Mark Likes Music

I may return to posting, but, for now, I'll be packing it in. It's been harder than I thought to keep blogging up since moving to Los Angeles and taking on a new job at the Colburn School. If you want to get in touch, or just want to keep up with me, follow me on Twitter @berrymark, or find me on Facebook. Thanks for stopping by.

More and more, orchestras in the United States are investing in non-traditional, community-based programs  that are not only helping to re-establish themselves as part of the civic fabric but are also broadening the notion of what constitutes an orchestra musician. Earlier this month, the Philadelphia Orchestra became the latest and most prominent American orchestra to take this step when it announced i ts HEAR initiative . It's cutesy acronym that stands for Health, Education, Access, Research , but is looks like the work behind it is anything but frivolous. An example of a HEAR project is the orchestra's partnership with the Temple University Arts and Quality of Life Research Cente r and the Broad Street Ministry.  After receiving music therapy training, orchestra musicians perform together with ministry guests, who include victims of homelessness and abuse. Temple University researchers then observe these performances to determine, as the ministry website puts...

Things have been rough at the Hartford Symphony for a while, and yesterday it took a step toward righting itself by promoting its artistic programming director, Stephen Collins, to CEO . Until yesterday, the Hartford Symphony was overseen by David Fay, the CEO of Bushnell Performing Arts Center, where the orchestra performed. This dual role left Fay open to accusations of conflict of interest, and he also split administrative staff between the two non-profit organizations.

Much more disgraceful than The Met's new logo is that the museum lies to the public. If you've ever gone, you'll know that The Met goes to every length to not only obscure that it's free to visit, but actively tries to get you to pay a "recommended" admission fee. In a passive-aggressive move designed only to end a lawsuit for its fraudulence, The Met will now call it a "suggested" fee to enter on its signage . Whether its employees will be more forthcoming with the attendance policy is yet to be seen. This kind of dishonesty is much more hurtful to your brand than any logo-design misfire.

It started with J ustin Davidson's Vulture review of The Metropolitan Museum's new logo, who called The Met's new logo a "graphic misfire" that looks "like a red double-decker bus that has stopped short, shoving the passengers into each other’s backs." Adweek panned it as a "letter-killing, article-elevating, butt-filled logo" and responded with one word upon viewing Wolff Olins's concept samples. Brand New has weighed in, as has Art Net News . Everyone loves to hate logos, which makes sense. I hate logos too: we spend way too much time arguing over marks, defending them, decoding their meaning. I'd rather talk about how an organization treats us, what it says to us, how it make our lives better. 

On Christmas Eve, Richard Florida posted an article on CityLab that draws on an article in the Economic Development Quarterly by Arthur Nelson and others to argue for the importance of the performing arts in drawing so-called knowledge workers to cities: The study finds substantial evidence that performing arts organizations add to both the growth of the knowledge class and to urban economies broadly. Those with just one type of performing arts center saw a 1.1 percent increase in knowledge-class employment between 2000 and 2010; those with two types of performing arts centers saw a 1.5 percent increase; and those with all three types saw a 2.2 percent increase.  The result of this influx of new-economy careerists is a whole bunch of money made: Over this ten-year period, the 118 metros with at lease one performing arts organization generated a whopping $60 billion in annual income and more than half a million additional knowledge-class jobs, or over 12 percent of all kn...

On his own blog, my colleague Nate Zeisler describes two models for musical careers . In the first model, musicians are mechanics, creating within "a very narrow, accepted window of performance practice which has been dictated by your teacher, conductor and the music written on a page." In the second model, musicians act more like designers, and come up with "new ways of thinking about the art form" by drawing on new genres of music and artistic disciplines. For Nate, the path toward a successful career is to fuse the two: In the field of classical music, there is very little room for people who can’t infuse qualities from both sides of the aisle into their career. Great designers in music will have little to say and won’t have credibility in the field if they aren’t great mechanics. Great mechanics, for the most part, won’t have a sustainable career if they’re not thinking as designers. I agree that the most successful musicians will be able to be both mechanic...

Last week, the Houston Symphony announced that it has hired four new string players as it first group of "community embedded musicians" who will perform, teach, and otherwise use their talents throughout the city. Violinist Jenna Barghouti, bassist David D. Connor, violist Anthony Parce, and cellist and Hellen Weberpal will perform 25 concerts a year with the orchestra, but will spend most of their time outside the concert hall. The orchestra has a plan, for example, to create a music therapy program for these musicians (a "music and wellness program aimed at increasing the quality of health care through music," as the press release says). The Community Embedded Musician program  starts this season, and only time will tell how far it will go beyond the traditional outreach model, but making a real investment in talented musicians who can apply their talents in new ways shows that the Houston Symphony gets it. They get that orchestras they have to go out and...

As a guest blogger on the Cross-Eyed Pianist , Simon Brackenborough argues that programming composers like Arnold Bax, half-lost to history but still with passionate advocates, will invigorate concert music and attract new audiences: It’s not about whether enough people will like Bax. But by confidently confronting the question of why he produces both obsessive fans and sniffy detractors, you have exactly the opportunity to engage people that the Proms should have seized with both hands. Disagreement, after all, is a sign that an art form matters: a repertoire of limited risk is a repertoire of limited relevance. The industry will be in a healthier place when concert-goers are less sure that they will enjoy the experience, but are willing to pay to find out. I'm not sure we should promote concerts with the slogan, You May Not Enjoy This: Pay to Find Out, but I do agree that there is great value in putting "masterworks"--pieces we hear all the time, season in and season...

In June,  the board of the Hartford Symphony approved cutting the orchestra's budget by 20% , from $2.5 million to $2 million, as the administration begins negotiating a new contract with the musicians, talks that promise to be contentious. Writing on the WNPR website, Steve Metcalf argues that saving Hartford's orchestra does not mean resorting to performing more pops concerts, as he claims is the direction proposed by CEO David Fay, but by remembering that the primary purpose of the orchestra is to perpetuate the canon: The pesky underlying issue here is that a great professional orchestra exists to play the great orchestral repertoire – both modern and vintage – at the highest possible artistic level. Yes, of course, pops concerts can be fun, and can furnish a nice little ancillary zone of activity and outreach. And sure, maybe there is an additional stream of revenue to be had from backing up, you know, aging rock groups or video-game soundtrack nights or occasionally a...

From Mark Swed's review of Yuja Wang's performance at the Hollywood Bowl last Tuesday:  Dressed in a strapless, snug, sparkling gown with a black zipper down her back Tuesday night, Yuja Wang has clearly become the belle of the Bowl. Ever since her Hollywood Bowl debut four years ago wearing a short skirt that became a fashion statement, in classical music circles at any rate, audiences expect that the 28-year-old Chinese pianist will be a dazzling presence the moment she walks on stage. Hi-def Bowl monitors help. F rom his 2011 review of Yuja Wang with the Los Angeles Philharmonic : Her dress Tuesday was so short and tight that had there been any less of it, the Bowl might have been forced to restrict admission to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult. Had her heels been any higher, walking, to say nothing of her sensitive pedaling, would have been unfeasible. The infernal helicopters that brazenly buzz the Bowl seemed, on this night, like long-necked p...

On the Neoclassical blog, Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Holly Mulcahy gives us her two cents on why orchestras can't seem to get their communities excited about what they do : Having a logo and concise website is a good start, but ultimately it’s a narrative, a story, that has the most power to capture attention and hearts. ... As orchestras try to share what they can about education, entertainment, and culture, the huge thing lacking is a story arc and tension to draw people in.  For Mulcahy, it's all about finding a more compelling way to tell the story, which is true, but orchestras also have to remember that they're writing non-fiction. How many orchestras have adapted their mission and strategies in a way that will help make the yarn they spin compelling? Orchestras still program music, pick their soloists and music directors, and cultivate donors under the tired, threadbare, unsubstantiated assumption that their music has some inherent high-culture ...

Salon.com listed their 50 dorkiest songs (that we secretly love) earlier this week; it's a great list, but I think they missed a few. How about this, for one: Judson Spence's album was cringeworthy, but for the Hammond B-3 alone, his only hit was worth listening to when it came out in 1988.

E-mail, man . It's the worst. Back in the old days, I used to love making that walk down to the computer lab to see if any one of the handful of people who had my email address had fired an electronic missive my way. Staring at that two-tone, black-and-yellow screen, filled with anticipation, feeling that burst of joy at the sight of a line in the inbox: it was the highlight of my day. I still enjoy checking into my trusty Google account, but at work, I avoid my inbox at all costs. It's where my productivity goes to die, and it's not necessarily because of e-mail itself, but how and when people decide to send it to me. I wish more people would follow the advice of Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail , who also takes the time to realign our ethics of e-mail. For one, he dispells the assumption that short e-mails are rude, and asks us to "consider that lengthy emails are disrespectful of others' time." To that end, he recommends we follow a five-sentenc...

Anastasia Tsioulcas gives us a round-up of British critics' comments on Tara Erraught's weight in their reviews of her performance in  Der Rosenkavalier at the Glyndebourne Festival. They remind me of Alaistair Macaulay's review of the New York City Ballet's 2010 Nutcracker , in which he displayed similar pettiness regarding Jenifer Ringer's appearance. Macaulay couldn't get beyond his own bitterness to lead a discussion of how body appearance might effect how receive and interpret ballet; these music writers seem to be more interested in cultivating an air of catty cool to really do their jobs and engage in a critique of how body types effect an opera.

Last week on Polyphonic.org, Robert Levine criticized the "news business" for not reporting, as reported in the Journal Sentinel , that the Milwaukee Symphony had raised $5 million in emergency funds to pay off debt and balance its budge t. Levine also has a piece of advice: (M)ost of what you read about orchestras is crap. At the very best, it’s one-sided – bad news is sexier than good news, and weird news is more interesting than important news.  A few thoughts here: 1) I don't know where Levine gets his reportage, but when there is good news, people write about it. I've read interesting and heartening stories in the last few months about the Kansas City Symphony , the Baltimore Symphony , the Cleveland Orchestra ( also here ), and the Detroit Symphony . 2) Journalists' jobs aren't to be cheerleaders for their hometown orchestras, and they can provide a great service by critically examining the goings on of what are, after all, local civic organ...

On New Music Box, Armondo Bayolo exhorts musicians to think big : We must see ourselves as collaborators within a much wider network of musicians and citizens, helping each other as best we can—be it through something as complex as presenting performances or something as simple as sharing each other’s work on social media—regardless of personal payoff.  The benefits will ultimately manifest themselves and reach far beyond the immediate gratification of a paycheck (although let’s not forget the importance of that paycheck, lest we get too idealistic and starve ourselves in the process) and into the realm of real, tangible cultural change. It's dispiriting that some musicians need to be reminded that advocacy needs to be part of what they do, that it's not enough to play the gig, get paid, and go home. On the other hand, it's an encouraging sign that there are groups out there who are either engaging in new ways with other musicians-- Bayolo cites the relationship between ...

It's easy enough to walk into any workplace and hear people bragging about all the multitasking they do, but, as pointed out by Matthew Fritz , what gets undervalued today is the ability to focus and prioritize. Multitasking can be downright harmful:  Rahul Mayak on Twitter  cited a Time / Inc. article by Issie Lapowsky that discusses recent research on  the negative effects of multitasking . One big culprit? E-mail. As Lapowsky points out, almost a quarter of our work time is spent on e-mail , and almost all of it increases multitasking--and tension. According to a study out of University of California, Irvine, when employees were cut off from e-mail for five days, their levels of stress and focus increased. That's not to say that e-mail is inherently bad, but it does show how people use it to pay forward the chaos and instability their own multitasking creates.

I came across a couple of blog posts about music that talk about the shift from an industry model ("we make CDs") to a service model based on ongoing personal engagement . Classical musicians have been living this new model for years. Most of them not only perform, but they also teach, and it's common practice to engage in pre- or post-concert meet-and-greets after concerts. Even orchestras , the classical-music institution most closely tied to the industrial model, have embraced educational programs and events aimed at improving face-to-face contact with the audience. To some extent, all musicians have had to piece together a career, using all their entrepreneurial tools to sell various services. But classical music benefits having in place not only a long-standing tradition of engagement in place but also the institutions it needs to carry that out on a large scale. 

I'm really excited about this, because I just embraced the smiley-face emoticon . BuzzFeed now has its own style guide ,  as noted by Megan Garber of  The Atlantic  with notable condescension. To be fair, though, it is pretty slipshod work if you put together a guide that lets writers overrule you if anything "looks weird" to them. The point is that if BuzzFeed can have a style guide, so can you. No matter how small your organization, you'll have a lot of writing to do. Figure out whether you use Ph.D. or PhD , use serial commas, and accept smiley-face emoticons in e-mails (and, for that matter, whether you write it e-mail or email ). It'll save you a lot of time and embarrassment.