on the record

Very often in my travels around the country to visit with orchestras I am asked about power. "Who has the real power?" "Is the real power in the music director, the board chair, or the executive director?" "Where in this organization should the final authority lie?" "If the conductor and executive director disagree, who settles it?" These are some typical examples (and I could give many more) of questions I have experienced that all have to do with power. Along with that often comes the "whom should the music director report to?" question--i.e., should it be the executive director or the board chair?

I have assisted many orchestras, mid-sized and small, in music director searches. Often a music director has been present for many years and there is little or no institutional memory about the previous search. Where possible, I always suggest that an orchestra send search committee members (including at least one musician) to the League of American Orchestras' Music Director Search Seminar, because it is an intensive two-day education on just about all aspects of a search. Sometimes, though, the timing of the search is such that they cannot attend it--or even if they do, they cannot send the entire search committee.

In any number of orchestras that I have visited recently, it has become clear to me that a big problem, and one not talked about as much as it should be, is communication. I don't mean public relations. I mean internal communication inside the organization.

Recently I was preparing material for some lectures I was giving on a Baltic cruise. The topic for each lecture was a different school of Nordic or Scandinavian music - and the point of the talks was to illustrate unfamiliar music from (in these cases) Estonia, Finland, and Sweden. In talks like this I always try to give musical examples, so I did a lot of listening and then prepared a CD of excerpts.  The exercise was fascinating, and it made me focus on the fact that some countries, without the firm and deep and varied connections to the international music scene enjoyed by, say, Germany, Austria, and France, seem to lack the ability to help their best composers develop a place in the repertoire.

On a recent Sunday evening I saw an example of community engagement - true community engagement on a musical level - by the Houston Symphony. For a number of years now, Chevron has sponsored an annual Fiesta Sinfónica Familiar, a free concert at the orchestra's regular performance venue, Jones Hall. It has traditionally been conducted by Carlos Miguel Prieto, the Houston Symphony's former associate conductor, but this year it was led by the rising Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra.