holder. For three months while I spot-checked the discs, the box shuttled from room to room in fruitless search for a home. I was tempted to discard the box and file the discs on my conventional CD shelf, but the spine copy is infinitesimal, with titles of the works too dark to be read without klieg lights and a magnifying glass. The 32-page b&w booklet with two adoring tri-lingual tributes to Bernstein and a mixture of familiar and rare photos has no notes on the symphonies; no texts and translations for choral works. Nor is recording info as specific as in earlier CD releases.

Nevertheless, these are Bernstein recordings, and in general I prefer these more spontaneous Columbia/CBS recordings now on Sony Classical to the later, more carefully coiffed Deutsche Grammophon ones, usually with the Vienna Philharmonic, which many see as his “mature” statements. Tempos are broader on DG—sometimes egregiously so—and often preferred by European critics. DG has released most or all of them in smaller, more manageable bargain sets, but the only ones I can recommend unreservedly are the American and Haydn sets, the latter containing an irresistible “Oxford.”

My Sony picks:

Beethoven: Exciting and unpredictable. I prefer Bernstein’s “smaller” symphony performances, especially Nos. 1 and 2, over the uneven-numbered later ones, where he is concerned with making Big Statements. I found the DG remakes cautious and overly refined, an opinion reaffirmed after rehearing the recently reissued CD set.

Bizet: Symphony in C. Less than immaculate ensemble, but what joie de vivre!

Copland: Organ Symphony and Third Symphony. His Copland is indispensable.

Dvořák: Symphony No. 9. An exciting “New World.” Avoid the bloated DG.

Harris: Third Symphony. Also indispensable, as most of his American rep is.

Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 82-88, 93-104. The staff of life. Also available in a handy set of all his Haydn for the label.

Hindemith: Symphony in E-flat. Revivified Hindemith! (Also get his recording with Isaac Stern of the Violin Concerto—gorgeous melodies, sparkling wit, my favorite Stern recording.)

Ives: Symphony No. 2. The height of Ivesian Americana, superb on all counts. Avoid the sleepy DG.

Liszt: A Faust Symphony. Romantic drama with tumultuous conviction.

Mahler: Symphonies Nos. 1-9. Yes, we know that others championed Mahler first, but these are the recordings that brought about the Mahler Boom. Some, such as the Third and Seventh, are still unsurpassed, even by Bernstein.

Nielsen: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 5. Peerless performances of the life-affirming “Sinfonia espansiva” and the profound, wartime Fifth.

Prokofiev: Classical Symphony. The New Yorkers sound downright tipsy in this jolly, Haydnesque interpretation.

Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3. Schumann was in marital bliss when he wrote his “Spring” Symphony, and no one captures the music’s unbounded joy like Bernstein. The “Rhenish” is equally vital.

William Schuman: Symphonies Nos. 3, 5, and 8. The rip-snorting Third is one of the great American symphonies, incomparably rendered here by Schuman’s most galvanic interpreter. Far superior to his DG remake of 25 years later.

Shostakovich: All of Bernstein’s Shostakovich CDs have good points, but the Fifth is one of his half-dozen greatest recordings, taped at Boston’s Symphony Hall on the way home from the Philharmonic’s famous Soviet tour in 1959. For me, it has no competition.

Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1-7. Big, broadly paced, and hyper-emotional—right from the Russian tradition. Numbers 5 and 7, in particular, are immensely powerful.

Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4. A searingly intense interpretation of this explosive 20th-century masterpiece.

 

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The Art of Turning Down Work

November 3rd, 2011

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Dear Edna:

My career is evenly divided between an active performing career and commissions for original compositions. My guiding rule over the years has been to never turn down work, regardless of budget and timeframe, unless it was absolutely impossible to fit it in. This year, however, it became clear that I am more of a perfectionist than I used to be and projects take somewhat more time to come into shape. I need to find a way to space out my workload a little more evenly, which may mean turning down or postponing more projects. And so I wonder – is there a polite way to turn down or postpone work (concerts, commissions, smaller projects) when you’re clearly over-committed during a period, but to do it in such a way so as not to jeopardize the relationship for the future? Are there good battle strategies for this? Thank you so much!  –Caffeine Doolittle

Dear C.D.:

Let me begin by saying that you are the clear frontrunner to date for the “Ask Edna” creative alias competition!

It is truly a pleasure to receive a question from someone who has more professional opportunities than they can handle. Usually, people write to me when they have too few and are wondering about the long-term viability of their career. My answer to you is simple and straightforward. Honesty is the best policy and humility goes a long way. People who are approaching you may not realize how busy you are. You will want to stress from the outset how much their offer means to you and how you wish you could accept it. You might want to give them an idea of the volume and scope of projects with which you are involved without seeming egotistical. You might also mention when you were first approached about those projects so that they can get an idea of how much lead time you might need to fulfill their request in the future. In the case of concert requests, you can explain that you try to plan your season in blocks, with different time periods reserved for different types of concertizing. They will be flattered if you suggest a particular date or time period to them for one season later, explaining that you want to make sure to include them in that season and will use their date as an anchor for a period devoted to similar concert dates. If you already have dates slotted in for that season, give them as many choices as you can. They will appreciate your flexibility. You might also endear yourself to them if you offer to perform for the same fee you were receiving in the current season, even if there should subsequently be an increase in your fee. If the request is of a more substantial nature, such as a new commissioned work, the commissioning party will undoubtedly be appreciative if you set up a timeline with them, beginning with the date by which you think the piece could be ready and then working backwards to set up target dates for discussion of aspects of the work that might need to be addressed. With this kind of approach, there is little chance that you will jeopardize any relationships for the future – quite the contrary. Those wishing to work with you or present you will sense your genuine enthusiasm for collaborating with them and will respect the professionalism and care with which you make commitments and stick to them.

I would love to have YOUR question! Please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2011

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The LSO’s Unforgettable Beethoven and Britten

October 27th, 2011

by Sedgwick Clark

If I never hear another concert I will die a contented music lover, having heard the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform Beethoven’s Missa solemnis under Colin Davis and Britten’s War Requiem under Gianandrea Noseda last weekend. To see Davis, now 84 and in declining health, haltingly ascend the podium to sit and conquer this craggy Mass was almost unbearable. But his musical powers were undiminished in a performance of logical and emotional power from first note to last. It was the slowest Missa I’ve ever heard—over an hour and a half, not counting time between movements—and I hung on every single note.

I was not alone. Lincoln Center’s usually noisy and inattentive audience was utterly rapt until some yahoo shouted bravo before the last note had a chance to settle. For nearly two centuries the Missa has defeated listeners far more comprehending and spiritually inclined than I. One has to work, unlike in the contemporaneous Ninth Symphony, which abounds in engaging melodies.

No praise could be high enough for the conviction and execution of the LSO forces. British reviews for their Proms concert this past summer with Davis were more respectful than laudatory; if accurate, all I can figure is that the performance was a warm-up for this American engagement. Mezzo Sarah Connolly stood out among the vocal soloists. Concertmaster Gordan Nikolitch played the extended “Benedictus” violin solo eloquently. The timpanist’s dynamic use of hard Beethovenian sticks provided ideal punctuation. And Davis? He has always been true to the composer, if at times too reverently. On this evening his leadership was positively humbling. 

The LSO’s performance of Britten’s War Requiem on Sunday afternoon was no less affecting. The composer, a pacificist and apparent non-believer, combined the traditional Latin Requiem Mass and poems written by Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action seven days before the Armistice. Critics have split hairs since the premiere in May 1962, but Britten’s message has never escaped any audience I’ve been a part of.

The work is no stranger to New York. Kurt Masur led heartfelt performances of it twice and recorded it during his 13-year tenure with the Philharmonic; he once said he would program it every season if he could. Robert Shaw gave distinguished performances in Carnegie Hall. My own touchstone has been an emotionally devastating performance by the National Symphony Orchestra under Mstislav Rostropovich at Carnegie in early 1979, with Peter Pears, Galina Vishnevskaya, and John Shirley-Quirk as soloists. The LSO performance under Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda was in that league.

One knew that Noseda meant business when he stood on the podium for nearly a minute until all audience pre-performance rustling had ceased and then brought in the chorus’s “Requiem aeternam” at the threshold of audibility. There were a few more coughs throughout this performance than in the Beethoven, but not many, and at the very end Noseda drew out Britten’s pppp for all it was worth. The audience held its collective breath until he lowered his arms some 20 seconds later. In our day, when silence is intolerable, there is no higher compliment.

The success of the performance was also due, in no small measure, to the vocal forces: the LSO Chorus, again directed by Joseph Cullen; American Boychoir, directed by Fernando Malvar-Ruiz; soprano Sabina Cvilak, tenor Ian Bostridge, and baritone Simon Keenlyside.

Britten might have found it ironic that his War Requiem would be paired so rewardingly with Beethoven, a composer he disparaged. But his music, like Beethoven’s, has always spoken to distinctly human concerns, and the War Requiem may be his most enduring testimony.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

10/27 Carnegie Hall. Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä; Stephen Hough, piano. Tchaikovsky: Voyevoda Overture; Piano Concerto No. 1. Nielsen: Symphony No. 3 (“Sinfonia espansiva”).

10/28 Carnegie Hall. Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer; András Schiff, piano. Schubert: Overture to Die Zauberharfe; Symphony No. 5. Bartók: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3.

10/29 Carnegie Hall. Budapest Festival Orchestra/Iván Fischer; András Schiff, piano. Bartók: Hungarian Peasant Songs; Piano Concerto No. 2

10/30 Metropolitan Opera. Jonas Kaufmann, tenor; Helmut Deutsch. Works by Schumann, Mahler, Duparc, R. Strauss.

11/2 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic; Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble; Collegiate Chorale. Conducted by Michael Riesman. Live performance with film. Glass: Koyaanisqatsi.

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Getting In Front of Presenters

October 27th, 2011

By: Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Dear Edna:

I am a flutist, a soloist and chamber musician.  I am just getting started pursuing performances, after many years playing in an established ensemble.  I have a nice website with good audio and video tracks, but I have found that if I can get a presenter to see me live, it is much more likely to lead to a gig than just sending my materials.  I have been applying to showcase at regional presenter conferences, with only a little bit of success so far.  I was wondering if there are smaller showcasing opportunities. I know of only three:  Ohio (OAPN), North Carolina (NC ArtsMarket) and Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania Presenters). Are there other state-wide organizations that host showcases for touring purposes? Is there a list somewhere of showcase opportunities? My thought is that starting small might be more successful in the long run. Thank you. —Zara

Dear Zara:

My thanks go to you for sending such an interesting question and presenting it so articulately. You are clearly already well informed with regard to this topic. In researching it further, I turned to one of my former colleagues at IMG Artists, Thia Knowlton, who told me about Tennessee Presenters, a consortium that hosts a conference along with ArtsConversation in the off years of North Carolina’s Arts Market, which includes some showcases.  My own Internet explorations did not yield a list of showcase opportunities outside the regional ones with which you are already familiar.  However I learned about numerous arts consortia that I didn’t know exist, in states such as Maine, Montana, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky and Wyoming. Some research on your part might reveal whether they include showcases in their meetings. Some useful websites I discovered include South Arts, North Carolina Presenters and Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour.  There are some organizations that specifically offer showcase opportunities to artists interested in working with young audiences. One such organization is International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), which has an annual conference that includes showcases. The North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, Illinois, hosts SHOWCASE, an event designed to bring performers for young audiences to presenters’ attention.

My research on this topic also extended in a different direction. I have long admired the chamber ensemble, Fifth House, which has done excellent work in building new audiences in and around Chicago and working creatively both from the point of view of programs and chosen performance venues. I spoke with their pianist and Artistic Director, Adam Marks, who suggested an alternate approach to showcases. He agreed with your statement about the effectiveness of getting presenters to see a group perform live but felt that an informal concert in a community venue , or even a “salon concert” in a beautiful home, might provide a more meaningful experience for a presenter than the staged, carefully planned showcase for a homogeneous audience whom an artist may never get to meet, since they are often rushing off to another showcase after the performance. Furthermore, as he put it, “it can be more valuable to give a presenter a glimpse of how you interact with an audience than to put on a show for them.”  He suggested looking for opportunities to perform in cities where you are trying to target and cultivate presenters who might take an interest in you. Often you are on tour and passing through places where you may not have an engagement but where you’d love to come to the attention of local presenters. There are libraries who will pay a modest fee to present serious artists and that fee might be enough to at least cover your expenses. Once you have secured that opportunity, you can invite presenters to see you in a real-life concert, engaging with an audience similar to theirs. Of course, there is no guarantee that they will come but if your website is appealing and informative, your program is interesting and your approach to them is heartfelt and well written, your chances will be enhanced.  I think there is a lot of value in this approach. When I speak to students, I encourage them to look at every place they travel to, for any reason, as an opportunity to make new contacts and build future audiences.  When one thinks about things this way, almost everything becomes a showcase opportunity and one is not forced to depend on organized conferences and presenter meetings.

I would love to have YOUR question! Please write Ask Edna.

© Edna Landau 2011

 

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Final curtain

October 21st, 2011

by Keith Clarke

The Royal College of Music always keeps its music staff busy, but it looks like the lawyers might be earning their keep on its latest offering. Lisbon Contemporary Music Ensemble is visiting with the world premiere of a new one-act opera “based on the real-life events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Khan.”

A press release outlines the plot: “A middle-aged businessman arrives at a hotel run by a concierge who promises to provide him with anything he could possibly desire. Fearing the best years of his life are over – despite a loving wife at home – he finds himself haunted by ghosts of desire and jealousy. Accepting the concierge’s offer, a young maid soon arrives at his suite. However, she later claims she was savagely attacked, while he protests his innocence.”

With fresh allegations swirling around the former International Monetary Fund chief, he will probably be too busy to turn up in South Kensington to judge the artistic merits of the piece.

>>>

If you were going to try and get inner-city teenagers interested in classical music, would you start with a three-hour piece about the crucifixion by a long-dead German? That is the brave plan of Suzi Digby, aka Lady Eatwell, who has launched an enterprising scheme – Vocal Futures – to sign up some 1,500 young ambassadors worldwide and build an online community to spread the word about classical music via Facebook and Twitter. The whole thing kicks off with three performances of the St Matthew Passion in a London bunker designed for testing concrete, launching a project which then goes on to Los Angeles, Cologne, Shanghai and Johannesburg. Read all about it at http://www.vocalfutures.org/

>>>

This completes my tour of duty on the MusicalAmerica blogspot, which I hope has given some kind of idea of the musical world as seen from a London perspective. I shall still be popping up at the sharp end of the site for as long as the editor puts up with me, but from the blogosphere it’s cheerio. As the BBC presenter John Ebdon used to say, “If you have been, thanks for listening.”

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Gateways to Jobs in Arts Administration

October 20th, 2011

by Edna Landau

To ask a question, please write Ask Edna.

Dear Edna:

I hope you won’t mind a slightly different question from those you have been answering so splendidly and thoroughly in your excellent columns, asked by one of your former colleagues and longtime friends. I come from a small town in the United Kingdom. Many decades ago when I was in my teens, I knew that I wanted to work in the international music business but in those days it was impossible to find anyone to advise how to achieve that goal. I therefore decided to apply for a graduate traineeship with the BBC, which I was exceedingly fortunate to get. With that grounding, I was able to move into opera and orchestral management. I now receive requests from a lot of younger people who genuinely want to work in an administrative capacity but have absolutely no idea how to enter the business of arts management. What advice would you give to those wishing to get on the first rung of the ladder, whether that be working in an artists’ management company or a professional performing arts organization? —John Duffus

Dear John:

Great to hear from you and happy to answer such a fundamentally important question to many of our readers. The happy news is that there are probably many more opportunities available to those aspiring to jobs in arts administration than there were when you and I were young. It seems less critical to have participated in an arts administration program if the objective is to secure a position in artist management, than it might be to work in a performance venue or organization such as an orchestra or opera house. There is an extremely gifted and capable young man working at IMG Artists by the name of James Egelhofer, whom we hired while I was working there. He had just graduated from Brown University with an interesting and promising resumé but he obviously had no experience in the field. I could tell after a few minutes of his interview that he would be a star and he went on to manage significant artists while still in his 20’s,  after having learned the trade by servicing a group of artists, observing his co-workers’ activities and asking a lot of terrific questions. IMG Artists is lucky to still have him. In recognition of the indistinct path towards jobs in artist management, a joint venture was recently undertaken by the University of New Orleans, Arts Northwest and the North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents (NAPAMA) to launch a professional certification program for performing arts and managers. Courses are offered online and in person at professional conferences.

The pathway to other arts administration jobs might also consist of working one’s way up the ladder from an entry level position. However, it should be noted that there are some wonderful arts administration programs throughout North America and in Europe as well. Among them is an arts management program offered by Teachers College/Columbia University, whom we are delighted to have as our “Ask Edna” sponsor this month. A comprehensive list of such programs is offered on the website of the Association of Arts Administration Educators. Musical America also offers a list of such programs on its website (available to subscribers) and in their annual directory, which is accessible in many school libraries.

Although you only asked about getting on “the first rung of the ladder,” I would like to add that there are some important programs available to individuals who have already gained experience in the arts management field but who wish to graduate to a more advanced position. These should be treasured in our difficult economic climate. Among them are the League of American Orchestras’ Orchestra Management Fellowship Program and Essentials of Orchestra Management, National Arts Strategies’ executive education and organizational leadership programs, and the Clore Leadership Programme in London. If one were to look at the resumés of those currently holding leaderhip positions in the arts throughout the world, a good number would reflect participation in the excellent arts administration programs mentioned above and on offer throughout the world. I am sure that our readers have information to share on this topic and I hope we will be hearing from you soon!

I would love to have YOUR question! Please write Ask Edna.

©Edna Landau 2011

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