Orchestras in our time and place: the League of
American Orchestras’ conference, Seattle,
2014
League of American Orchestra conferences
are inspirational affairs. It’s not just the wealth of sessions or the chance
to hear orchestras and ensembles you might not otherwise hear; it’s the chance
to run into colleagues, including former employees of Australian orchestras who
now work, say, in Atlanta or Dallas. Mostly, it’s those moments sitting in
crowded auditoria pinching yourself and saying, ‘I never realised the world of
orchestral music is this big!’
This year’s conference took
place in Seattle where, according to Seattle Symphony Chair Leslie Chihuly,
‘Boeing engineers helped define air travel, Amazon and Microsoft have changed
the way we use technology, and Starbucks has popularised coffee culture’
(although Australian coffee connoisseurs probably won’t get overly-excited by
that last boast). Seattle is also legendary for being rainy with 226 cloudy
days per year (the dark green of a well-watered Pacific Northwestern forest
landscape is refreshing when you arrive from arid Southern California), but in
the three days of conference I attended, we experienced brilliant sunshine. From
the top of the Needle the city looked stunning with its volcano, Mt Rainier, seemingly
sitting in the clouds off to the right of the skyline.
Conference themes in the
years I’ve attended have hovered around the rumours of classical music’s
imminent death or inevitable decline. There is often an emphasis on the
importance of innovation.
Clearly, classical music has
issues to face, but I’ve never been convinced that innovation is a value in
itself. The Minneapolis conference three years
ago didn’t answer this question for me, but Seattle started to drill down. Perhaps the
conference title helped: Critical
Questions, Countless Solutions. One of the speakers, Alan Brown of the San
Francisco-headquartered management consultancy WolfBrown, summarised some of
the challenges orchestras now face:
... music is now a visual experience for those who grew up
with music videos and now YouTube. With the migration of consumption from
physical media to streaming audio, we’ve witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of choice....Downloading
music and making playlists is by far the
dominant modality of music participation in the US. And billions of people
worldwide have grown accustomed to listening to music in random order, with an
algorithm as their DJ....thankfully, people are still showing up for live
concerts…
Of course, the rise of Asia
is another significant new feature in the classical music landscape and Seattle was the perfect
conference venue to consider Asian as well as indigenous ‘outreach’ (even if
that’s a word the Seattle Symphony has actually banished in favour of ‘partnership’
and ‘collaboration’). League president Jesse Rosen recalled Boeing’s Ron
Woodward observing in 1996 ‘that America
once looked from its eastern seaboard across the Atlantic to Europe
for its connection to commerce, to culture, and to heritage. But today... America looks from the shores of the Pacific,
with its independent and innovative spirit, to face towards Asia.’
Seattle now has one of the largest Asian
communities in America
with significant populations of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Japanese,
Indians and Cambodians. And Seattle
has a highly visible indigenous population. During the conference, we got to
hear an extract from the ‘Potlatch’ Symphony, a collaboration between the
Seattle Symphony and the local Duwamish people.
The tone for the conference
was set at the outset in the keynote address by virtuoso flautist and founder
of ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble), Claire Chase. Having started
her talk with a rivetting performance of Varèse’s Density 21.5, she spoke of Varèse’s observation that ‘possible
musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals’ and therefore
of the need to spark the ‘fire’ to tell different kinds of stories. To a large
extent, Chase’s address was an exhortation to create new economies, collaborative
models and definitions of community by which ensembles could ‘pulsate’ with
music’s life. When she started out in the world of commissioning and staging
new works with an ensemble of 15 Oberlin classmates there was, she said, no
decision that wasn’t creative ‘whether it was about marketing, fundraising,
budgeting, education, production, outreach, where to put the chairs at the
concert, or how to get people on and off stage between pieces...’ She reminded
us that everything we in the orchestral world are engaged with, is storytelling
- marketing, education, community building, ‘natural outgrowths of a burning
need...to make music for people and tell them stories.’
But does Chase’s brand of
guerilla music-making suit orchestras? Perhaps ICE can be ‘part 21st century
orchestra, rock band, circus troupe, startup’ but what about an ensemble of 100
people whose most rewarding repertoire, for audience and players alike, has not
been significantly increased in the past 50 years?
The conference’s final
speaker Alan Brown noted the gulf between Claire’s call to ‘“widen the space of
our imagination” with the realities of the conversations I’m hearing in breakout
sessions and in the hallways’ and the 2014 conference had the regular panels on
fund-raising and management (what perhaps might be called bread-and-butter
issues). But even here, the dominant theme, if there was one, was how to create
freer structures. Boards on Fire,
presented by a Seattle-based consultant on NGOs Susan Howlett
(http://susanhowlett.com/), offered useful ideas on how to inspire trustees ‘to
raise money joyfully’ by finding time to get into meatier, more ‘generative’
issues, rather than be stuck, as usually happens, between strategic and
fiduciary agenda items. New Habits for
New Times involved discussion of ways to allow decisions and ideas to
percolate up throughout an organisation, although as an Australian it surprised
me that the concept of Friday evening office-wide drinks came as something of a
novelty.
Perhaps the session I was
most looking forward to, given the theme and location of the conference (and my
own concerns), was Collaborating with
Asian Communities. After all Australia
doesn’t just look across the Pacific to Asia,
it’s in the region.
Only 20 or so people were
there to benefit from the advice of a panel including Seattle-based composer
Byron Au Yong; Pankaj Nath, vice president/relationship manager for JP Morgan
Chase, and Mayumi Tsutakawa, manager of grants to organisations for the
Washington State Arts Commission. What was clear though was that those who
attended had pondered long and hard the best way to collaborate. They agreed
that what must be found is ‘true collaboration’, in the words of another
panel-member Kelly Dylla (vice president of education and community engagement
for the Seattle Symphony), but as an audience member said, it was ‘way harder
than anything I’d imagined.’ Practical advice included making sure your board
represents the population make-up of your city. Byron Au Yong also advised
people to be realistic. His opera, Stuck
Elevator was about people from Guangxi Province
in China,
‘but they won’t be the audience. They work 24/7. It’ll be their children.’ On
the plus side, a couple of attendees noted that ‘there are a lot of people who
get involved in music to remind them of home’.
I guess it’s understandable
that only 20 people attended the session. Such collaborations have not yet
produced repertoire that’s guaranteed to reward listeners and players who are
used to the narrative richness of Mahler or Shostakovich or Brahms.
But that wouldn’t be any reason
to give up the quest. The important thing, surely, is to make sure these
collaborations are not one-offs and that orchestras continue to draw on everything
that influences classical music in the world at this time. If there was any
single take-away from this conference it might be that orchestras must continue
to strive, in the words of Jesse Rosen, to ‘be the orchestra of and for your
community, in this time, and in your place’.
The word “orchestra,” in
ancient Greece,’
said Claire Chase, ‘meant “a dancing place.”
What if orchestras of the
21st century could revisit this most ancient part of their stories and be,
literally, an open space? A place where change is the norm, where even the permanent collection - what we call our canon - is questioned, argued, retold? A place that commissions twice as much new music as it repeats? And reaches twice as many schoolchildren as it reaches patrons? Or a place where the sphere of context, the very notion of public, is constantly widening? A place where the radical reimagining of how and for whom art gets made, is a daily practice?
I don’t know how much of that
can happen when people have day-to-day questions of survival to consider, but I
do believe that in the three years of League conferences I’ve attended the
suggested answers to those questions have gotten deeper and deeper.
Gordon Kalton Williams, ©
2014
This article first appeared in the mid-year edition of The Podium, published by Symphony Services International, Sydney.
