Summit Rundown

‘Getting To and Making the Ask’ – PowerPoint presentation by Paul Hogle

PowerPoint presentation by Frankie Airey

Constituency Notes and Agenda – CEOs

Constituency Notes and Agenda – Artistic Administrators

Constituency Notes and Agenda – Marketing

Opera New Jersy's 2010 production of Carmen. Photo: Jeff Reader

You have only to walk a few blocks in many places in the US to get a sense of the scale of philanthropy here. Just pick a city. In Charleston, for example, within a five-minute walk, you can pass the Karpeles Manuscript Museum, Charles P. Darby Children’s Research Center, and Stiles and Virginia Harper Student Services Center…In Savannah, you can stand inside the Richard and Judy Eckburg Atrium, the impressive entranceway to the Jepson Center, one of the Telfair Museums of Art. Philanthropy is pervasive. Sponsorship also is part of life. Is everything sponsored? The ‘please turn off your cellphone’ message before the curtain at San Diego Opera is sponsored by the Sycuan Casino, that is: a business run by a Native American tribe, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation.

But I’m going to focus here on private giving, which is on the rise and about to take over from corporations as the biggest source of donation. In 2010, according to Giving USA’s Annual Report, 81% of US giving came from individuals, 14% from foundations. In Australia also, as Brook Turner reported in The Australian Financial Review (20 June 2011): ‘Individuals and foundations are poised to overtake companies as the biggest supporters of major arts companies…’

With businessman Harold Mitchell commissioned by Australia’s Federal Government in April to review private sector support for the arts and due to hand down his report, it may be interesting to consider how philanthropy works in the United States. They’ve been doing it a lot longer and on a much larger scale than Australia. Are there any lessons for us in their experience?

In many respects, Australia and the US have similar ideas about charity. Our ideas of charitable behaviour stem from similar notions of social improvement. In both countries, funnily enough, our definitions of charitable activities can be referred back to a 1601 parliamentary statute brought in to redress ‘the Misemployment of Landes Goodes and Stockes of Money heretofore given to Charitable Uses.’ Back then those charitable uses included ‘Releife of aged impotent and poore people, …Schooles of Learninge…’, even ‘Mariages of poore Maides’. And both Australia and the US believe you should get a tax deduction for a charitable gift. Over the years both countries have refined what is a charity for tax-deductible purposes, what in the US is termed a 501(c)(3) company after the subsection of the US tax code that defines recognised recipients.

It’s always been easy to include organisations that deal in health and welfare in such lists. It has often been harder to include the arts. But the US list is more generous. It includes such organisations as: mutual ditch or irrigation companies ‘if 85 percent or more of the income consists of amounts collected from members for the sole purpose of meeting losses and expenses’ or ‘cemetery companies…’ – and it has long specified literary pursuits for example.  The other big differences are that in the US you can also earn income from your gift – and recognition is okay.

Perhaps Americans have a broader list of tax-deductible charities because they want to encourage individuals to support social endeavour rather than the federal government. Australia, of course, is different. One of the most intriguing conversations I’ve had in the US was with a Tea Party supporter who said he would move to Australia ‘if this dang country keeps going the way it’s going.’ I had to tell him that while he enjoyed his time in Sydney and the Barrier Reef, most Australians tolerate, welcome, even seek a higher level of government assistance.

Or, well, did once. Private support is on the rise, and is bound to be a greater source of funding in the future. Is it safe to rely on yet? According to Valerie Wilder, in The Australian Ballet’s public submission to the Mitchell Report: ‘If the recent flurry of press articles on philanthropy in Australia is to be believed, high net worth individuals in this country are not yet contributing at anywhere near capacity’.

Perhaps it is time to offer some of the benefits that US companies are allowed to offer – and advertise. Check out the Met’s website. With an organisation like the Metropolitan Opera you can be acknowledged, earn income and receive a tax deduction at the same time. It’s all explained to you there, on a webpage. Perhaps a Charitable Lead Trust is what you want. As the Met’s site says:

Assets are placed into a charitable lead trust and the trust makes annual payments to the Metropolitan Opera for a specified term of years, often 10 to 15. After that, the assets are returned either to you or to your individual beneficiaries. These trusts are an excellent way to transfer appreciating property (preferably income-producing) to beneficiaries while supporting the Metropolitan Opera. They are a particularly effective means of reducing, or possibly eliminating, the estate and/or gift tax on the eventual transfer of these assets to your beneficiaries…

Or, is a Charitable Remainder Trust more your caper? You can click on the Gift Calculator. If you want simply to give, the Met’s site will tell you exactly what you get for your nominated amount, including assistance with ticket exchanges and seating improvements, donor recognition, and attendance at exclusive receptions, general rehearsals, closed rehearsals and even private coaching sessions with singers. As well, the Met’s website will tell you what portion of your gift, given these benefits, is not available for a Tax deduction.

In 2010, the Metropolitan Opera broke fundraising records. They made $182 million in contributions, a 50% increase on the previous year. It could be credited to the broadening of their donor base through their live broadcasts into cinemas around the country, or individuals ‘stepping up to the plate’. I wonder if it also has something to do with the clarity of their website.

It does seem that philanthropic giving in the US is not as altruistic as in Australia (although there are donors who eschew benefits), but with their ability to attract more people US organisations have more potential to create a community around their artform. If you give in the US you also have a chance to make your mark as a stakeholder. At a certain level of giving, you gain entry to the board. One organisation quoted me $5000 as the price of board membership. I immediately thought, ‘I could become a player here.’

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Boston Symphony Orchestra Ozawa Hall at dusk. Photo: Steve Rosenthal. Courtesy BSO.

Of course it’s all hard work.  Fundraising is more than half of what a US CEO does. The million dollar donors want to talk to him or her. And then there are the huge Development departments, the engine rooms of the organisation, ‘where the energy comes from,’ says Anne Midgette, music critic for The Washington Post, ‘where the income of these organisations is pursued with a lot of muscle.’

Some orchestras in the US, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, are wholly reliant on themselves to raise their funds. How does the pressure fall on the individual employee?

Barbara Hanson is Major Gifts Officer at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with specific responsibility for Tanglewood, the BSO’s summer home in western Massachusetts. A big part of looking after donors is making them feel welcome. Says Hanson, ‘All of our overseers and our trustees have a staff person who is their contact. I have my own list. Basically “I’m your girl”. If these donors have ticketing or other requests, for example, ‘I don’t handle their requests myself. I can’t get in and print out a ticket, but I will go into the box office and sit with the box office manager because they will leave their requests with me and that sort of thing. And I get to know people very well. It’s so unbelievably stimulating and exhausting – and exciting.’

Part of looking after donors for Hanson involves travel. A great many Tanglewood supporters come from New York or northern New Jersey (about two hours’ drive away). ‘In fact, I go to New York for a short period of time every month. I go to Florida in March usually for about a week and see supporters who are wintering down there. I mean lunches and dinners with people, or coffee, or just catch up. We work around an event or two. The Pops goes down every other year and we go with them and see folks and just maintain contact. They might ask, “How’s the season going in Boston? Is anything new coming up for Tanglewood?’ I fill them in if they ask about specific things. And then the same goes for New York. It’s having a presence because certainly they don’t forget about Tanglewood in the winter time but it’s very different once they go back to those lives because also a lot of our supporters are Metropolitan Opera supporters.’

So it’s getting to know your own list of donors and trustees. But how do you, tactfully, work out their giving potential?

‘Well we have a research person on staff, so we try and find out someone’s capacities because, you know, it’s funny. I’ve never asked anyone for a million dollars but there are people who if you asked them for a million they might just keel over and land on the floor. And there are others who, even if they didn’t have that capacity, would be very flattered you would think that they did. So that’s where the relationships come in, getting to know people, finding out how much an institution means to them. You want to know how to approach someone when you’re going to ask them for a big gift because you don’t want to leave money on the table and you don’t want to insult someone. As I’ve been told from the very beginning, when you’re talking to someone about a gift it should never come as a surprise.’

And, says Mi Ryung Roman, Director of Development at New York-based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, ‘Every board member has an expectation that they’re either going to give or find people – “give or get”. Your most important relationship is with the board and knowing who they are and what they do.’

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But why do people give? Deborah R. Card, Executive Director of the Seattle Symphony, once said, ‘People almost never give just because they have the spare cash and they need a place to stash it’. There is a range of reasons for philanthropic giving. For some, it’s the benefits. ‘At Tanglewood,’ says Hanson, ‘we give the benefit of parking and ticketing.’ But, she concedes, there are some who decline benefits. They don’t come to Donor Dinners, for example. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra offers ‘side by sides’. ‘We can offer our top donors the chance to sit onstage next to a musician during a rehearsal, so they can be in it and feel what it’s like,’ says Mi Ryung Roman. ‘Orpheus has the advantage of offering unique opportunities, being a chamber orchestra.’

A lot of the motivation can be summarised as ‘the experience of feeling involved’. So, do donors need the tax breaks? Yes, says music critic, Anne Midgette, pointing out that ‘tax breaks are the state subsidy in America’.

‘I think without a tax break people would be less ready to give $10 million. It’s hard to say because I can’t speak for the super-rich. But I also think motivations are never one-sided. There’s always a complex network of: because your name goes on the building, because it feels good to be a patron to your community, because you get a tax break. You know – win-win. The tax break is not the major reason. It is a reason. It is part of the constellation of perks that make people happy to do it.’

I asked one Chair why he donates. Charles Metcalf is chair of Opera New Jersey, which is based in the beautiful university town of Princeton (once home to Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein), nestled between the larger cities of New York and Philadelphia. ‘I basically give some kind of donation to any arts organisation where I’m a regular subscriber,’ he says. His General Director, Richard Russell, interjects: ‘One board member at an organisation I used to work for said to me they came to the board because they were interested intellectually about learning how an arts company runs. That was something they wanted to do in their retirement. There’s a social caché of being on the board of Metropolitan Opera that we can’t duplicate here, but luckily we have board members who are committed to seeing opera in this area’.

People with enough money to give and the wherewithal to make it work for them – I could imagine a great generative potential for an organisation embracing knowledgeable people who know where to place their money. But what about the dominant personality?

Charles Metcalf: ‘There’s a sense in which you don’t want to be a one-dominant donor place. It can get a bit despotic. But sometimes it’s a dominant donor, sometimes it’s someone who’s been the director for 35 years.’ He and Richard chuckle. Richard explains, ‘There’s a great interest in Gilbert and Sullivan in the Princeton area and Chuck doesn’t have a great love for that work.’ And this time Metcalf interjects: ‘But I support it.’

What about the people who just have ‘spare cash’? Anne Midgette offers a cautionary tale about a donor she spoke to some years ago. ‘I asked her, “What conductors do you like?” And she said, “Oh honestly, you know to me it’s all just beautiful music.” And I thought, “It’s so much like a function of a social place.” I mean, that’s what orchestras have to worry about. The next generation coming up does care about what kind of music they’re hearing.’

Which must mean it’s going to become harder to extract money. I imagine it already is. I talked to a woman from Minneapolis who was going to New York precisely to raise funds for an organisation she’d started. We both talked about the ‘ask’ and how difficult that might be. At what moment do you say, ‘So, the reason I’m here is…?’

But this doesn’t seem to faze the Development people I’ve spoken to. Says Barbara Hanson: ‘I mean I’m a development person. People know what that means. If I’m spending a lot of time with them or having pointed conversations with them about their philanthropy, eventually it’s going to come to “Will you give us this, or can we talk about a long-term gift or that sort of thing?” And I’ve had people say, “We both know what this conversation is about. Why don’t you come to the point?” To me that’s wonderful. It’s called “thank you!”

Says Richard Russell: ‘there is a continuum from single ticket buyers to subscribers who then become donors. So the idea is to capitalise upon their interest to begin with. You’re not trying cultivate people who are not already attached to the organisation, or at least have no interest.’

Mi Ryung Roman: ‘I think the most fun part of my job is it feels like matchmaking. It often makes the “ask” not a scary thing to do. It takes a lot of research and conversation and learning about someone beyond their obvious association. Let’s say you’re a subscriber: do you love music enough to have your kids learn it? Was your own upbringing around music? Do you support other performing arts organisations? I personally have a musical background, but it’s the art of relationships management that counts. The artform speaks for itself.’

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Or does it? Does this mean donors and board members who will push the orchestra beyond its standard and arguably petrifying repertoire and make it a living institution in the 21^st century, an attractive proposition for the next generation of donors? I spoke to Jesse Rosen, President and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, the advocacy and research organisation for orchestras in the United States: ‘I think in some sense having a large proportion of private support has an energising effect. Your donors and patrons are not just people who give money, but people with perspective and points of view and varying strains of thought and belief. So they have some sway and some influence over direction. They’re voices in the orchestral organisation and arguably through that process orchestras have an accountability to them that keeps orchestras connected to current, contemporary thinking. The other side of this though, which will be contradictory but I think that both things are true, is that the absence of government subsidy means that orchestras operate with an extremely narrow margin for risk, and every program has to meet very stringent revenue targets. Room for experimentation is really quite limited.’

So how diverse are their ‘strains of thought’? There is Midgette’s ‘to me it’s all just beautiful music’ type of donor. But Rosen and I spoke at length about the Cleveland Orchestra’s expansion to Miami, where the orchestra has its own Miami board and donors. ‘The driver for Cleveland going to Miami was the erosion of the population base and wealth in Cleveland itself; its capacity to support an orchestra at the level to which it’s been supported, and they went into a market with no professional orchestra’.

But it seems the Miami venture has had an effect on repertoire and outreach. Says Rosen: ‘What Cleveland realised is that if they were going to be successful in Miami, that they had to build relationships there, not just funding relationships but really make themselves part of the community. So their residencies in Miami are quite extensive in terms of teaching masterclasses, public symposia, partnerships with schools and other organisations. They’ve appointed a conductor with a specialty or special knowledge and experience with Latin American repertoire [Costa Rican Giancarlo Guerrero, who conducted the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in May 2011]. So they have in fact planted themselves there as though they want to stick around and it’s led the musicians and management both to really increase their connection to the Cleveland community.’

This sets up an inspirational image of an imaginative orchestra operating with a flexible and knowledgeable board and set of donors to respond skilfully to a unique set of circumstances. What if, like Hollywood, the boards and donors (think of them as ‘producers’) were knowledgeable peddlers of the product, drawing on deeper and deeper knowledge of the greater society they were beginning to incorporate? But there have been and continue to be risks with philanthropy.

You have to be sensitive, observes Mi Ryung Roman, aware of the demands on New York’s much-requested donors. ‘There are high-profile individuals who are hit up by every organisation in town.’ And there are many calls on their interests. ‘Someone says, “I give the bulk of my charitable giving to Dana-Farber [the Cancer Institute]”,’ says Barbara Hanson. ‘I’m going to argue with that?!’ Charles Metcalf chooses his words carefully: ‘What would be a risk for me in giving to the arts is a substantial weakening of the social and health protection network of the less well-to-do; the pressure will be on me to divert.’

Perhaps the biggest risk is the decline amongst the current giving age-group. ‘It’s not presumed,’ says Jesse Rosen, ‘that as wealth transfers from one generation to the next that the coming generations will be placing the same priority on giving to the orchestra and the ballet, the opera, etc…’

You still get instances like the anonymous donor who matched every dollar individually donated to Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440 composer commissioning project. ‘But,’ says Anne Midgette, ‘it’s many organisations’ goal to break away from “heroic giving”,’ which she defines as the sort of donor who will pull out the cheque book when an organisation is a million dollars short and say, ‘Alright, one more time’.

I mention to her a May 7th San Francisco Chronicle article in which David Gockley, General Director of the San Francisco Opera, worried about relying so heavily on 11 top donors, and said, ‘What we need to do is for each wealthy donor, to find 10 people who are interested in opera and get them to give one-tenth of what their parents gave.’

Midgette: ‘But I think you’re going to have to find a hundred people who’ll give $100,000. I say over and over there’s so much emphasis on education and getting young people into the orchestras. What they need to be doing is cultivating people between 40 and 50. That’s the generation that they’re going to lose and that’s the generation that’s poised to be donors.’

And they’ve got to make those people feel that they belong because ‘Orchestras have not done a lot to make their audiences feel like they belong in other ways. You know, there’s that whole format of the orchestra concert. You must behave in a certain way if you don’t want to look stupid. You must sit silently. You’ll often have music played at you that you don’t really like or want to hear. It’s a very oddly antagonistic relationship to the audience and so gaining entrée into a club that feels exclusive and a little bit scary is probably well worth the price. I think the biggest threat is that the billionaires of tomorrow are not going to have the same incentive to donate as the billionaires of today. And yet classical music is relatively cheap. I remember talking to a philanthropist in California, a young woman who got into commissioning music, saying “It’s so cheap. I can’t buy art like this but I can make all of these symphonies…”’

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Giving, of course, is meant to be America’s redistribution of wealth. Even so unsentimental a businessman as Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the fathers of American capitalism, donated his flagship to the Union in 1862 and then, after the Civil War was over, endowed a university in the South as part of his own personal contribution to Reconstruction. In a sense, you are obliged to donate. ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected,’ Rose Kennedy is supposed to have drummed into her children. Anti-governmentalism is an oft-observed feature of American life, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into anti-society, and most Americans acknowledge that they should give something back to their country. But is there anything my interviewees would want government to be doing?

Some envy Australia’s level of government support. When I ask Richard Russell if he thinks there would be any disadvantages to 37% support, he thinks hard for a minute. ‘I’m struggling to find a “con”.’ Finally, he says, ‘I think you’re obviously subject to political patronage if that’s the case.’ Australians would probably advise that this is no more problematic than the influence of big donors or longstanding music directors. Opera New Jersey does say however that the 5% they get from the state legitimises them to a helpful degree. Says Charles Metcalf; ‘If you get government funding, that is a good housekeeping seal of approval that channels donors to you, or has the potential to do that.’

Jesse Rosen sees some practical benefits in holding onto the sort of data collection and analysis and advocacy that the National Endowment for the Arts is capable of. Anne Midgette is a little more caustic about calls for more government support. ‘Well everyone in America likes to pontificate about how the government should support us. It’s never going to happen. What would I like to see? I’d like to see more dynamic art. I’d like to see less timidity. Nobody’s going to want to go to classical music if it’s “white bread”.’

What most would probably not want is for President Obama to cap the Charitable Gift Deduction, a prospect that was raised again most recently when the White House jobs plan was presented to a joint session of congress. Senate Democrats proposed acceptable alternative ways to fund the package, but some Not-for-Profits (or, rather, 501(c)(3)s to give them their US name) are still nervous about a measure the president has mentioned several times.

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You get a sense from studying US philanthropy that when the system works, it works well. But even though Australia’s Productivity Commission said in January 2010: ‘[the reason] governments provide subsidies to the private sector rather than simply increasing state provision is that it can result in better targeting of resources’, I do see holes. A system based on individuals’ predilections is not necessarily a wholistic approach. What happens if you have a disease that doesn’t pique the interest of someone who can pay for the research? I think of the ‘Adopt a Highway’ movement. Around America you see signs acknowledging the people who have subsidised a tract of road – the Central Coast Republican Party, Employees of Hearst’s Castle, North Malibu Hair Salon… But you probably should ask if the interstate highway system could have been built this way. Who provides the overview?

Philanthropy probably won’t replace government involvement in Australia (at least for a long while to come), but it certainly provides a high level of vibrancy in the United States. And hey, on just about every block in America, it’s part of the daily streetscape.

Gordon Kalton Williams
© 2011

Gordon Williams is currently based in Savannah, Georgia. He is blogging his broader impressions of the US on his website at www.gordonkaltonwilliams.com

Further reading:

Metropolitan Opera’s donor page

http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/support/planned_gifts/index.aspx

Acknowledgements: I’d like to thank Robert Clarke for his advice on this article.

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Download the full Media Release

Announcing the winner of the 2011 ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Awards.

The Grand Final of the ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Awards was held last night in the Concert Hall of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.

Three finalists battled it out with astonishing musical skill and fierce competition for the title. Nicholas Russoniello was named the winner with his stunning performance of [insert concerto title here] accompanied by the Queensland Symphony Orchetsra and conducted by Edvard Tchivzhel.

After winning their respective Stage III category finals, pianist Nicholas Young (20 yrs), saxophonist Nicholas Russoniello (26 yrs) and violinist Emily Sun (20 yrs) performed their concertos with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Edvard Tchivzhel, in the prestigious Grand Final of the 2011 ABC Symphony Australia Young Performers Awards in Brisbane last night, Saturday 3 September.

Kate Lidbetter announced Nicholas Russoniello as the winner awarding him/her with a $20,000 cash prize, multiple recordings of the winning performance and valuable opportunities for future concert engagements with major Australian symphony orchestras.

Nicholas Russoniello from Wollongong NSW commenced his studies in saxophone at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Music (Performance) with first class honours.

As a student, Nicholas’ distinguishing talent earned him numerous awards and scholarships which enabled him to pursue international study in the UK and France. Nicholas is a celebrated performer and regularly plays with the ensemble Duo Histoire in concerts around Australia. His merits also include performing as a soloist with the Orchestra Dell’Accademia Musicale di Schio, Vicenza and the Syrinx Quartet, for the Società Dei Concerti Milan. In 2011 Nicholas became a member of the saxophone quartet Continuum Sax.

Thursday 2 June, 2011 – Opening plenary (Culturenomics: Urban development and renewal through arts infrastructure development)

Moderator – Tateo Nakajima, Partner, Artec Consultants Inc, USA
Keynote speakers – Richard Evans, CEO, Sydney Opera House, Australia; and David Staples, Chairman, Theatre Projects Consultants, UK

Panel – Ho-Sang Ahn, CEO, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korea; Graham Sheffield CBE, Director Arts, British Council, UK; Benson Puah, CEO, Esplanade Theatres on the Bay and National Arts Council, Singapore; Ray Harris, Chief Operating Officer, The Nederlander Company, USA

The opening plenary session featured Richard Evans, who gave a fascinating keynote speech titled Culturenomics.  He noted that we’ve all seen statistics that show how important culture is to the economic  environment of any city, and that cities with a strong culture have equally strong values in other areas.  He showed a variety of images of the Sydney Opera House, describing it as a cultural landmark that is World Heritage listed.  Not only is it an arts and architectural icon, it is also a place of celebration.  Richard stated that we need to be more daring, more audacious and tenacious in our urban renewal.  Urban renewal begins with architectural courage and the Sydney Opera House is a case study for architectural audacity.  It was designed in the 1950s, a very different time from now.  Getting a daring design for an expensive building through parliament in post-war Australia was difficult and took the tenacity of Joe Cahill, Premier of NSW, to argue for the building over and over again.  Now the site receives 8.2 million visitors per year, offers 22,500 jobs to the nation and adds $1.1 billion to the economy.    The development of the site on which the House sits has also added to redevelopment of the whole Rocks area of Sydney, but Richard noted that it still remains difficult to argue to government for funds to improve infrastructure, which is not seen but so vital.  If the tiles were falling off the building money would flow, but to upgrade internal and structural problems is much more difficult.

The venue tries to bring the experience of the Sydney Opera House to those that don’t attend the opera or concerts or plays.  They offer free seats via the internet, and have partnered with YouTube and Google.  There are online educational activities and regional hubs, attaching the SOH brand to school halls by sending performers out to audiences.  Programming is crucial but there are competing expectations – the House is a cultural protector but also a cultural innovator.  These two roles can be one and the same.  The House’s staples are the opera, ballet, symphonic concerts and theatre.  But as presenter/promoters, the House has presented 500 performances to 350,000 people.  It must straddle all forms of the arts, constantly reaching new audiences and first-time visitors.

Richard mentioned the “Goldilocks Zone”, where programming must cede just enough power to the audience, but not too much. He cited the recent You Tube Symphony as a good example of how this can work.   He noted that people are now well travelled and well informed and very willing to tell programmers what they like and don’t like.  How much should programmers cede?  Well, the YouTube Symphony project got it just right.

Q: Is it important to have an idea of where you’ll go before you build the building?

Richard Evans: We have 8.2m visitors per year, but only 1.3m ticket purchases.  Tourists and daytime visitors really own the building.  But the spirit is in the concerts and presentations.  There are infrastructure arguments – you don’t see the problems so it’s hard to argue for funding for them.  We treat our daytime visitors as seriously as we do our performing arts patrons.

Benson Puah: Why does culture need to defend itself through economic terms when schools, health, defence etc are just seen as necessary?  We forget about the enrichment of the individual.  The first premise is to influence the people that come – local and Asian artists in the case of Esplanade.  Over time it has made a difference.  Without art, the building would be a hollow place.

Graham Sheffield: It’s like “slow food” – “slow arts”.  The Barbican took from 1956 until 1983 to develop.  The Sydney Opera House took from the mid-50s until 1973.  It takes a really long time.  Because it’s more than just a place, and government and the authorities must realise it’s a long haul.  We must challenge the buildings to do different things.  You have to get out of the building and really change the education system.  Encourage radical change in education systems so people can appreciate the art that’s put on – it’s a generational shift.  The way the arts are taught must be designed along with the building. A lot more art won’t occur in these spaces anyway.

Q: When, relative to the opening of the building, does the rest of it start?

Richard Evans: when the Opera House was commissioned there was an orchestra that wanted a hall, but the opera company wasn’t in a position to use the building.  Now, a lot of buildings come from artists wanting their own venue.

Benson Puah: the idea for the Esplanade was seeded in the 70s.  But there was no market then.  The key decision was to build it in phases.  Phase 1 was the concert hall, and local artists distanced themselves from it.  But it was probably done the right way around as it would be harder to fund a big venue after a smaller one had been built.

Ray Harris: The private sector is different.

David Staples – keynote address

The “Bilbao Bounce” – what is it, and how do you capture it?  The keys to success are scale, leadership, context, arts activity and software.  Now I’d like to add “audacity” to the list.  If Australia knew how much the Opera House would cost and how long it would take, they would not have built it.

The Lincoln Centre is situated on the upper west side of Manhattan because the land there was cheap.  Today we would regenerate the area, but in the 50s and 60s it was bulldozed.  At the Lincoln Centre there are 11 or 12 organisations and it has been an arts-led urban regeneration.  It cost approximately $180M and the whole area is now regenerated.  A 1983 study showed a five-fold increase in tax revenue over 20 years and that the Lincoln Centre generated huge income.

The Kennedy Centre in Washington DC opened in 1971.  While the people who created the Lincoln Centre spurred regeneration, those that did the Kennedy Centre did nothing.  It’s on a river and next to a freeway, and there’s not a single new restaurant or bar in the area.  The same can be said of the LA Music Centre, where there was nothing until the Disney Concert Hall was built.

Bilbao was declining until the Guggenheim Museum was built.  The civic leaders decided to regenerate the area, and when the Museum opened in 1997 there were economic benefits, including the creation of nearly 4000 jobs.  They also built a new airport, a subway system, a footbridge, all designed by good architects.

Salford, UK is one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country.  Lowry was a British artist of the 20^th century who mainly painted industrial landscapes.  The Lowry Centre now attracts around 1.1m visitors per year, because they built other things around it including a shopping mall and BBC North.  There are now around 15,000 people working there.

The Dallas Arts District – 30 years ago the white population was leaving.  The leaders decided to regenerate with an arts district, an initiative from the development community whose land value was deteriorating.  It was a long term plan, started 27 years ago.  It took 25 years to bring to fruition but it fails to enliven the city totally.  There is a car culture – no-one is on the streets.  But it’s a huge success in terms of cultural institutions.

The Sage Gateshead in the UK is another example.  It’s a metropolitan centre which started to change people’s attitudes.  It was the largest centre in Europe at the time it was built.  The Angel of the North was created, plus the Millennium Bridge in 2001 and then the Sage in 2004.  This project was about leadership – the Council was determined to change the city.

Friday 3 June:  Programming – Performing Arts Content.  Producing House or Receiving House (or can it be both?)

Moderator – Guarav Kripalani, Artistic Director, Singapore Repertory Theatre, Singapore

Keynote Speaker – Benson Puah, CEO, Esplanade Theatres on the Bay & National Arts Council, Singapore

Panel  – Richard Evans,  CEO, Sydney Opera House, Australia; Andrew Kay, Managing Director, Andrew Kay and Associates, Australia; Douglas Gautier, CEO and Artistic Director, Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia; Dong-Ho Park, CEO, Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, Korea; Alison M. Friedman, Director/Founder, Ping Pong Productions, China.

Benson Puah – keynote speech

Yesterday Richard Evans spoke about governments needing to have audacity, to take a leap of faith.  What do you do after that leap of faith, when the building is completed?  It can’t be left to chance that it fulfils its purpose.  In Asia today we are experiencing a boom in the construction of many complexes.  Sometimes we don’t understand why they’re being built.  Today we’re not just talking about arts centres, but about multi-venue complexes.  Esplanade on the Bay has 21 restaurants and bars and other public spaces as well as a theatre.  Venues are now grander and cater to a wide variety of perceived needs.  Are they symbols for the community that the arts matter, or just someone’s vanity?  Their relevance to the community takes secondary importance.  Id’ like to share a bit about Esplanade’s journey – the context in which it was built and the role that it plays.

The conundrum of whether we are a producing or receiving house, or bit of both, will follow.  At the start, the point of Esplanade was to serve the entire community, including the multicultural community.  The centre had to be a place that each community could call home.  Performing arts centres are for everyone.  A diverse range of programs had to be offered, with our own programming team consciously programming for all.  We decided not to have resident companies because we were concerned that being defined by one particular genre would limit our ability to reach out to the community we wanted to serve.  Our vision was to be for everyone.  There was also a lack of a regular arts going audience at that time.  We wanted to build a year-round arts calendar so people knew at any time of the year, there would be a quality arts event for them at Esplanade.  We had three starting points – cultural festivals to serve the Malay, Indian and Chinese communities to celebrate festivals through the arts.  We have about 15 festivals, 20 series and about 3000 performances per year, most free, some ticketed.  Complementing what we do, we also have hirers that present community and commercially driven programs.  We curate these programs so choosing a hirer is not a case of accepting the first through the door, it’s curated to ensure the calendar is balanced and there is a certain quality.

This curated program reinforces our identity as an arts centre dedicated to the community for which it is built.  We originate content that is relevant to our lives.  We retain full use of the different spaces.  Having a resident company would require a lot of time and space so we could not present other types of shows or originate work.  It would be limiting rather than beneficial.  We opened the centre with several commissioned works.  We try to open the minds of the audience by exposing them to a range of Asian work available on the world stage, by working with international artists and bringing the Asian voice to the world stage.

Art has the ability to open minds, the capacity to touch lives and to encourage its audiences to look deep inside.   When a centre is a place that all can claim as its own, then it starts to do its duty.  It can help us to develop a strong social consciousness.  The articulation of a clear and strong voice will emerge.  Centres can inform the social consciousness of its community.

Richard Evans, SOH – The reality is that venues around the world have become quite good at producing, but it’s really not our skill.  Fundamentally we don’t create art ourselves, but it’s our responsibility to bring to the community a global cultural offering.  We value the work of the resident companies but by their nature there’s a fois gras approach to force feeding the offering to the audience.  A venue’s role is to balance that by presenting its own performances.

It’s a question of balance and in our case we’re moving towards a better balance.  Our organisation went through feast and famine.  We decided to get into producing very heavily some years ago with mixed results.  To start with the House did not take any risk at all which resulted in a lot of dark days.  The theatres were utilised about 56-57% when I came in as CEO.  We’ve tried to get the balance back, to look at an interesting juxtaposition of ideas.  We have six resident companies.  Big commercial works are important but we’re a packager and facilitate, and that’s where we can add the most.

Alison Friedman (Ping Pong Productions) – In China venues were neither presenters nor producers but monuments to the state.  That’s changing, representatives are here today looking for presenting and producing models.  In what timeframe does your resident’s brand become your brand?   This is new in China.  Lot of these places are now rental houses, the government invests in the building but not the creation of the art or the people that run the buildings.  Richard Evans – nature abhors a vacuum, but do we create a venue for companies to use, or build the venue and hope someone will fill it?  The Sydney Opera House was built for symphony orchestras and opera came later, then theatre some years later again.  It took quite a lot of time but the venue was not dark, it was always very busy.  It varies so much in different communities.  I think China is very exciting right now and the complex in Beijing is amazing and will have an impact on the whole city.  Alison – in China, often if there’s a company they’ll often build their own venue and vice versa.  If you have one, you’ll build the other.

Andrew Kay, Andrew Kay and Associates – I’ m an impresario, not a producer or a presenter.  I use my own money, have no relationship to investors, do what I want to do when I want to, and do things that are interesting to me.  I’m not based in any one city or centre but produce all over the world.  I’ve probably presented in 300-500 centres around the world.  This business is all about relationships, networks, the way you work with each other to build product.  We have access to great artists and can deliver product that no-one else can deliver.  Things can disappear overnight, we don’t want to wait to hear whether a venue is available after a month when the committee meets.

There followed a discussion about what the purpose of Esplanade on the Bay is – a community centre or arts centre?  Benson Puah – if there is international recognition that’s just a benefit of our programming, not the reason that we program.  If we don’t curate, all sorts of stuff gets in that my  audience may not want.  We need to develop trust with that audience, if you’re not seen to be a reliable venue then you’ll break faith with the audience.  People will go to hear someone they don’t know because they trust the venue to do the right thing and give them something they will like.  Every society will have its own model and this is ours.

Douglas Gautier, Adelaide Festival Centre – it’s a question of rebuilding and making connections and whether that’s with a resident company or commercial hirers, it’s not an issue of curation but the art of the possible, making it all click together.  It’s a delicate balance.

Andrew Kay – there’s a debate in Australia about who the audience belongs to.  When you present Richard III at Esplanade, whose audience are they?  Esplanade, the company or the person who’s selling the ticket?  I sell a ticket but I’m not allowed to have the details of the person who bought the ticket because that information belongs to the company that sold the ticket!  Benson Puah – we’re protective of our image and our reputation but we want others to succeed.  For Esplanade to succeed we need others to succeed.  If we try to succeed at the expense of others we’ll be a destroyer, not a creator.

Alison Friedman – in China they’re looking for new models all the time, (not quite government, not quite public or private sector) – I had sabbatical at the Kennedy centre in the midst of the recession and everyone was looking for new models saying the old one was broken.

Douglas Gautier – we need to build constituencies and be there for the long haul.

Guarav Kripalani – it’s determined a lot by the age of the programmer.  I was teaching and my students were super energised by someone I’d never heard of.  They sold out on the first day they went on sale. Esplanade has a 20-something on their programming team.

Benson Puah – it’s not for us to impose our views or our taste.  Programmers have to show things to a wide range of age groups.  Social media is more powerful than we think, a different community and network that exists independently of what we are familiar with.

Arts Infrastructure breakout – Programming Arts Festivals

Moderator – Low Kee Hon, General Manager, Singapore Arts Festival, National Arts Council, Singapore

Keynote Speaker – Douglas Gautier, CEO/Artistic Director Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia

Panel - Lindy Hume, Festival Director, Sydney Festival, Australia; Jan Briers, General Manager, International Flanders Festival, Brussels and Vice President, European Festivals Association, Belgium; Atsuko Yashima, Senior Producer, Tokyo Jazz Festival, Japan; Wei Zhi, Vice President, Shanghai International Arts Festival, China

Keynote address – Douglas Gautier

There has been a recent study on the importance of festivals which makes comparisons of big international festivals with more generic or specific festivals.  It includes general questions such as what role can a festival play in urban regeneration, and in the local and international establishment of infrastructure development?  Why have festivals? Who calls the shots? How are the public and arts community involved in the program? What is the future of festivals in an increasingly busy event calendar?

Festivals can lead to the creation and enhancement of infrastructure to support the activities.  For instance, the Adelaide Festival Centre, Festival Hall in London, Bergen, places in Asia.  What will be the future demands of festivals for the buildings that we construct?   What can venues do to actually generate festivals?  Festivals provide a chance to focus, explore, celebrate, package and engage over a period of time with artist, ideas, audiences and communities.  They offer a platform to take people to places they don’t normally go, to take risks – to do things you wouldn’t do at other times.  A festival buzz can permeate a whole city/community.  They can attract sponsors and tourists.  The media gets behind festivals – reportage and partnerships.  They provide opportunities for venue management to be involved.  Creative and marketing partnerships can be a challenge for venues but a great opportunity for venue management to be involved in a creative way.  Festivals are an experience.  The intrinsic artistic worth of festivals is something we should think hard about – communities where great festivals are presented make the community feel good about themselves.  Multicultural societies – festivals are a good platform for helping issues that arise in that context.  Multiculturalism is very much something we face every day in this part of the world.  There’s something to be said for festivals that have a lasting life, that are sustainable and take artists and audiences on a journey over a period of time.  There’s a cumulative effect which is very precious.

Successful festivals are likely to become more genre specific.  With large international festivals there’s a danger that they become a shopping trolley exercise were a circuit is created and one festival can look like another.  But there are good examples of where that’s not the case.  But when I look across the landscape, the more interesting areas to pursue are genre specific.  It’s true that where we see critical mass working, where you have great success, hubs are created with networking opportunities creating opportunities for ideas and momentum, eg Edinburgh.  There was a report recently released by Festivals Edinburgh – it’s terrific.  Edinburgh’s success has been a model for many of us but they went through a difficult period about 10 years ago where they had to make clear the value of the festivals to the city.  About 5 years ago the festivals came together to form Festivals Edinburgh, to position festivals within UK to seek critical mass, friends and influence.  About 5 years ago they commissioned study called Thundering Hooves, a remarkable document.  Apart from all the economic data that you’d expect ($245m contribution to Edinburgh as a city by festivals) it also emphasised how festivals play a starring role in the profile of the city, increasing local pride, widening access to the arts etc.  Attending festival events as a family increased a child’s imagination etc.  They offered benchmarking beyond purely financial impacts.  They quantified the cultural, social and environmental effects on the city – best practice in the international events sector.

Adelaide is a small city whose main claim to fame and legacy over the years has been its ability to stage festivals of interest.  We have looked at the Edinburgh model and thought hard about the festivals that we have and those we could create.  Adelaide Festival Centre runs three festivals – a Cabaret Festival (which in the last couple of years we have sought to make more commercial, we’ve put in charge the well known cabaret entertainer David Campbell, which has taken the Festival to commercial heights to the point that it nearly pays for itself).  The second is a Guitar festival, with Slava Grigoryan as Artistic Director .  And the OzAsia Festival is exploring the links between Australia and the diverse cultures of our Asian neighbours.  Connections with Asia are really important in Australia.  We have great opportunity to look at these wonderful cultures in Asia and how we can learn from them and work with them.  I looked at various landscapes in Australia in terms of work being carried out and saw some interesting work in Brisbane (eg Brisbane Triennale of visual arts) but couldn’t see collaboration between Asia and Australia that was like a hub, nexus, platform for that sort of cultural interaction.  It seemed the time was right to start.

Asian communities are growing within Australian cities and we have second, third, fourth generation Asian Australians with a totally different dynamic.  The OzAsia Festival presents work by Australian artists that identify with an Asian heritage, and collaborative work between Australian and Asian artists and a cross section of the cultures of Asia, both traditional and contemporary.  We have a broad cultural reach including visual arts, dance, music etc.  We encourage the participation of key national and international cultural and business organisations, and national and international performing arts groups, including  flagship companies.  We are building a constituency to make sure this has a forward dynamic.  We would like to see it live and kicking in 20 or 30 years time.

Community involvement is very important, there are many free events and live discussions.  The tourism side is also very important.  We have cultivated strong media partnerships, particularly with SBS.  We aim to be a platform for ideas about Asian engagement, and engage the education sector.  Language is an issue – tuition of Asian languages in secondary schools and universities is declining.  This is a key problem.  We seek cooperation from foreign governments and Asian communities and foreign students, business and sponsors.  In the end, though, one thing that has struck me in all of this is a quote from patron Hieu Van Le, Lieutenant Governor of SA.  “Cultural engagement and the arts can help build bridges, understanding and tolerance like nothing else can”.  He was a refugee, a “boat person” from Vietnam 30 years ago.

Low Kee Hong – moderator

A big issue is the relevance of festivals nowadays.  The landscape in consumption is so different now.  Edinburgh – in a lot of European festivals eg contemporary visual arts events, they create art along the lines of the cultural regeneration model.  Art and craft becomes engaging to drive the economy of the city.  Edinburgh is a quiet city outside of the festival period.  In Singapore it’s a condition that’s very different, we can’t use cultural regeneration here – Singapore is built primarily on the economic model and thinking about art comes after thinking about the economy.  In the last 10-15 years it has changed quite a bit. Esplanade on the Bay does 17 festivals per year, some are genre specific or ethnic specific.  Does Singapore really still need an arts festival?  What does it mean to have a national arts festival?  There is a difference between big mega-festivals and genre specific ones.  There is a shift/change in market and audience.  Who is our audience?  This is a grey space as we don’t have a handle on the full audience.  How do we create a festival that is relevant to our city? I believe there is no single model that will work, you need to have something that changes.

Atsuko Yashima

I run a specific festival – a jazz festival in Tokyo.  How do we create a new music festival in a city like Tokyo?  It’s about to be our 10^th anniversary, we were organised by the national broadcaster in Japan.  The festival is held in the Tokyo International Forum, right in the heart of Tokyo, in front of central station and near the palace and business/shopping district.  There is not a real residential community there.  In 2002 we started the festival in a soccer stadium with 50,000 seats in the suburbs.  Then we moved to an exhibition hall near Tokyo Bay, but found no local community in that area.  We moved to the real centre of Tokyo thinking it was last place we could be.  We’ve been running for 10 years and the constant challenge is to bring new audience/listeners to jazz, compared to old jazz fans who are used to going to jazz clubs and cafes.  Most of the Japanese audience who go to festival events would have been men over 40.  We wanted a festival where our own friends could come along, who don’t regularly listen to jazz but can find good talent through a festival opportunity.   We have been holding free events in open spaces, inviting artists from different genres such as R&B etc.  So far we have created a lot of young audiences who come and listen.  The audience is now 40% women and a lot of the audience are below the age of 30.

Low Kee Hong

In some ways we are talking about not giving people what we think they want, but coming from the ground to put together a platform where younger bands can be introduced.  What is the purpose and our role as curators and programmers?  Should we program for audiences, meaning we cater to what the mass wants, or do we have a responsibility to start to push the boundaries and introduce different ways of thinking?

Lindy Hume

In Sydney, it’s a question of audience and relevance – what does it mean to redefine a festival?  The idea of a festival’s identity – we should be creating festivals for our time and our place.  Then we’ve got something to start with in an interesting sense of looking back to look forward.  You’ve got a DNA in every place, and every festival has its DNA.  You have to  explore what that is and what it has been, and in the case of long term festivals like Sydney and Perth (coming up to 60^th birthday), you have to look at what that means.  It’s the same in any business – what a magazine was 35 years ago is not what an e-zine is now.  We’re trying to be current and look at our time and place.  Sydney festival’s DNA partly had an economic model because it was about creating energy in the deserted CBD in summer.  It sure isn’t deserted now!  Its’ whole reason for being is a festival for the people of Sydney.  The slogan is “This is our city in summer”.  It was as true in 1977 as it is now in 2012.  It’s about looking at what that means here and now.  We are a portfolio festival, not genre specific.  We try to talk to a multiplicity of audiences and we are shamelessly populist and creating a festival for the people so not necessarily art first, it’s the audience first, and they tell us what our festival will be.  The 2010 festival must not look like the 2011 or 2012 festival because our city is evolving, the hot spots and social issues are different.  We must hold a mirror up to our city and that’s what our programming is about.

Low Kee Hong

That brings up the whole frame of consumption.  There are booths next door with companies pitching their works to curators and festival directors.  This is the whole business of the arts.  I’m curious as to any platform like a fair where there is an intense circulation and discussion of art projects or commodities that are to be bought and sold and exchanged.  It’s difficult to separate the parts of the festival.  Within Australia you have multiple cities and competition is irrelevant – collaboration is more important.  We want to be the first to present things, to discover things.  In Europe theatre is  a big established network of festivals, and funding is available through the EU.

Jan Briers

What we are talking about here is in terms of one umbrella with so many different festivals.  Our festival organisation has existed for 54 years and always we think we have to change it, because the landscape of the festivals is changing all the time.  Originally it was the European Music Festival Association but today most of the festivals are arts festivals, not just music.  Artists today want to work together with their colleagues to make all forms of art.  We were happy when a few years ago we were at APAP and we learned from them.  We saw that all those big festivals are not really in need of federation but are there to help the small festivals.  For instance, in Flanders we have 280 music festivals.  The top 10 have an audience of more than 5 million visitors so these big festivals have all the professionals, but they are there to help all the small ones.

Low Kee Hong

In Korea there are 6000 festivals.  The Association of Asian Performing Arts (AAPA) started with friends who knew each other, who asked what we could do about changing the landscape.  In Asia and Asia Pacific very different to Europe.  We have a wide range of different festivals.  What does it all mean when cities begin to evolve?  At the end of all this perhaps it is not about questions of scale, or what is available for circulation.  Perhaps it is the time to start thinking about the most fundamental questions  that half the time we don’t ask enough – that is the place of the arts in our society.  Being in the business we’re very caught up in it and we tend to forget that without the artists and the arts, all of us would not be sitting in this room.  What does art mean in your own society?  What is the fundamental?

Robert Baird (US/Canada) how do you balance curating a festival that might be putting something forward for art’s sake compared to money’s sake?  Douglas – it’s always a balance.  We have a festival that makes money and probably should do so (Cabaret) and I don’t think that’s a bad discipline.  But with OzAsia festival there’s a lot of investment to be done, free work to be done, aspirational/audience building to be done.  Investment is required.  I’m fortunate that my trustees and management and the government are understanding so there’s a real endorsement of some of the work that we do having a public purpose, and that is a very important principle when we’re thinking about the landscape of various festivals and their aspirations.  I wouldn’t anticipate that OzAsia would ever be a commercial enterprise unless it attracts the interest of corporates (Asian business in Australia and Asian business in Asia).  Lindy Hume – when you have something of the breadth of the Sydney Festival, that’s a good example of high quality free events (half our budget) to shamelessly populist to indy bands etc.  At the other end of the Festival, which we all focus on strongly because it’s probably the most challenging thing we do, where the element of risk is really high, development and commissioning of new work, genre collaboration and hybridity of artworks – it’s almost the norm now.  The big, bold, hard, challenging ideas.  Unless you express all those extremes within the festival portfolio you’re not doing your job or holding up the mirror to society.  The government understand that the big ideas, risky stuff, needs to be part of that bigger, broader discussion.  Jan Briers – you have to take risks but at the same time you have to have an audience.  We didn’t change the program but we had a day where we brought all kinds of music to all the halls and we had 3000 people coming to those concerts but we changed the name and our strategy.  The public went from one hall to another by boat, and the ticket was included in the cost of the concert.   Now we have 10,000 people coming to those concerts.  The government says it’s more commercial because of the numbers going, but we didn’t actually change the program. 

CLOSING PLENARY – Culturenomics: Where to from here?

Keynote speaker – Michael Lynch, CEO of West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA)

My role is to try and recap what has happened over last 3 days and formulate some thoughts about moving into the future.   I was appointed CEO of West Kowloon last Friday.

Quote from Andre Malraux – it is important that as the people who are the custodians of the performing arts, that we have something that we hang this work on.   Malraux said “art is what remains when all the rest is banished/vanished”.   We must remember the important role that artists and the creation of art play.  I have been appointed to West Kowloon to build 15 arts buildings on a 40 hectare estate on the water in Hong Kong because I’ve spent a lot of time working in arts organisations over a lot of years.  I have experience in changing built-for-purpose buildings in the arts so they can adapt to different circumstances and changing audience expectations.  We need to be thinking about more than the way arts venues have worked in our past experience.  The big question that we have to ask is how they can work and be attractive to the audiences of the future.  This is the biggest challenge – we now confront a very different world.  Working in Asia is changing so dramatically and having a profound impact on the rest of the world – we are at a really important change point.  The challenge of West Kowloon for me is that I’m interested in the role the arts play in a changing society and making society a more interesting place.  I’ve found myself troubled over past few days thinking about a number of the venues that I’ve worked in the past and those I’m trying to create for the future.  There are three venues that I think exemplify some of my dilemmas.  This venue (The Sands Marina)  is extraordinary but it makes me think hard about the future of the artforms I’ve worked in, as I watch a place like this unfold.  Who are the audiences, what are they coming here for?  Do I want to listen to classical music in a crowded foyer with taxis beeping?  This venue challenges many of my notions about performing arts venues and how they work.   This morning I visited Jack Ho’s new venue – a 5000 seat venue on the top of a building a couple of miles from here.  There is no precedent, it makes you think really hard about what are the experiences an audience will have in a venue like that.  What impact will that have on audiences and artists in this city over the course of the coming years.  In 1809 a 300 seat Regency theatre in Bury St Edmunds was created.  I’ve been looking at the future viability of a number of British arts organisations and I’ve been asked to come and help them survive.  The Theatre Royal in Bury is very different compared to Marina Bay Sands and Jack Ho’s theatre because it has operated for 202 years and it is still functioning as a theatre.  It just had a £10M renovation to take it back to what it was like in 1809.  The experience of being in that theatre is extraordinary – the intimacy, acoustics, and relationship to the stage are all very special.  It underscores the other message about the future.   In my view performing arts facilities are places for performing and sharing the experience of performance.  Live performance will continue to make sense in our society because of the social and intellectual connections that we make.  At the heart of all performances are the creators – venues are there to realise the visions of the artists.  At West Kowloon our driving consideration must be optimal conditions for artists to create their work.  It is the creation of art that is what we as managers and administrators are here to achieve – we exist for the benefit of artistic creation and we want to make artists happy.  Happy artists make for happy audiences and happy audiences make for happy arts administrators and happy arts administrators make successful arts precincts.

Over the course of this conference several key messages have been made – we’ve been talking a lot about venues and arts infrastructure.  Tateo Nakajima from Artec Consultants has made an extraordinary contribution.  His summation of how you build buildings, how you make sure the acoustics work – his message was that the client was the most important member of the design team.  Similarly I thought that Richard Evans in his opening address did pose interesting issues.  He talked about the big issues that are confronting venues and he has led the Sydney Opera House through big issues over the past 3-4 years.  He has made an important contribution.  I thought the contributions of Anthony Sargeant in talking about how a venue works and the things you need to do to make a venue work was an important distillation of the key things you need to take on board as you move forward if you’re looking at running a building or programming. What venues are about is creating unforgettable arts experiences to give people magical and transformative experiences.  We must hold tight to that message.  Provocations in terms of where we might go in the future – is it feasible for the world to just keep on creating more festivals?  Should they start obliterating themselves or changing their own nature?  There is the issue of cultural and community engagement – big issues in terms of what we’re thinking of in West Kowloon.  The creation of new work – there is a radical approach by director of Singapore Festival, 50% new commissions, next year it will be 75%.  Lindy Hume talked about the pressure that puts back on people, what happens if you haven’t got it quite right?  The end of the big roof buildings – doesn’t mean they’re going to go away but is it acceptable to put a roof over everything and assume that that is the best way to organise the future of our business?

Here is some feedback for next Singapore Live conference – there are no women on this panel, there’s a bit of gender imbalance that probably needs to be addressed.  We have to accept that the English, American and Australian perspective has been interesting in getting us to this point because of our histories in the development of both the artforms and the buildings, but what will be more interesting as we go forward is to listen to the perspectives of our Asian colleagues about what the next manifestation of the arts is going to look like once we’ve been through this period of ferment.

LOA President Jesse Rosen noted four key areas for consideration by the conference.  These were:

• Innovation
• Board Responsibilities for Fiscal Health
• Realignment with Community Needs
• Fostering Creativity

The event was a wonderful opportunity to mix with key staff from hundreds of American and international orchestras.  The conference sessions were largely relevant and interesting, and Symphony Services International took a booth in the trade fair, which gathered interest from a range of US orchestras.  We displayed the Goodear Acoustic Shield, program notes and surtitles, Goodear Editions and our library products.  At the time of writing it is unclear whether our participation in the event will lead to any specific orders, though early indications are that orchestras in the US will be attracted to the Goodear Shield, particularly once they have had a chance to road-test it.

Gordon Williams (previously Audience Development Manager of SSI and now resident in the United States) joined me at the conference and looked after the booth for much of the period.  Other Australian representatives at the conference were Patrick Pickett (CEO, Queensland Symphony Orchestra), Anna Melville (Artistic Co-ordinator, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) and Mark Elliott (Director of Sales and Marketing, Sydney Symphony).  Some of the notes attached to this report were taken by Gordon or Patrick (their initials appear after the heading of the section).

Tuesday June 7: Opening Plenary – Creating and Environment for Innovation

At this opening session of the conference, welcome address were provided by Jesse Rosen, president and CEO, League of American Orchestras; Jon Campbell, chair elect, Minnesota Orchestra; Dobson Wes), board chair, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.  Keynote addresses were given by Larry Wendling, Ph.D, vice president, Corporate Research Laboratory, 3M; Katie Wyatt, executive director, KidzNotes and Deborah Borda, president and CEO, Los Angeles Philharmonic.  A performance was provided by The Combined Symphonies of the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies & the Minnesota Youth Symphonies.

Larry Wendling spoke eloquently about 3M’s philosophy of innovation, and how “scientists and musicians are very much alike.  They are the creative forces in their organisations.  The key is to create value.  For an American orchestra this means identifying and truly understanding the needs of the customer.  When you can do this well and repeatedly you develop true customer loyalty and have sustainable position.”

Katie Wyatt asked “Do we have the guts to make an equal commitment to classical music and social good in ways that strengthen our investment in our community?”  Deborah Borda pondered the meaning of innovation, and who is really responsible for change in our sector.

And Jesse Rosen told us “As you move through next few days, don’t let yourself off the hook.   Listen hard, question even harder, take notes and pull the strands together for yourself and revel in the music making.”

Click the link below to view the full plenary session and read the PDF transcript of Deborah Borda’s speech.

http://www.americanorchestras.org/conference_2011/creating_an_environment.html

Tuesday June 7: Concert (Minnesota Orchestra)

Conductor: Osmo Vanska

Soloist: Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

Program: Aaron Jay Kernis – Concerto with Echoes

Beethoven – Concerto No.3 in C Min for Piano and Orchestra, opus 37

Sibelius – Symphony No.2 in D major, Opus 43

Wednesday June 8: Plenary – Red Alert!

This session was introduced by Jesse Rosen, president and CEO, League of American Orchestras then featured Susan Nelson, principal, TDC and Steve A. Wolff, founding principal, AMS Planning and Research.  Susan and Steve spoke passionately (and very entertainingly) about capitalization – why it matters and how to develop a capitalization strategy, and the common mistakes made by orchestras.

Click the link below to view the full plenary session and read the PDF transcripts of Jesse Rosen, Susan Nelson and Stephen Wolff’s speeches.

http://www.americanorchestras.org/conference_2011/videos_downloads_2.html#red_alert

Wednesday June 8: Toolbox session – Two approaches to audience development

This very full session featured Jessica Etten, Director of Marketing and Communications, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Cindy Grzanowski, Director of Marketing, Single Ticket Sales & Audience Development; Minnesota Orchestra; Jon Limbacher, Vice President and COO, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and David Sailer, Director of Marketing, Subscription Sales & Audience Services, Minnesota Orchestra.  It was moderated by David Snead, Vice President of Marketing, New York Philharmonic.

The following details about the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra and St Paul Chamber Orchestra were provided:

• Minneapolis has 31 million people, with the most theatre seats per capita outside NY.
• One of only two US cities that can support 2 full time orchestras (the other is NY).
• Voter turnout is the highest in the US.
• It is the 4^th highest educated market, home to 19 fortune 500 companies.
• More than 40% of adults volunteer their time.
• St Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO) is 51 yrs old, with an annual budget of $11m and over 100 subscription concerts per year.
• Over $92K paid attendance, with series running in 10 venues across twin cities.
• SPCO has 35 full time players and just performs classical repertoire – no pops or summer series.
• Minnesota Symphony Orchestra (MSO) is bigger and older, having been around for 100 years.
• MSO has a $31m annual turnover, 124 concerts/year, 66 subscription concerts.
• Paid attendance is $208K, and subscriptions equal $107K.
• The classical season forms 53% of the overall season.

The shared audience between both orchestras is 19% of the St Paul audience and 14% of the Minnesota audience.  Among the two orchestras there is only 8% crossover.  A bigger threat is the sheer breadth of options for people.

St Paul Chamber Orchestra approach to audience development

This was an extremely interesting audience development approach that many people at the Conference were extremely interested in.  The SPCO team outlined the approach as follows:

Our audience development program starts with the belief – simple, and seemingly self-evident – that audience is everything.  It’s the existential issue for our orchestra.  If we can build a strong audience we can figure out the rest.  If there isn’t a strong audience the other problems are insoluble.  There is no community urgency around fixing any problems because there won’t be much at stake.  Audience is at the core of our mission and business model.  Orchestras are much more complicated than their budget size indicates.  If you don’t have alignment you can’t get anything done.  It’s important for context in terms of our objectives, making strategy decisions, assessing opportunities.  Our business model is an ownership model – we can’t sell our way to prosperity, we can’t even come close.  Instead we decided to focus on developing investors and owners from within the audience.  Those who write the second cheque to give cross the divide between being consumers in a product and being investors in a cause.  They feel responsible, directly, for our success or failure.  Our strategy is to get more of those investors/owners, as that’s the key for us to thrive.  They will come from the audience, so we are focused on enlarging the basis of consumers as they will produce more potential donors and owners of the organisation.  This is not about maximising ticket revenue. The larger audience also enhances our case for support.  We need to serve more people, otherwise why should people give?  You have a case if you’re serving more people in the community.

The lynchpin of our theory is a belief about the power of access – affordability and geographic availability.  Access is everything, it will produce larger audience, more donors, a stronger case for support for the organisation, and a stronger community value proposition.  What we’re adding in value to the community is an important start towards enhancing the value proposition to raise money in the philanthropic marketplace.  We have to constantly improve our case for support to make us competitive.  Our audience development program focuses on three concepts:

1.     What do we want to achieve?

2.     How are we going to achieve it?

3.     How are we going to measure whether we’re making progress or not?

Everything fits into these categories.   We spend a lot of time getting alignment internally around these three objectives.  Our primary objective is to develop a large, sustainable audience for what we do.  Sustainability is important – it’s not enough to just build a large audience today.  Is there a likelihood that we’ll have an audience in the future?  That’s part of our responsibility.  It’s not just about ticket revenue.  We care about that, but it’s not our driver day to day.  Six years ago, if we held a meeting of board, musicians and staff our goal would have got a range of answers, perhaps not like what you see today.  We’ve worked to get here over time.  We now have six working strategies that are being revised all the time.

1.     Affordability – over the last five years we have made a concerted effort to make our organisation more affordable by lowering prices.  We offer special prices for neighbourhood concerts, for kids and more recently in our other venues. Before we started, only 35% of tickets cost $25 or less – today it is 85%.  56% of our tickets sell for $10 or less.  This is a dramatic change but before we were discounting, our list price had moved towards lower prices for everyone.  We said we’d embrace this and lower prices for everyone, and become known for our affordability.  We felt it would leave a bit of money on the table but it would be worth it for the organisation in the long run.

2.     Our Neighbourhood Strategy, which has been there from beginning.  This program was struggling – no-one came, it wasn’t working.  We decided to lower prices in this series and immediately saw great demand for tickets priced at $10-$25.  We started to expand from four venues to ten in certain neighbourhoods.  We moved from 1000 subscribing households to 2500.  We will continue to expand this Neighborhood series.

3.     The biggest challenge is getting brand new people into the concert hall.  Traditionally we did a mass market approach, with lots of advertising (radio, billboard, newspaper).  We realised returns were modest in terms of new people coming through the halls.  We began a process of scaling back advertising until we eliminated all print/radio advertising and found minimal to no impact on number of households buying tickets.  We saved money, but wondered how to get people through the halls? 70-80% of people who come through the door never come back.  We wanted the 30% we retained to grow.  We took a grass roots approach – the traditional approach was broad, but now we target better.   The traditional model is to say to audiences “come because it’s great, believe us”.  Now we ask patrons to invite their friends to a concert. The costs involved in the traditional method were high, now we have cut nearly $1m off our budget by eliminating advertising.  Grass-roots marketing is not expensive in direct costs but is high cost in terms of people.  We’re not there yet, there’s a lot more to do.  We use word of mouth marketing, connections and the power of free samples/free trials.  We offer a guest pass program – when subscribers get their season tickets, we send them guest passes, asking them to invite someone to come who’s never been before.  People have listened to this and we have hundreds of new people coming in the door.  When we offer a free concert in a neighbourhood, we post fliers in the local concert hall and ask subscribers in that venue to bring friends and family who might be interested. We have a community ambassadors program – our subscribers serve as ambassadors.  We ask them to hand deliver information to people who might be interested.  We don’t just leave fliers at restaurants etc – it cuts through the clutter.  Sometimes we offer community organisation fundraisers the opportunity to sell SPCO tickets and we each keep half of the revenue.  In addition, we get all their database information to keep in contact with people.  We have a corporate passport program – we set up an ongoing ticket deal for companies’ employees, give them credit for being a contributor and they come to concerts.

4.     We are just dipping our toe in the water with a new strategy of using new media and digital media.  We are trying to develop a greater connection for people. On Facebook, our email club, online coupons, and the most important thing we’ve done is make our music free to everyone through the internet.  Minnesota Public Radio has recorded all our concerts since 1969 and streams them free through the web.  We hope that having music available for free will allow it to go viral.  It’s too early to know yet whether it will work.

5.     Young audience development (young adults, those under 40).  We do have education programs in place but this is for young adults.  We have a program called Club 2030, to which people can sign up for free then get $10 best available seats whenever they like if they’re in their 20s or 30s.  It does make a difference in the halls.  When long term subscribers see young people in the hall they’re more likely to believe there’s a future for their investment.  Life gets in the way of coming to concerts, especially for those with young children.  We make it more possible to bring children – we offer $5 children’s tickets for any concert, and we see 1500 children per year.  Our target is that all family concerts will be free of charge.  We have expanded the number of family events that we’re doing. The philosophy is that when the parents have more time, they’ll come to a concert on their own.

6.     Rationalising our expense.  We can now undertake some of the other strategies here.  We have reduced our marketing budget by $1m (especially in advertising) because we were aggressive with our expense reductions.  Our net ticket revenue has improved substantially after lowering prices because we’ve been so aggressive on the expense side.  Our future revenue potential is huge.

Minnesota Symphony Orchestra’s approach to audience development (Cindy Grzanowski)

Brand differentiation – what makes us unique?  In addition to representing classical music we also present music of all kinds, predominantly in one venue, year round.  We think this product diversity had advantages.  It stabilises our risk (our marketing objective is to focus on earned income).  It allows flexibility in programming and we can put music on the stage based on customer response.  Just by watching what’s happening on stage we can bring in new people.  For instance our program with video games live had 72% of new people coming through door.  It helps us to experiment and encourages people to come back and sample things.

We have three income streams and product diversity.  In addition to our Music Director/mainstage series we offer a smattering of classical artists, plus artists such as Ben Folds, Herbie Hancock.   We promote everything in all of our materials.  On average over any one year, 30% of households are new to us.  We program music people want to hear. 38% of the households who come to our concerts are “dabblers” trying different types of concerts.

We offer a “Create your own subscriptions” program – is a strategy around frequency. We don’t normally see a classical subscriber buy one ticket and move into 4-6 concerts but maybe they might buy two classical concerts plus a holiday and a concert. It expands our relationship with that customer.  There’s a shift in who’s buying. We treat these individuals like a core subscriber and offer them all the same benefits and timing.  Two-thirds of our core audience is aged 56+ but in these packages only one-third is 65+.  They are used to paying for the things they want so we can keep raising the price for this group.

Our pricing strategy is a real challenge in our orchestra because of high fixed costs.  With this comes the necessity to maximise concert revenue, so we have to place a higher value on ticket prices.  How do we balance that and present an affordable option for people who have a price barrier? Our average household income is $130K but almost half of our audience earns under $100K.  27% are brand new each year, and 37% of them only come to one concert per year.  We have a low introductory price point offer (like trial offer) then we provide targeted discounting throughout the year to patrons we identify need the price break.  All five price points are available on main floor.  We pre-program the area that’s unpopular at $25/ticket and offer them to self-identified low price point buyers.  We data-mine within our own lists to find those people.  Patrons can go online and check what’s available in advance.  We sell 8000 classical tickets/year to students at $12/$15 rates so there are lots of young faces in the crowd.

We have a program where first-timers are offered two tickets for $10, a bit like the SPCO’s program.  People can come and hear short grabs (movements or sections) from the mainstage programs we’ll offer throughout the year. We created a system to keep those tickets available to guests year round, so we’re constantly inviting new people to come and experience us.  We find people show up more when we attach a small price to the experience. There are online mechanics behind this – we authenticate people so you can go online and authenticate that you’re brand new and we’ll send you an email that will link you to the site, with a revolving list of concerts available for you.  We launched this as a small program in 2005 but it has increased each year. Year after year we see these 2-for-10 buyers have bought a lot in addition to this program.  Patrons get something different when they go to these concerts – programs that have everything that we offer on it. People want to know everything that we do.  This way we have control, we don’t give them a great big concert program, but provide an order form and helpful hints. The results from this have been successful for us. Increased to four of these per year to promote the 2010/11 season, with end results of $253K revenue (our budget was $16K).

Thursday June 9: Toolboxes – Where Mission and Money Meet

This session was led by Deborah Rutter, President, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Ed Sermier, Director, national customized services, Nonprofit Finance Fund.

Deborah Rutter introduced the session by saying the speakers intended to talk philosophically and practically about how “finance people” and “mission people” can work together and how the worlds overlap.  The session would examine how to utilize your financial acumen and that of your organisation to help you make decisions.

Deborah outlined an issue that had arisen for the Chicago Symphony, noting that similar decisions are required to be made regularly.  In 2008 at the height of the GFC, the orchestra had commitments to two projects – a farewell tour to Europe with outgoing chief conductor Bernard Haitink, and a festival celebrating the 85^th birthday of Pierre Boulez, with him conducting concerts of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at Carnegie Hall.  Both projects would be costly and high-profile, and each of the conductors was important to the orchestra.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s mission is to promote and perform great music to audiences in Chicago and around the world. So both projects met the mission but the organisation could not afford to do both.  Management and players considered whether this was the only time that the projects could occur, and exactly what the expenses involved in each would be.  They asked: Is this the only way we could do this? What is our commitment to other people and what ongoing positive or negative repercussions would there be in either decision?  In the end the orchestra cancelled the Schoenberg and undertook the tour. The Chairman ensured the funds were available to successfully undertake the tour, which the orchestra already had signed contracts for.  It would definitely be the last tour with Haitink, and it was a good way to thank him for his time as Chief Conductor.  The orchestra decided they create a different festival with Pierre Boulez and do special things to celebrate his birthday. In this way the orchestra addressed its mission, making clear what its priorities were, and doing what they couldn’t do in any other circumstances.  The urgency around raising the additional money required to undertake the tour was one they could make a compelling case for to donors and the board.

Deborah noted that in the orchestral world, we are constantly being challenged to make really tough decisions when all the opportunities in front of us are really great ones.  By visibly and openly deciding not to act on one opportunity, and to live within our budget (and in fact save money) CSO was able to say “this is our priority” and that was how they got a lot of support for making the decision, including from the musicians.

The group then debated an imaginary scenario where an orchestra has a great education program and is invited to purchase a license for an online delivery of music education that would provide access to every fourth grader in the area, at a cost of $5000 per year.  Simultaneously the gala committee wants to add $10,000 to their decorations/entertainment budget for the annual gala, convinced it will pay off in terms of revenue raised.

The group raised a number of interesting questions and areas of discussion.  Could the additional investment in the gala raise the $5000 needed for the education license?  Would adding to the entertainment/decor budget really make a difference to ticket-buyers who had already paid for their ticket?  Is paying the licence fee the best way to access the education program?  Is a different band really going to draw additional people to the gala event?  While these questions were not specifically answered in the session, it was clear that these were the sort of finance vs mission questions that would need to be asked before the imaginary orchestra could make its decision.

Ed Sermier addressed the group by saying that as the financial person employed by the imaginary orchestra, he would answer the question four different ways depending on his role within the company.  He cautioned that he had no intention of casting any aspersions on anyone working in the finance area.   But he noted that orchestras generally fall into four categories in terms of size (and turnover), and each has a different type of financial employee working for them. A small budget orchestra (up to $100K) might have a bookkeeper or someone on the board who perhaps doesn’t have another role within the orchestra. This person will not be able to do an analysis of the two issues that Deborah described.  The next level is an orchestra with some millions, with an accounting professional in the finance office. Accountants are very precise so you can expect some reasonably sensible analysis that may not go too deep, that allows the Executive Director to make a decision.  A larger orchestra again would have a Financial Comptroller who has a few people working for them. This person has an accounting background and may be uncomfortable doing estimates so they don’t give you what you need. Then you have a Chief Financial Officer.  The CEO’s expectation of a CFO is to take the issue and essentially look at it from the CEO’s perspective.  The CFO will apply judgement – for instance, if the gala is projected to make $60K in revenue and the out of pocked expenses are $56K (netting just $4K), an accountant will show you $4K profit, but a comptroller will tell you it’s break even because the amount is just too small to call it a profit. A CFO not only makes that judgement call, but will put in a contingency or ensure the Executive Director does not use the small surplus as any material factor in making their decision. He will set the financial issue in the larger context of whether there are reserves in the organisation allowing the orchestra to plan for a deficit so it can continue to offer important programs by dropping its reserves rather than depriving the audience of those services.  Essentially the difference between these financial experts is the level of analysis and judgment that each can apply to the organisation and the situations it faces.

Ed provided the group with a spreadsheet titled “Program Profitability Model”.  A copy of this spreadsheet can be found here. He stated that it is by intention very simple and only on one piece of paper.  On this page, revenue and expenses are shown on the one page so the financial position is very clear to everyone.  The creation of the numbers and where they lie on this paper is the direct result of the Executive Director’s decisions. You don’t put any marketing expenses in a program that would not go away if the program went away.  The Executive Director controls the decisions about where the numbers go, the finance person just makes it easy for the Director to make the decisions.  Ed noted that he never represents amounts less than $1000 and he labels carefully which fiscal year each activity is for.  Presentation is often where the financial person provides a large contribution.

Deborah noted that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra uses this process every week and live within those margins. She recommended to the group that they try to work out how to get fixed costs (that an organisation would have to pay anyway, eg salaries) into grant applications. This process must occur in advance of making commitments, not afterwards. There is no value judgment on any of this, it’s just financial information.  The artform is to look at everything you do and work out what is important, it’s not necessarily about getting rid of everything that loses money.  Perhaps it could just lose less, or something that’s making money could make more.

Thursday June 9: Toolboxes – The Art and Science of Pricing

Click the link below to view the full session with speakers Jon Limbacher, Vice President and COO, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Jack McAuliffe, President, Engaged Audiences LLC, moderated by  Russell Jones, vice president for marketing and membership development, League of American Orchestras.

http://www.americanorchestras.org/conference_2011/videos_downloads_2.html#art_science

Russell Jones noted that we need to be strategic in linking our price to our strategy, values and the community.  This interesting discussion between advocates of two completely different pricing strategies led to a great deal of discussion and questions from the floor.

General

Links to a variety of other sessions and workshops (some via video, some PDF transcripts) can be found at the League of American Orchestras’ website as follows:

http://www.americanorchestras.org/conference_2011/videos_downloads.html?utm_source=realmagnet&utm_campaign=conference

LA Opera 2009-10 Season. 'Gotterdammerung'. Alberich (Richard Paul Fink), Eric Halfvarson (Hagen). Photo by: Monika Rittershaus

‘Crisis’. That’s the word you most often hear when someone in the US describes the state of opera in America these days. ‘Our donors are going gray’; ‘We’re one donor from disaster!’ And then they recount the companies that have collapsed in the recent past – Orlando, Baltimore, Opera Pacific, Connecticut, Berkshire – and you start to share their feeling of rising panic. Could the same thing happen in our part of the world? Perhaps not in this way, considering the extent of government support, but…

America’s opera companies are certainly struggling with the sorts of challenges affecting operas and symphony orchestras around the Western world – declining patronage, increasing costs, questions over a static repertoire… When I arrived in New York, the papers carried ‘fat lady’s singing’ stories about New York City Opera. And US companies are still reeling from the Global Financial Crisis, which packed a bigger punch here than in Australia.

‘It’s affected all aspects of our business,’ I was told by Rupert Hemmings, Director of Production at Los Angeles Opera. Hemmings, the son of Peter Hemmings (who as General Manager of The Australian Opera commissioned Meale and Malouf’s Voss) admits that, given LA Opera’s proximity to Hollywood, production value is possibly not an area they can skimp on. But the GFC is a ‘very strong presence’ and it has to be observed. We have ‘scaled back more in quantity of what we’re doing’ (a common solution at many companies: let’s do four operas, instead of five).

But for an Australian still trying to get the lie of the land, the American opera scene still looks pretty inviting. I look enviously at the ads for new productions in the current issue of Opera America – John Musto and Mark Campbell’s The Inspector, the forthcoming premiere of Nico Muhly and Stephen Karam’s Dark Sisters… ‘Why did you come here now?’ a Washington lawyer asked on the train from Chicago. He was shaking his head over the Financial Crisis. But I see hopeful signs.

We already know how successful opera in cinema has been for The Met. That may not denote a solution for all other companies (of which, I’ve got say, there are a staggeringly large number in the US). But clearly American companies are working hard to come to terms with technological opportunities. The keynote speech at the recent Opera America conference in Boston was given by Dr Nicholas Negroponte of MIT’s Media Lab, producer of such programs and platforms as Amazon’s Kindle, Guitar Hero and LEGO Mindstorms.

LA Opera 2010-11 Season. 'Il Postino'. Charles Castronovo (Mario Ruoppolo), Amanda Squitieri (Beatrice). Photo by: Robert Millard

Under MIT’s auspices, there are even now technological operas like Tod Machover’s Death and the Power: the Robots’ Opera. ‘A wealthy inventor toys with immortality,’ according to The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Swed, ‘by downloading himself into his household environment, sofa included.’

Do technological solutions marry with the enduring values of opera? Swed, in that article, questioned visual solutions for an aural art-form (if that is not putting it too crudely.) When I spoke to LA composer, Paul Reale, he seemed to sound a warning about the attractions of technology: ‘The substance has to be of primary concern.’ Reale, who leans more now toward chamber music, spoke of the need for opera ‘to embed itself in the culture the way Don Giovanni does, because Mozart’s dealing with the way people feel about each other.’ But quite a few of the other possible (‘analogue’) solutions for opera’s predicament look positive.

One of these is personal entrepreneurism. There is a trend on the part of US opera performers to get out there and get doing, creating opportunities for themselves, rather than waiting for auditions.

What is arising now is the kind of musician who can conceive of a project (say, ‘the world of my Appalachian forebears’), source the funding and win an appreciative and profitable response from the community for whom the work was written. Entrepreneurism is even on the syllabus at schools such as Eastman, New England Conservatory, Duquesne University and the Manhattan School of Music. This option is not limited to singers, of course. But singers and opera performers are well-placed to come up with a show, something that makes maximum use of text and stagecraft.

Success is measured now not so much by landing the role of Mimì, but by building a career in this manner. ‘I kind of made myself the opera singer of Bed-Stuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant],’ says soprano Malesha Jessie in a Brooklyn Independent Television interview which you can view on YouTube. She sings in bars, the street, wherever anyone will stop and listen it seems. “Who turned up tonight prepared to sing?” was a question asked by soprano Lauren Flanagan at an Opera America ‘in conversation’ evening I attended, as she made the point that her career was built on making the most of any opportunity to perform.

There is a sense now that opera can be made anywhere and everywhere. Houston Grand Opera’s ‘Song of Houston’ creates musical-dramatic works that ‘tell the stories of Houstonians in collaborative community and educational projects’. All of this is creating work that is intended to speak to and with America.

AOP. 'Nora, In the Great Outdoors'. Composer: Daniel Felsenfeld. Librettist: Will Eno

According to the Opera America website, the most frequently-produced operas in the 2009-2010 US season were: Figaro, La bohème, Carmen, Tosca, traviata, Madam Butterfly, The Magic Flute, Hansel and Gretel, The Elixir of Love and Don Giovanni. We may not wish to supplant these works, but does this mean they cannot be supplemented?

One positive thing you’ll note about the contemporary American opera scene is the number of new commissions. A question mark may be placed over how many of these may ‘embed themselves in the culture’, to borrow Reale’s phrase. But even that aspect is being worked on.

‘We’ve sometimes called ourselves The Workshopping Opera Company,’ says Charles Jarden, General Director of American Opera Projects, ‘because even though there are other companies that commission new work, ours is a systematic development process. [The works we accept are] evaluated, results are measured, the product is looked at before it moves to the next step.’ But the key feature here is probably the degree of audience feedback. Jarden says AOP is modelled on practices in theatre and film. So ‘readings, early readings in front of an audience…The film industry actually started this way too, with focus groups – “Did the ending work for you?” “Should the baby be thrown out the window at the end?” And we kind of impose that on creators. They know when they come to us that if the feedback is that this is not landing, we may stop the project.’

American Opera Projects currently has 15 projects listed on their website, all in varying stages of development (from libretto readings to workshopped scenes…); several of the works they have developed have now successfully been staged by name-companies – Tarik O’Regan’s Heart of Darkness at Covent Garden, Stephen Schwartz’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon (Santa Barbara Opera and New York City Opera), and Jorge Martin’s Before Night Falls with Fort Worth ‘That’s been the change in the last five years, that companies are now coming to us and saying, “You guys have the expertise, you have the resources, you also have the New York caché of how to do it in a milieu that is well-suited to it, and you have the theatre industry people here.” Stephen Schwartz [composer of Broadway musicals Wicked, Godspell and Pippin] came to us…’

But AOP doesn’t just workshop specific submissions. Composers and the Voice could be considered an investment in opera composers. At the end of a year-long process of familiarisation (the composers with the capabilities of voices; the participating singers with the creators’ work and methods), composers and librettists produce 3-5 minute solo works (accompanied by piano) for each of the basic vocal categories: coloratura soprano, lyric soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone and bass. AOP’s monodrama series champions a neglected form. We heard two works in different stages of development, The Wanton Sublime by Tarik O’Regan and Anna Rabinowitz and Daniel Felsenfeld and Will Eno’s Nora in the Great Outdoors, a dramatisation of what happens to Ibsen’s Nora after she has left Torvald’s Doll’s House. I was struck by composer Felsenfeld’s interest in what happens next, after the resolution of the action. To him, this moment of reflection is the operatic moment, the moment demanding a bursting into song. It struck me as a very perceptive comment from someone investigating opera at its most fundamental level.

It isn’t just about creating big operas, clearly. Just as Houston Grand Opera draws strength from its community with the ‘Song of Houston’ project, AOP draws strength from Brooklyn – encouraging locals to write songs and performance pieces about their community (I Hear American Sing), or aiming to commission settings of all Brooklyn-ite Walt Whitman’s poetry.

Jarden’s vision of opera companies is once more allied to this idea that opera can develop anywhere and everywhere, a view that I have heard made a number of times now: ‘Why not use opera companies more like the old-fashioned tailor? We are the experts. If you want a piece of music for your high school graduation ceremony, come to us. We’ll find a composer and we’ll create it. It won’t be off the rack. If you want a monument in your town, come to an opera company. They’ll create a music event around that for your ceremony. The company now has community worth….’

The situation in America vis-a-vis opera looks dangerous. There is talk of big companies on the verge of collapse. But I wonder if the situation is more one of dissolution, dispersal and reinvention – there is more happening at the grass-roots level, and there is sometimes tactical retreat to a lower tier. The commissioning of Muhly’s Dark Sisters has been hailed by Anne Midgette of The Washington Post as a ‘…validation for the once-conservative Opera Company of Philadelphia [a co-producer] which has over the years launched a series presenting offbeat works in a smaller theatre…’ Alex Ross in The New Yorker (May 9, 2011) hopes that New York City Opera will ‘adopt a shaggy, rebellious attitude’.

A country with so much drama and so rich in sound (as I write I hear a baseball game being cheered in Spanish) will always, surely, have some sort of native opera. This is what strikes an Australian overwhelmed by the sheer size of the response to a perception of crisis. Perhaps doors will slam shut, but such is the energy here that it’s possible to be hopeful (in Daniel Felsenfeld’s words) about what happens next.

Gordon Kalton Williams © 2011