Last April my brother, Jim, copied an e mail he had sent to the great pianist, Andre Watts. Since it says everything better than I possibly could, I'll just let the letter tell the story:

Dear Mr. Watts,

For years our family has admired you, the gift of musical talent you have been given, and the obvious discipline you have followed to develop and maintain your skills. Your music has touched the hearts of many people, but you have touched the hearts and lives of our family in a special way.

Our family is deeply indebted to you because of an episode of Mr. Rogers you taped. I have a daughter (Jamie) who is 29 years old and is severely disabled and profoundly retarded. She has had many challenges; among them was the desire to eat. For years, Jamie did not want to eat and we struggled at every mealtime to feed her. Early on, we discovered that music either distracted her or stimulated her and so we began playing music as she would eat her food.

When you were on Mr. Rogers, we taped the original episode on a VCR. She watched that episode of Mr. Rogers over and over - both while she was eating and for her own personal enjoyment. She responds with joy, claps when the program begins, and hums as you play. It is her favorite music. Without exaggeration, she has probably seen the program well over 1000 times. It was rebroadcast a couple of years ago and we finally have it on a DVD. The tape was worn out!

We live in Greenwood which is on the south-side of Indianapolis, so we attend the ISO concerts as we can, especially when you are the guest artist. It seems like we are watching an old friend when you play.

On Mr. Rogers, you played a piece by Franz Liszt entitled "In a Dream". I have searched and have been unable to find that piece. Could you give me any information about it? I would dearly love to purchase it.

Thank you for what you have done for Jamie and our family. You have unknowingly had a very significant role in her survival and daily life.

Not long afterward he received the following reply:

Greetings, and many thanks for your very special mail.

Your kind words were very affecting and I felt somehow emotionally connected to your daughter, Jamie. I am genuinely happy & humbled that I can play even a tiny positive part in your existence.

I am a very poor, disorganized correspondent, but I would like to send you a copy of this Liszt work. Please have a little patience with me; - it may take me a week or two to get it to you. I'm delighted that the piece (one of my favorite works of Liszt) has a place in your lives.
.................all good wishes.................
Andre

Time went by, and one day Jim noticed in the local paper that Watts would soon be performing nearby. Thus, the following e mail from my brother to Watts:

How ironic that I just heard TODAY that you are going to be playing October 25th at the Cristel DeHaan Fine Arts Center at the University of Indianapolis. That day happens to be both Jamie's 30th birthday and my 61st birthday. We are planning to attend your concert.

The day came and I suddenly received the following message from Jim on my phone: Andre Watts has played two of the Mr. Rogers works so far, and a third is listed on the program.

Later another message appeared on my cell: He just played "En Reve" by Liszt. Jamie put her head up and listened and hummed her enjoyment after he concluded it. She loves him. This was, of course, the "In a Dream" title Jim mentioned in his initial letter to Watts.

After the concert, as they were leaving the hall, an usher came to them and said, "Mr. Watts would like you to come backstage in just a few moments if you are willing. He would like to meet you and Jamie."

So, my final phone message was: You have a picture. And here it is, a photo from Jim's cell phone:

It goes without saying that I could write a LOT here, but for the purposes of this blog, what strikes me about this story is the very fact that apparently Watts decided to make a private concert within a public recital. To speak directly to Jamie, he chose to look up his old Mr. Rogers program (Is it just me, or would that be a bit of an assignment?) and find a way to weave the works he played long ago on a television show for children into a concert with a completely different agenda. That he did so masterfully is not in doubt, but it is worth noting that he also did it silently. There was no public announcement, no drawing attention to an act of grace. The only members of the audience who knew were Jamie, her parents and two family friends who also attended.

Music is its own language, and, while that language is universal, it is also intensely personal. There are many ways of building communities around the arts. Sometimes you just do it very quietly - with a few people at a time.

Opera began in the privacy of the upper crust of society: Baroque Italy's artistic patrons and political leaders provided the settings for the Florentine Camerata and the Italian madrigal to merge into a new genre. Cavalieri led to Peri and Caccini. Monteverdi and Cavalli followed, and in time opera's high production costs (even in its early days) led to the creation of public theaters at which everyday Italians bought tickets to pay for the endeavor. Along the way, they developed a passion for the genre. When it came to the United States, opera was initially perceived as the realm of the wealthy and influential, but later the Met's Texaco broadcasts made Saturday afternoons a time when generations of Americans across the country listened gratis to the likes of Tebaldi, Callas, Pavarotti and Domingo.

In other words, that which was the domain of a small group became beloved by a large one. Extremes do become their opposites in time.

This marvelous dichotomy between opera as an art-form for the few and those valiant attempts to make it one for the many continues to this day. Witness the Metropolitan Opera's recent experiment in providing free opera for the masses in Lincoln Center Plaza.

Earlier this month I saw Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and Puccini's Il Trittico over Labor Day weekend as part of a ten-day outdoor festival of Met productions. Each night video from a recent Met production was projected onto a large movie screen. Clearly there was great interest in spending evenings outside enjoying the free events. There were seats for thousands of people, and on both nights I saw latecomers sitting on the walkways at the edges of the seating area.

Honestly, the very best music I heard was a climactic choral moment by Puccini set to a one- minute video clip showing season highlights. The final note was overwhelming - a crescendo to end all crescendos. The voices were at full blast and then, after they cut off the orchestra continued to build and build to an enormous climax. I thought, "This is opera on steroids." This extraordinarily tactile and sensuous music, already larger than life, was pumped up like a body builder just after lifting weights. With a kind of "whoosh" experience that came from MTV-speed video segments combined with such glorious music, the little commercial felt like an epic movie trailer. I remember thinking that it was so big that to hear that passage LIVE might now actually become a disappointment. I don't think I've EVER thought THAT thought a day in my life! So the Metropolitan Opera certainly started off with a WOW moment.

Normally, the Met's productions begin with the chandeliers ascending out of the sightlines into the ceiling. Here, sitting in the plaza, the lobby itself was gradually dimmed in front of us, and, as the colorful Chagall's lost their vibrancy behind the glass facade, a large screen in front of the entryway's pillars lit up with video of those same chandeliers disappearing. It was a nice touch and a clever way to bring us mentally inside the building, even as we continued to sit outside in the Plaza.

Many times, when I see opera on television, I think, "This is just awful." The small screen, the weak sound, the artificiality of the whole thing just makes me think that opera should be experienced live or not at all. Opera is just too grand to be so small. And yet, here in a public space, with all the distractions of New York City around us, the event was compelling. Particular kudos should go to the sound engineers. I was astonished at the aural presence we could experience outside. The sound was warm enough to have resonance, and it lacked the tinny qualities often associated with electronic sound projection. Musically, in other words, it worked.

Opera, like all good theater, asks us to suspend reality. Instead of talking, people sing. Instead of coughing, sopranos with tuberculosis rise to a high C in a well-controlled pianissimo and then die in front of us, only to re-appear a moment later smiling in triumph while taking a bow. No one laughs at the ridiculousness of the spectacle, often because we are far too busy crying. And THAT is the magic of opera. I'm told that Opening Night at the Met had seats going for well over $1,000. All the better then that earlier in the same month the rest of us could listen for free.

At least for me art is best when experienced in community - even if accompanied by the occasional taxi cab horn or the wail of a distant siren. Bravos to the Met! A great idea, well executed!

Make it a new tradition!

Last time I finished with:

It isn't hard to love Bruno Walter, and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra's recordings reveal him to be a musician in the center of good taste. The tempos are not surprising, nor are the climaxes overblown. The whole CSO series is consistently satisfying, and you would expect to look to others to surprise you with extremes of interpretations.

Or you could look to his 1940 recording of Bruckner's Fourth with the NBC Symphony.

Let's take it from there...

The Bruckner Fourth recording by Walter in 1940 (using the early Löwe/Schalk edition of the symphony) simply teems with ideas.

It's like hearing a man in a forest shouting, "Look at THIS tree! Now, look at THAT one! And how about THIS flower! And did you notice this blade of grass???" Everything is in stark relief. It is almost manic in tempo modifications. The sfortzandi are edgier, the ritardandi broader, and the brass chorales bolder. It is Bruckner Fourth as you might have imagined Mahler conducting it. It is a fascinating reading and it puts the Bruno Walter I thought I knew in an entirely new light. The 1940 Walter can do anything he wants. His technique frees him to move the orchestra's tempi forward and back. His personality is strong. His ideas are as tangible as steel. The emotions are extreme - surprising for a conductor I've come to know as being gentle in so many respects.

And yet, for all of its astonishing aspects, the 1940 performance doesn't quite work. Every lovingly-etched detail competes with the next one. Every tempo modification is too much. Each individual moment is revelatory, and one could wonder if the interpretation is influenced by the cataclysmic events taking place in Europe at the time. Regardless, while the reading is fascinating, it is not satisfying as a whole.

In the 1960 recording Walter revisits the work (with the Haas edition of the score) bringing a kind of wisdom that only two more decades of living with the music could have provided. In this reading the individual trees form a forest. The details serve the entirety. The 1940 recording's raw passion is replaced tenfold with the grandeur and majesty of 1960. As Walter tamed himself he revealed a higher truth hiding in the music he so deeply wanted to serve.

I'm not suggesting that the 1960 Walter version of Bruckner's Fourth is the only one to hear, or the best one, or anything of the like. I could have explored this same subject with Klemperer or others who made multiple recordings of this symphony. Instead I'm thinking about the work of the artist as a magnetizing force - and of the artistic work WE do that brings people around to join the cause over time.

This blog is about building arts communities, and one might wonder why I would share this "coffee with an old conductor" discovery here.

The reason is simply that, in our worries about this season - this REALLY challenging time, when budgets are lean, and every decision - artistic or financial - seems fraught with danger, we need to stop and remember what we're primarily about.

For all that we need to do to figure out how to bring in new monies, how to build new relationships, how to interact with our audiences in order to create more loyal "tribes" around our institutions, we need to remember that those efforts are on the edge of the issue - not at the center of it.

Arts communities are, first and foremost, about art. It's self-evident, but it isn't hard for that idea to get pushed to the side, especially in an environment of economic stress.

I remember hearing recently about one conductor whose Board members suggested changing the programming format for the orchestra to half classical and half pops on each program in order to build audiences. I felt for them, and for their conductor. The Board was worried about the empty house, and the conductor was worried about his own integrity as an artist. The organization had forgotten themselves and their reason for being in the midst of the crisis, and they had lost their way.

This will be "the year that was" in a lot of respects. There are going to be stresses we haven't felt before. The economic models won't be working in the normal ways, and we'll be asked to try new things. In and of itself, that concept is neither good nor bad. Innovation in the arts IS needed, and this season just might provide the crisis necessary for positive re-invention - or it will provide a moment to invite the money changers into the temple.

There's the rub. Can we reinvent ourselves without selling out? And the answer has to be YES.

Artists build their communities through their creations and through their insights. As they grow, as they learn how to navigate through the shoals, they come closer to the ever-elusive ideal, and others follow them. In other words, the older Walter of 1960 - who has the scars of his earlier battles with Bruckner's monumental body of work - is better able to help build an arts community around the composer than the younger Walter. It isn't that he couldn't serve the effort in 1940 - his entire life was devoted to the "cause" of Bruckner. But, as Walter grew in understanding, the rest of the world, the "community" of Bruckner's admirers, could grow alongside him.

Building an arts community in music includes attending to things like community relations, marketing approaches, pricing strategies, programming and soloist choices, graphic design work, and the use of emerging on-line technology. In other disciplines it might include looking hard at the kind of neighborhood your theater is in and thinking about demographics in relationship to programming. Or it might make you ask whether there is a good restaurant near your art gallery and how having one would change the foot traffic on the streets. In other words, the complexity involved in building a successful arts community depends upon MANY things - some of which seem ancillary and some of which are specific to the plays, shows, concerts and other kinds of programs we offer to the public.

Mostly though, building an arts community comes out of making art - growing in understanding - and conveying what we've come to learn to others. It's Bruno Walter in 1940 and 1960, and the hard-fought ground he covered in between.

It might be good to remember that in this particular year. Doing so just might keep us from letting the tail wag the dog.

If we remember to focus on the art while we innovate we'll be fine in the long run.

I want to start this series of blogs on personal artistic development and its relationship to building communities. Naturally, there are many interpretations of the word "community" - ranging from shared geography to any group with a shared interest. Recently, I have been thinking of the community which formed around Bruckner's music - and of one conductor's role in helping establish and foster it over a very long lifetime: Bruno Walter. I've come to understand more clearly what his personal journey entailed. As an interpretive artist Walter grew in understanding Bruckner's music over a lifetime of study, and his own growth helped foster the community that would be formed around the composer.

Today I want to continue exploring the subject

Many hours of score preparation are done in silence.

You sit and stare at a page, imagining the sounds as you look at the notes, articulations, dynamics, tempo indications and all the other myriad details which attempt to indicate the moment-by-moment intricacies and actions of live music-making. To someone looking at you while you are studying, there is nothing to see. You appear as if you are resting, but your mind is active, and your inner ear is working as hard as it can to create a landscape of music that you'll try to help come alive in rehearsal and then later, in concert. As you return to the score, day after day, you not only learn the music, but you begin to get new perspectives on the work as a whole. Sometimes yesterday's question becomes today's answer; sometimes you rethink a tempo or the dimensions of a ritardando, or how loud this forte will be compared to THAT forte.

For some musicians, the score is the only source they want to interact with. I know conductors who actively DON'T listen to other musicians' performances of a work they are studying because they don't want to be influenced, even unconsciously, by someone else's ideas. I respect that viewpoint - in that they are trying to express the composer's ideas, rather than a warmed-over version of Conductor A's interpretation of them. The last thing you want to do as a re-creative artist is to create a Frankenstein-like interpretation, borrowing one moment from this interpretation and the next moment from that one - as if merging different views of a work together would make a satisfying whole.

For myself, after I've done enough work on my own, I love to listen to others' views of the work I'm working on. I confess that sometimes they point out a detail I've missed, but more often, it is a way of "having coffee" with another conductor. You listen to how they approach a problem. You get to see if their answer "works" and you REALLY see their feet of clay when it doesn't. Those moments are cautionary, because a master conductor's failings are telling. You look at the score and think, "If THIS conductor can't solve that problem, how am I supposed to???" And sometimes you hear a performance that, while successful, doesn't represents a vision of the work that matches your own. Those can be fascinating experiences too. You say to yourself something like, "I would never conduct it that way, but it is totally convincing!"

Right now I'm preparing a Bruckner symphony. I've spent much of the summer in silence with it, and now I'm listening to a number of recordings - "having coffee" with the likes of Jochum, Haitink, Sawallisch, Klemperer, Tennstedt, Masur, Kubelik, Karajan, Abbado, Bohm, Celibidache, Chailly, Barenboim and others.

One morning not long ago, I spent 40 minutes on the first movement of Bruckner 's Fourth -  "having coffee" with Bruno Walter. Actually, I spent that morning with TWO Bruno Walters.

The experience was revelatory, and it got me thinking about the subject of this series of blogs.

The first Bruno Walter was a middle-aged man. He was guest conducting in 1940 with the newly-created NBC Orchestra, and the orchestra created for Toscannini showed itself to be a truly virtuoso instrument. One of the interesting things about the NBC is that it was made up of extraordinary musicians, but each of the early broadcasts marked the first time THAT particular orchestra had played the work. Because of that fact you get a musical mix of seasoned musicianship and freshness. Walter's recording of the Bruckner Fourth (on the Pearl label) is from a live radio broadcast, and I gathered from reading the CD booklet that the acetate from the radio broadcast, complete with audio pops and a rather "closed" sound from the infamous Studio 8H, formed the basis for the recording. You don't buy this recording for the quality of the sound, but as a way of peering into a moment in time.

The second Bruno Walter I spent the morning with was an older man. In that recording (on Columbia Records) he conducts the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in the early 1960's. The tempos are slower in this recording. Each movement is longer than the earlier performance, but there is more at play here than just speed. The later recording is grand. It holds together as a single unit. It isn't simply the much improved quality of sound, it is the musicianship we experience. The phrases breathe, the a tempos seem natural, and the shape of the dramatic arch seems completely "right". You don't get jostled around listening to this reading. It has majesty to it and a kind of serenity that seems to match the world of the composer, the music itself and its interpreter like a hand in glove. It simply fits.

Like the NBC in the 1940's the Columbia Symphony Orchestra was not an ensemble with a long history. Instead it represented some of the very best studio musicians in the business. Walter made a number of recordings late in his life with this group, and there are even recordings of studio rehearsals. Listening to those sessions shows him to be a gentleman on the podium at the same time that he demands a very clear musical result from his colleagues. His manner of addressing the musicians as "my friends" or even courteously by name was the model of respect from a musician whose storied history and enormous cultural background could have led a lesser man to a very different approach in dealing with his musical colleagues. It isn't hard to love Bruno Walter, and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra's recordings reveal him to be a musician in the center of good taste. The tempos are not surprising, nor are the climaxes overblown. The whole CSO series is consistently satisfying, and you would expect to look to others to surprise you with extremes of interpretations.

Or you could look to his 1940 recording of Bruckner's Fourth with the NBC Symphony.

I'll explore the surprises I found there in the next entry.

The economic convulsions of last year are still fresh, but there is hope that, someplace on the horizon, better days are coming. A lot of arts organizations got scared last spring. I read of Boards in a panic, suddenly confronted with no cash, smaller audiences, and dwindling donations. The crisis served as a wake-up call for many, and there were undoubtedly many earnest conversations about getting serious about keeping audience relations warm in this downturn. Budgets were cut, and cut again. Artistic leaders had to weigh conflicting interests as they suggested plans for a season that would take place between last year's chaos and next year's hoped-for recovery.

With the summer's last days come the first hints of the new season. Brochures have been mailed, ticket orders are now being filled, boards are returning to their meetings, and staff members are working to get everything ready. Actor's auditions are scheduled for roles for plays which will soon be in rehearsal. Musicians are practicing, and artists of all types are preparing new projects. 

I know that, for myself, this summer I've been working through a pile of scores for the upcoming season. From Mozart and Mendelssohn to Bruckner and Bartok, there is a lot of music to prepare. Summer is not only "off-season", but also time to get ready. The interior work happens long before the exterior work begins.

During this time I've also been thinking about the role of the artist in relationship to building "arts communities". Understanding our latent capacities as artists to help galvanize our communities around the arts seems to be essential at this moment. We sometimes leave this work to the marketing department or the community relations staff. There is a good reason - the work of an artist is to make art, and it CAN seem like an intrusion to look outward instead of inward. But it doesn't have to be that simple. We can make art AND the communities around them. In addition to doing our individual creative work, we can be part of the larger solution in a period of turmoil for all of us.

I want to start this series of blogs on personal artistic development and its relationship to building communities. Naturally, there are many interpretations of the word "community" - ranging from shared geography to any group with a shared interest.

Recently, I have been thinking of the community which formed around Bruckner's music - and of one conductor's role in helping establish and foster it over a very long lifetime: Bruno Walter. I've come to understand more clearly what his personal journey entailed. As an interpretive artist Walter grew in understanding Bruckner's music over a lifetime of study, and his own growth helped foster the community that would be formed around the composer. 

More on this subject next time...

Today I experienced both: a prism and then a little perspective.

This morning Kennedy Center's acclaimed President, Michael Kaiser, spoke to a roomful of arts leaders in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I drove two hours to get there and, upon arrival, found that the room was full and the mood was surprisingly upbeat.

In the state with the nation's highest unemployment rate the arts are reeling. Budget cuts have reduced state support for the arts to zero. Corporate support has plummeted alongside a staggering statewide economic crisis of truly epic proportions. And yet there was some laughter in the room, and a sense of hope - or at least a sturdy sense of grit. By the time we got to the Q&A session at the end it was clear that people attending wanted answers to their questions about how to survive these dark days so that they might thrive again in the not-too-distant future. I didn't feel fear. I felt resolve.

In that light I was taken by Mr. Kaiser's comment about his experience turning around the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. "There was a recession then too, and that company could have been lost in the thinning out process, but it took just two years to come out of the crisis - and what a loss to the country it would have been if we hadn't survived! How much poorer would we all be without Alvin Ailey Dance Theater? Today's recession doesn't meant we just get scared and close down. We can't accept the premise that losing so many artists and institutions is inevitable."

Kaiser, known for his book, The Art of the Turnaround, offered three primary ideas to stave off disaster: Don't cut funding for the artistic product, don't cut marketing, and plan really INTERESTING projects which might take several years to accomplish. Donors will support bigger, interesting ideas more than little, boring ones, but big ideas need time to get funding in place and to capture the public imagination. His four-word mantra: great art, well marketed.

So much for the prism; now for a bit of perspective.

We're all feeling shell-shocked in the wake of a financial meltdown the likes of which none of us has seen, but there are no roadside bombs on the way to rehearsal and no threats of violence for making our art.

Today, I read a blog in the New York Times about the National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. We should take a lesson from Maestro Karim Wasfi who continues to make music in the midst of extraordinary circumstances. He is reaching out to new potential concert sponsors and looking past the present difficulties while contemplating some future day when there will be a new Opera House in which he'll hold his concerts. His is the triumph of vision over reality.

I am surely putting words in their mouths, but I take away the following:

From Mr. Kaiser: Have the courage to be creative, daring and interesting because tepid art isn't worth the price of admission, and in a down market no one will spend money to come to something that isn't compelling. For all your budget woes, continue to market aggressively and innovatively because potential audiences won't come if they don't know about your art and potential donors won't give if they don't care about your institution. Even in times like these it's ok to think big, but give yourself time to succeed.

And from the National Symphony Orchestra of Iraq: Things could be a lot worse. Don't give up. We have to keep making art. Things will surely get easier later, but this just might be our finest hour.

I heard about this Beijing concert at a special program which was part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute devoted to studying Buddhist Traditions of Tibet and the Himalayas. Last Thursday night an evening of Tibetan and Chinese composers was presented by Dr. Ning Tien at College of the Holy Cross, and I was among those attending. Like anyone else there I didn't know what to expect, and the music didn't disappoint. It featured a recording of the concert given in Beijing as well as a "live" part of the program with a string quartet and a pianist.

The evening began with a recorded performance of Circle of Life by Mingyur Tendzin. A work which tracks the life cycle according to Buddhist thought: Life, Death, Bardo and Rebirth, it featured an ensemble of orchestral instruments, a chorus singing in Chinese and a tenor singing in Tibetan. The music was largely set in pentatonic mode with layers of ostinati - over which the vocalists offered folk-derived music that could have formed a sound-track to the film Lost Horizon. Although the work was largely set in predictable phrase lengths and expected rhythmic patterns, the closing Reincarnation music was truly glorious - almost surprisingly so, considering the fact that the soul was re-entering the world of samsara!

The remainder of the program was equally interesting but there was one composer who stood head and shoulders above the rest. His work was surprising in a number of ways. Most of the night's music featurerd harmonies from a world nestled between Debussy and Turandot. But here was a composer using birdcalls, medieval drones, tone-clusters and truly atmospheric uses of percussion - from enormous drums to the most delicate of bells - to evoke a Tibetan soundscape with a ring of truth in every note. The work, called Yalone, was at once both modern and ancient. It had coloristic moments that could have come from Joseph Schwantner's music juxtaposed against passages featuring an evocative, pitch-bending bamboo flute over a single, held note reflecting a scene of post-meditative calm. More than fifteen minutes long, it held the listener's interest from beginning to end. This was the music of a young master. His name is Penpa Dawa.

After the program ended I spoke with Ning Tien, asking her about details of the music and perhaps more importantly, what had happen to these composers since the concert took place. "They're back in Lhasa now," she said - adding that she should would soon be in contact with her parents, both on the faculty of the Conservatory, to learn about what kind of artistic work they were involved in. "But is there an infra-structure in Tibet to support such creativity?" I asked. "Perhaps they will teach, write music for smaller ensembles, and maybe for film as well," she answered. "They'll have to be creative to make a living."

I didn't miss the irony that such an answer could be said of any young composer - even one from the Land of Snows.

Going to the conference revealed the current issues, unspoken fears, and magnitude of the challenge being faced within the field. The elephant in the room was the current financial meltdown and its impact on precarious institutions like symphony orchestras. But the implication was that the problem was larger than the bleak economy.

The problem is us. Darwin was right: When circumstances change, we have to adapt.

Our field is notoriously slow to change its model, and throughout the week speakers were prodding everyone to move away from the status quo by comparing the possible future of the symphony orchestra field to that of the failing newspaper industry. More than once we were reminded of the unwillingness of the big three Detroit automakers to face reality and innovate. The clear implication was that we have to change, that change is good, and that we don't have time to waste.

In a private conversation, I heard that a leader in the field had made an estimate that as many as a third of non-profits would probably fail during this economic downturn. Yes, a THIRD! If that ratio held true for symphony orchestras it would mean a catastrophic loss to this field. I have kept returning to that prediction as I have thought about three particular sessions among the many I attended during the conference:

• The first was a Beyond the Score program devoted to Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in e minor, From the New World. It was a remarkable production, certainly worthy of the immense resources of the Chicago Symphony's very creative staff. The performance included photos, film clips and a well-written script performed by three actors, one of whom played Mr. Dvorak himself, supplemented by occasional lines from Sir Mark Elder who conducted. The Civic Orchestra of Chicago performed excerpts from Dvorak's symphony to illustrate the story of its creation, and we heard passages from polkas, Slavonic dances and spirituals as well.
• The second session was on the implications of social networking tools in the performing arts. The consensus was that no one really knows HOW to most effectively use these new tools yet, but there seems to be agreement that this is the wave of the future - or, more accurately, of the present. Obviously this will be a growing area of experimentation in the near term across the field.
• The last session was an attempt to retain audiences by studying those audience members who have come only once to a symphony orchestra performance, never to return because of their unhappiness with a host of seemingly unrelated issues ranging from parking their car to the price of a glass of wine at intermission. The upshot of that session was that if you can get audience members to come to a second performance there is a good chance you'll keep them for a long time.

When I look back at the League's convention those three sessions keep flashing "pay attention!" It is clear that the next few years will see a tremendous shakedown in this field, and none of us knows which institutions will remain standing. Most will try to change. Some will use innovative concert-models like Beyond the Score, many will try to use Twitter, Facebook, and iPhone applications to build on-line communities, some will focus on the experiential approach - adjusting repertoire and adding services and value to keep their patrons coming back. A few won't change a thing, and most of those probably won't be here at the end of this process.

What will we change? Will we re-format our concerts on the Beyond the Score model to contextualize a work like Dvorak's Ninth, taking on the task of teaching our audiences with a Discovery Channel-like approach? Will we find and retain audiences through the power of the internet? Will we adapt our audience-services model to be more like an up-scale retail outlet whose primary product is the complete night out - from soup to nuts with Brahms in between? Will it be something else? Or even MANY new things? Now we're getting someplace!

They kept making buggy whips while Henry Ford was cranking out his first cars.

It's past time for this field to get to work. The question remains: "On what?" The one's who adapt well will remain. As for the rest...ask Charles Darwin.

Mid-week I stopped by the local radio station to meet with the station manager who was going to do the narration for this concert when he surprised me with, "Hey, today the phones lit up when we gave away two tickets for the concert. We couldn't believe how quickly people were calling in!" Excuse me? We hadn't offered a ticket giveaway. Actually, at the time, we had a waiting list for tickets and had sent out an e-mail to our subscribers asking those who weren't planning on using their tickets for this concert to donate them back to the office in order to accommodate the demand.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened. Someone who couldn't attend decided that their tickets were precious commodities, and, instead of just letting them be re-sold they took it upon themselves to take them to the radio station, which would announce the giveaway. In other words they created their own marketing campaign.

Over the past eight years, the ASO has been engaged in reinventing itself and consciously serving as a laboratory for new ideas. We've taken some pride for our innovations: creating new tools for growing our audiences, launching a new multi-year donor model, and designing innovative artistic programs while being more responsive to our community. We're in a difficult economic climate - around 22% actual unemployment in this region - so seeing positive results is even more remarkable. We've made a plan, and it's working.

But it struck me that this was something entirely different.

Instead of a top-down marketing campaign conceived of in the office; instead of using free viral tools like our Invite a Friend or Be Our Guest cards that WE created to encourage our audience members to broaden our base; instead of utilizing Purple Cow elements WE built into the concert-going experience that guaranteed buzz on Monday morning after a concert - here was an audience member acting independently and creating their own campaign, finding a means of distributing the information locally, and then disappearing into thin air! It was a "Lone Ranger" moment. Who WAS that masked audience-member? I don't know! WE don't know.

Sometimes I ask myself what a vibrant arts community looks like. How do you know when you've found one?

Perhaps in the new model, it will be when someone creates their own campaign on Facebook or Twitter - "I'm giving away two tickets to this week's Bruckner symphony to the first person who responds!"

Vibrant arts communities may feel chaotic because the command structures we're used to won't be operational anymore. The forces for change will be decentralized.

Power to the people!

Oooo baby, we're about to lose control, and I like it!

Last week, while participating in the League of American Orchestras' National Conference in Chicago, I attended a Chicago Symphony Orchestra Dvorak Festival concert with Sir Mark Elder conducting and Alisa Weilerstein as the very able soloist.

My seat was in the Upper Balcony, and I ascended the stairs to the very top of Symphony Hall. It's quite a view from that perch - the rake of the hall takes your breath away until you get used to the steep angle looking down on the stage. The ceiling seems close enough to touch if you could just jump high enough, and the acoustics are surprisingly good.

Perhaps the best part of sitting up there is that those audience members listen to the music with a level of intensity I have rarely experienced. It seemed to me that the folks in the Upper Balcony are there for the music and nothing else - except, perhaps, for the opportunity to share their enthusiasm with others.

I settled in and was immediately captivated. The program began with In Nature's Realm, a rarely heard work that received a marvelous reading under Elder's baton.

Soon Alisa Weilerstein entered the stage and Dvorak's Cello Concerto began. The music was sumptuous one moment and electric the next. The audience sat silently until the final notes of the concerto led to an outburst in the balcony that was deafening. Far off to the right of the section, I heard a male voice bellowing, "That was GREAT! THAT was just GREAT!" I looked over and saw a man in his seventies beaming with happiness.

During intermission, in the balcony's lobby, the man walked near me. "What'd you think?" I asked. "Incredible!" he answered and his face lit up with joy. Curious, I asked him a few questions and found that Bob was a retired schoolteacher. He had been required to take a music appreciation class from Chicago Teachers' College in the early nineteen-sixties, and one of the course requirements was to attend a CSO concert. Bob was hooked. "I kept coming back. I never missed a concert by Solti or Giulini," he said. "I've stayed through Barenboim's time and now I can't wait for Muti to take over. You have no idea how much joy this place has brought into my life...and you know the best thing? I can afford it. So much is beyond my means, but this is something I can do!"

When you start to wonder if we can pull this off - find a business model to ensure that we'll continue to make great music at a level of genuine excellence, develop marketing strategies that will draw in new audiences, cultivate enough donors to sustain ourselves, and weather the financial storm long enough to survive - go sit in the upper balcony. Look around for the Bobs of this world. They aren't rich and they may not pronounce "Muti" correctly, but they love music as much or more than anyone else.

The Bobs count. They're why we're in this field in the first place, and they're why we can't allow ourselves to fail.

I've come to respect Godin's thinking on a number of subjects. His book, Purple Cow, formed the basis of the Adrian Symphony Orchestra's reinvention of itself with some quite remarkable results, and it is such a simple concept that it can be applied to a number of seemingly unrelated areas and activities. It has even encouraged me to ask myself, "is this program purple," when I'm choosing music for upcoming concerts, so it certainly provides a way of provoking new thinking for me.

In this presentation Godin is thinking about how we self-identify, how we look for others with a similar self-identifications, and then how we form groups around that unifying identity.

He calls these groups "tribes", and as soon as he said it, I found myself reacting to that word because it has such "primitive" connotations. I had to admit that the word resonated within me. And then I had to ask myself, "Why?"

So much in this field is changing so rapidly, I find it somehow comforting to use some enduring tenets of human nature as a guide while I think about what we might do next. It certainly feels better than trying to react willy-nilly to a mind-boggling cascade of seemingly uncontrollable outside events.

I try to remember that underneath change there is something that remains constant, and reflecting on that fact helps us to focus ourselves calmly even while we're in the midst of apparent chaos. Finding "that which remains unchanging" would certainly make a foundation for action.

What would it mean if what is unchanging is simply that we're still tribal? It might appear that thinking "tribally" wouldn't be of much use in a field as sophisticated as the arts, but actually I think it's a pretty good start!

It's a bit humbling to realize that even as modern a world as ours still thinks in terms not too dissimilar from that of a hunter-gatherer society. Recognizing our primal tendencies can remind us to draw upon our natural ways of thinking even as we try to solve rather complex modern challenges.

For instance, thinking through a "tribal" prism, we would quickly realize that people don't just want to be part of an audience, they want to belong. Getting an audience in the room may result from a good marketing campaign, but allowing them to become a tribe is a different matter altogether.

In just a few minutes the whole room would be changed, the environment transformed, and a new community created. In other words, the event itself had brought people of shared interests together.

I had flown from the mid-west with this concert as part of my agenda for being in New York. Other friends had come from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to be here for this historic occasion. What we had in common was a love of Mahler's music, and this WAS a rare event celebrating that composer. The Berlin Staatsoper would play all of Mahler's symphonies in order of their composition under two conductors at the top of their game. Barenboim and Boulez couldn't be more opposite in their approaches to performing Mahler, but the audience was united over this concert series from the very first note.

Even the applause for Thomas Quasthoff before Kindertotenlieder began seemed different than virtually any applause I had experienced. This was going to be something special we seemed to say. The hall quieted, and the first notes began. In an instant, the community formed, congealed and unified into one silent mass of listeners.

The magic lasted for two hours and then the hall emptied. I found myself asking what would remain of this newly-founded community. I walked with friends down 57th Street to the Istanbul Café, and we talked about the concert. Over Turkish coffee, a series of spin-off subjects ranging from Bernstein to Mitropoulos kept the magic going for another hour until the rain outside had ended and we hailed a cab to return to the apartment.

Has that community disappeared? I don't think so, at least not yet. It remains in the minds of those who shared the experience. But with each day, the glue that held us together weakens.

I'm told that later in the cycle, on the Mahler 5th concert, representatives from the Gustav Mahler Society of New York were busy on the sidewalks handing out flyers to capitalize on a public already predisposed to the cause.

It occurs to me that Carnegie Hall could have done the same thing capturing e mail addresses for future Mahleriana as part of the ticket sale: "Would you like to be notified anytime there is a concert featuring Mahler here?" would have been tantamount to the old McDonald's money-making phrase, "Do you want fries with that?"

The challenge isn't simply creating communities; it's keeping them alive.

Where do you begin?

This blog won't be all about symphony orchestras, but that IS what I do for a living, and so it should probably start there.

I found myself driving home the other night after an extraordinary evening of music making.

The night had featured a cellist in the orchestra who had been engaged for an "Up Close" event - meaning he played a little bit of unaccompanied cello music (Bach, and Hindemith), talked about his instrument and described his life as a musician. There was also coffee, tea and cookies. Some staff members were introduced, and the whole event lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. All of this effort was for about 30 people. The "audience" was drawn from our own data base, but not focused on donors. In other words, we were investing in the non-investors. I didn't know most of their names. They attend some concerts each year. That's all. Not the usual suspects...

And yet...

You would have thought, walking into the room mid-way through, that we were dealing with the most passionate people in the world - they were incredibly curious about what was going on. There were questions throughout, and sometimes the audience actually interrupted the musician - how does the bow produce sound, explain how you make those really high pitches (the harmonics), or how much did you practice today? Why do you use your thumb like that? How do you memorize the music?

A little music-making. A lot of life.

In theory, a symphony orchestra is a concert-giving organization, but that is only a small part of what it actually could do.

Should do?

We've been confined by who we think we are, and by what we think we are.