Fixing What’s Broken: a response

All in all, I thought the ideas expressed in Mr. Kaiser’s address were wonderfully refreshing to read. His statement “I am absolutely convinced that most of the problems facing orchestras result from poor management. Too many arts managers today know all the vocabulary but have no real idea about creating revenue for their organizations.” acknowledges the immediate need for a change in the way orchestras conduct business. His seemingly genuine devotion and dedication to the production of art and the artists that create it especially impressed me.

Mr. Kaiser goes on to show his ability to look at the “big picture” by considering the long term in orchestra artistic and administrative planning. He presents immediate solutions for immediate problems, but those solutions directly facilitate where an organization will be a decade from now. That’s smart coordinated planning. There’s definitely no “circling the wagons ” going on in his mind.

With all of his good ideas I was puzzled about he came to some of his views regarding community service through education programs. He spends too much of his focus on programs centered on servicing school systems. His desire is to build an audience for the future that is not relegated to the white upper middle class demographic. A good and necessary goal, but I believe that one of the best immediate solutions to this very real problem is by offering free concerts to the public at large. Instead of focusing on primarily playing in schools, orchestras need to bring families across all demographics to orchestra concerts. Playing at large public parks with free admission will do far more to serve the immediate need of exposing a new audience to the orchestra as well as give the administration a long-term tool for “high visibility” public exposure. At these concerts, the orchestra administration needs to pull out all of the stops: every executive, manager, staffer, and volunteer needs to be at these concerts with an organized plan to educate those in attendance. When I currently attend free concerts I never see booths with “ask me” displays, or any interaction between players and musicians. Once in awhile you see some of these events at family concerts, but almost never at free concerts. The outreach potential is limitless and it won’t cost as much as many of the in school education programs. I’ll have much more about this idea in future blogs.

Another troubling aspect of Mr. Kaiser’s address is his belief that there is an oversupply of performances in many cities. Huh? There are too many orchestra concerts? He states: ” it seems clear to me that over the past two decades orchestras and their unions have agreed to expand the weeks of performances to a point where audiences are too small to fill every performance in many cities.” I think his analysis is as far from reality as possible. Smaller audiences have nothing to do with too many performances and everything to do with the lack of bringing in a new, younger audience. But that’s also another topic for a future blog. Stay tuned.