The Knight’s
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ROSS: As far as the field itself, things were moving forward. We applied for our Unplugged program, which we had just started—musicians and staff and aud ience members would come together to try to design what this would look like. And we were denied, because we weren’t innovative enough. But they came back in Phase 2 and said, “You know what? We want your program now.” So that was an interesting dynamic.
Catherine Cahill
Tony Woodcock
John Forsyte
it would be good to hear from you about what the field felt like at that time.
Matthew Imaging
ROSEN: Brushing up on the Shining Eyes report, one of the things I found interesting was this observation that the quality of the initial 1994 Magic of Music proposals really wasn’t very good and seemed to reveal a lot of dysfunction in orchestras. It feels like the field is in a very different place now. As a way of setting some context for the Magic of Music program,
Tina Ward
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ast fall, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation published The Search for Shining Eyes: Audiences, Leadership and Change in the Symphony Orchestra Field by Dr. Thomas Wolf. The report— available in its entirety at www.knightfdn.org—summarized activities and findings of the Magic of Music Symphony Orch estra Initiative, which invested more than $13 million in fifteen orchestras from 1994 to 2004, aiming to tackle some of the systemic problems facing American orchestras. Its title comes from a quote by Benjamin Zander, conductor and member of the advisory committee: “When I look out and see all those shining eyes in the audience, I know we’ve created the magic.” That “shining eyes” theory was a basis for the initiative’s first phase, which examined ways to transform the concert-hall experience and reinvigorate the relationship between orchestras and their audiences through innovative pro grams and outreach involving all members of the musical family. A second phase grouped orchestras into consortia to continue the work and included an extensive classical-music consumer segmentation study that provided insights into attendance patterns. Shining Eyes documents this ground-breaking, decadelong examination of the relationship between orchestras, their audiences, and their place in the community. It also provides conclusions that prompted more than a bit of discussion in orchestra circles. In January, SYMPHONY con vened a group of Magic of Music participants and observers to reflect on their experiences and share opinions on the report’s findings, as well as their own lessons learned.
Anna Ross
Insider reflections on the decade-long Magic of Music initiative and its impact on the orchestra world
s Roundtable The Participants
Anna Ross is director of education and
community partnerships and a violist for the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, which joined Magic of Music in Phase 2, when thirteen orchestras were grouped into three consortia addressing issues such as how to reach new audiences. Fort Wayne’s Unplugged series, which takes an informal approach to concert presentations, was enhanced through participation in the initiative. Unplugged continues today, as audiences have grown accustomed to interactive concerts where they can ask questions and socialize with musicians.
Tony Woodcock participated in Magic
WARD: I can give you an anecdote. I was asked to be the musician representative at one of the first Knight meetings in which the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra participated. What I later learned was that I had been asked without the orchestra committee being included in the process of choosing a musician representative. On the way to the Knight meeting, I read the proposal. I was furious because the proposal included several statements that were incorrect. If the drafting of the grant proposal had been a truly inclusive process, in my
of Music during his 1998-2003 tenure as president of the Oregon Symphony. He was recently named president of New England Conservatory, after serv ing as Minnesota Orchestra president and CEO. The Oregon Symphony’s multimedia Nerve Endings programs carried throughout the Magic of Music initiative and served as a model for other orchestras looking to attract new audiences. Major funding in Phase 2 assisted production of Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezin, a re-creation of the requiem presented by Jewish inmates at that concentration camp.
ROSEN: Here’s one of the report’s obser vations: “The Magic of Music program’s impact on the field of orchestras was at once modest and significant. It was modest since it did not change the course of history for the orchestras’ field as some, perhaps naively, had hoped it would. It was significant because it was able to dispel long-held myths, foster new ways of doing business, and point to promising innovations.” Do you agree? WOODCOCK: I would characterize the program as a glorious failure. And the The Oregon Symphony’s multi-media production, Defiant Requiem, produced under the Magic of Music initiative
Catherine Cahill is CEO of the Brooklyn
Tina Ward, clarinetist for the Saint Louis
Symphony Orchestra, was among the orchestra’s members who participated in community-based initiatives that became integral to the orchestra’s mission and helped strengthen ties between musi cians and audience members. SLSO musician training became a model for other orchestras in Magic of Music, Phase 2.
Photos by Molly Sheridan
John Forsyte, president of the Pacific
Symphony, joined the discussion as an observer from the orchestra field, one of many who have faced challenges similar to those experienced by Magic of Music consortia members. Magic of Music activities were followed closely by orchestras across the country as the initiative unfolded.
Jesse Rosen, executive vice president and managing director of the American Symphony Orchestra League, served as moderator.
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Neil Borrud
Philharmonic. The orchestra participated in both phases of the Magic of Music program, initially with a concept called Interplays, which expanded upon thematic programming with weekend-long educational events, and later by focusing on audience engagement through concerts at the Brooklyn Mus eum of Art, Brooklyn Public Library, and neighborhood churches.
opinion the proposal should have read differently. I think that this reflected the lack of true collaboration that existed in my orchestra and in much of the field at that time. ROSS: We did have musicians on board committees and on our board, but the question of transparency was always there. It was still so new: What is the role of the musician on these committees, and is it their responsibility then to share information with their colleagues? And how does that create transparency?
reason I would describe it as a glorious failure was because they only focused upon activity. They thought new types of creativity—in terms of concert formats and concert-giving and all of those good things—would change the model by which orchestras operate. I think we all are aware that’s maybe one layer, but it’s not the panacea. For me, picking up the report held a mirror to the industry. It actually told us a great many things—and many things that we learn from now. I wrote down two of the major headings—I don’t know when I’ve ever seen these in a 27
The Brooklyn Philharmonic continues to engage the neighborhood with its Music Off the Shelves program.
Johanna Thomsen
that had to happen at the grassroots level so we understood each part of the organ ization.
report about orchestras before: “Dispelling Myths” and “Blasting Through the Fog.” It’s telling us something about their exper ience of us. CAHILL: One of the positive things, though, was the research that came out of the audiences. What they uncovered was what many of us knew internally—that we were operating with certain belief systems. If nothing else, this really intensive process of gathering information was brilliant. We are still using the data from the marketing piece to analyze where we are putting our resources. WOODCOCK: It profoundly changed my perception of the core audience and the single-ticket buyer. They were basically saying, “Look, life has moved on. Society is different. People have different ways of handling their leisure time. You need to honor, you need to value, your singleticket buyers as much as your subscribers.” And that has been a theme for me in our marketing approach.
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ROSEN: We’ve got a lot of themes out on the table to unravel. Tony, with regard to your reference to the project being a glorious failure because of the determination that simply altering the concert experience was not going to change the level of audience participation—that seems to have been figured out midstream, and there was a course correction to look at the whole question of delivery systems. 28
So let’s stay with Knight for a second, and their role. Were they doing more than a funder should? Were they being prescriptive? Were they overstepping their bounds? WOODCOCK: You know, I would say that they made the sort of demands that you should make. I don’t think that they should be criticized for that. I think the expectations were sky high. They put in what—$13, $14 million? They wanted to see something like a $150 million change to the industry. CAHILL: I always thought, God bless them for the amount of money they put in, but it was a small investment for the kind of return that they had hoped for. In simple terms, if you get $150,000 a year and you’re a $50 million orchestra, that’s a small contribution against your annual operating budget to demand all that time and commitment. And some orchestras had to pull back. ROSS: And they said, “Oh, this change is going to happen in this short amount of time.” It just was not happening. Because of all the course corrections, you’d start to go this way and then you got so confused about what exactly was being asked of you. The outcomes were very confusing. Maybe if they had gone with more resources and a longer period of time, trying to create systematic change. We have things we’ve been doing for years and years and years, and to bring all the partners together for the first time created a lot of conversations
WARD: I had the feeling when I walked into the Knight retreat that this was really an exciting potential for R&D. But one of the essentials of real research is that you’re open to what the results are. And they weren’t open to any result. Penicillin was discovered by mistake. The penicillin might have been there, but they weren’t willing to consider it because it wasn’t butts in seats. And it would take you away from anything else that might have been an interesting pursuit in just an R&D and learning sense. ROSEN: Do you feel that some unexpected outcomes arose in St. Louis? WARD: Some things weren’t recognized: What were the benefits to the musicians? Did the musicians have more shining eyes because of this? This did create a change in the organization’s culture, which was valuable. WOODCOCK: That was one of the greatest advantages of the entire program: They insisted that the musicians be involved. WARD: There are two aspects of that. There’s the participation with the work of the foundation and how that changed the person. There’s also, did the projects themselves change the musicians? And I think in the case of Saint Louis, they did. ROSEN: The report cites one of the lega cies of the work as having created a system atic way to encourage orchestras to test hypotheses about transformational change. Do you feel that the work provided tools for making change? Is there something lasting in your orchestras that allows you to continue—do you have the culture, the tools, the know-how to keep going as a result of this work? CAHILL: I think it’s fair to say that people weren’t communicating internally to the level that the Knight Foundation abso lutely required: board trustees, staff, musi May–june
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cians, all coming to a table. And you would sit with orchestras of very different budget size, different communities, and there was an enormous energy and almost a relaxed kind of sharing of issues and commonalities, which did translate back to the home front, to some extent. My board is now accustomed to thinking that this kind of collaboration and dialogue is not foreign. Musicians now come to meetings and participate and get information. So if that’s transformative, then yes, Knight created that environment for our orchestra. WOODCOCK: There are so many lessons that can be learned that should inform a strategic-planning process. Just listen to this: “Regardless of their aspiration for artistic excellence and prestige nationally and internationally, orchestras must be relevant and of service to their commun ities and to the people who live there if they hope to find the resources to survive.” In other words, every orchestra survives locally. Maybe that’s an axiom, but I think
that we need to have that in front of us all the time. And then this one, “Transformational change in orchestras is dependant on the joint efforts of all sectors of the orchestra family: music director, musicians, admin istration, and volunteer leadership and trustees.” How many orchestras can say that they are in alignment to allow that transformation to happen? Then the most important finding of all: “There is healthy support for the art form. The problems of orchestras stem not from the music they play, but from the delivery systems they employ.” That, to me, is meat. That should be something that we all debate both internally and through the League as well.
WOODCOCK: We started a series called Nerve Endings. The last big project that we did through Knight was this re-enactment of the Verdi Requiem performance that was given in Czechoslovakia. We did it in collaboration with PBS, so they put a lot of resources into it, a concert that was really done for television—a sort of docudrama approach. They really liked what was produced. But I think the entire project cost something like $750,000, and it was shown twice on television and that was it. Nobody could afford to show it again. So this very valuable work had very, very limited exposure and therefore it had limited influence upon change.
ROSEN: Let’s finish up this line of conver sation around the nature of work that’s happening at orchestras. According to the report, a lot of things didn’t work. How was failure greeted at your orchestra?
WOODCOCK: Inevitably, there were dis cussions about the pragmatic approach: Was this the right amount of resource to be spending on just one project?
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ROSEN: And what conclusions did the Oregon Symphony draw from that? Was it worth it?
Lessons Learned
Orchestras and foundations found some surprises in the Shining Eyes report’s conclusions. Do you agree with these findings? Free programming and outreach do not turn people into ticket buyers. “Free and subsidized outreach can be valuable for its own sake and is part of an orchestra’s service to its community. But it is not a technique to market expensive tickets.” Traditional audience education efforts, designed to serve the uninitiated, are often used primarily by those who are most knowledgeable and most involved with orchestras. “Over and over again, Magic of Music orchestras chose to abandon programs designed to attract new audiences because it was the subscribers who took advantage of them.” Orchestras need to do more research on those who do not attend their concerts. “Despite extensive research conducted on audiences and people who have been audience members, orchestras do very little research on nonattenders.”
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Funders need to be clear with themselves and grantees about desired outcomes. “Funders may use vague terms like ‘transformational change’ and ‘shining eyes’ (two terms used in Magic of Music) or they may choose to give little guidance to applicants about what, very specifically, they are looking for. Applicants can be equally vague in describing the outcomes of the proposed project. Both will undermine effective grant making.” Sometimes the unintended results of a foundation program are more significant than those that were planned. “With some of the individual orchestras, what occurred outside the initial grant-funded projects was often more important than the projects themselves.” If a grants program is to be evaluated, it is best to think about evaluation at the very start and design the program in a way that makes uniform data collection and meaningful evaluation possible. “It must also be able to put in place hypotheses that are testable, and systems for information collection that are achievable.” 29
WARD: One thing that bothered me a great deal about this report is it seems to me there’s an underlying belief that the value of an orchestra is measured by attendance. There is no place for doing something because it’s the right thing to do. We’re not-for-profits. We should be doing the right thing.
CAHILL: We, too, exchanged a lot of information within the group and looked at best practices and what worked. And we even looked outside the consortia—we and all the other groups would examine the programming. That was great. Because how else would you have gotten that information?
ROSEN: John, your orchestra wasn’t in the program, but the themes you’re hearing are surely familiar ones. What was happening at the Pacific Symphony? Were there some of the same observations, frustrations, issues around developing audience?
FORSYTE: I always wanted to know what provoked the initial spark to start the program. Was it really a concern for diminishing audiences? Or was it a concern for the budget deficit challenges facing
FORSYTE: I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there’s a very, very large presenter of classical music in Orange County that engages ten major orchestras every year. It’s probably one of the biggest visiting orchestra series outside of New York. It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on us to think about how we present concerts. We’ve spent a lot of time internally talking about the delivery systems, the style of concert format and so forth, and spent a lot of time in the audience-development realm. I was jeal ous of the orchestras that participated in the Knight program, without really knowing some of the realities. I thought, “Wow, incubation money, an opportunity to get together in these small groups… Wow, consortiums, that sounds like an amazing experience.” WOODCOCK: We found it frustrating. FORSYTE: See, that’s surprising to me. ROSEN: Were there any successes in the consortia where projects moved from one organization to another? WOODCOCK: The Nerve Endings model, for instance. We were in partner ship with the Wichita Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, and the Louisiana Philharmonic, I think it was. And some of the modeling that we did—in fact, some of the programs that we had done—were given to those orchestras.
“One thing that bothered me is an underlying belief that the value of orchestras is measured by attendance. There’s no place for doing something because it’s the right thing to do.” —Tina Ward orchestras, and were those bottom-line issues symbolic of audience-development problems? WOODCOCK: I think their perception was that orchestras needed to be encouraged to be more creative, and they formulated this program as a result. CAHILL: Basically they realized that sub scriptions were declining and that single tickets were not improving.
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ROSEN: Let’s go into audience research for a bit, particularly the segmentation study. This quote is great: “Magic of Music found May–june
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that orchestras were operating in a fog of vague assumptions about audiences, such as, if you can get them into the concert hall, they will most likely want to come again.” Did they get it right? ROSS: One of the things that we haven’t figured out and some of the other orch estras have is the initiator/responder concept. But with some new initiatives, different experiments that we’re doing, we’re finding people out there. We did this 72-hour sale. Every ticket was $20. We expected to sell 600 tickets. We sold 1,500. It was shocking. CAHILL: We just didn’t know. So any information was better than not knowing. Assuming it’s correct, it means there’s a great opportunity out there that we had not thought about before. WOODCOCK: The Knight Foundation did change my thinking—certainly our marketing approach. We started to take single-ticket buyers far more seriously. I took that philosophy to Minnesota as well. FORSYTE: What does that mean, you took them more seriously? WOODCOCK: Instead of them being the bane of our lives, we started to give them some value-added things. We started to make them part of the family, so they would get special offers and discounts and would be made to feel part of the organization—which I just think is absolutely essential. It’s actually empowered Minnesota to experiment. We had a series of concerts called Adventures in Music—Sunday afternoon, two con certs, families. It was just dying on its knees. And we thought, what do we do with this? Do we cut it? And the idea came about that we would re-invent it— improve the programming, the format, make it a lot jollier, and make it free. And we would get Target Corporation to underwrite it completely. We got Target to help us segment a market that we wanted to go for. We had 61,000 phone calls in two days—completely blocked our phone system. We had broken a barrier, s y m p h o n y
one of resistance to price. If you’re going to charge me $20 or $10 or $15, I find it hard to make a choice. It’s free? I’m intrigued by what you do and I’m going to come and experience it. That’s directly out of the confidence that I feel from the Knight Foundation. ROSEN: Presumably you had a lot of firsttime attendees. What, if anything, will bring them back? And does it matter if they come back? WOODCOCK: I think it’s okay that that’s how they experienced us, and that’s how they have a relationship with us. ROSEN: What really is the goal? If it’s not about attendance and orchestras are making choices to put resources into areas that don’t have a near-term attendance or box-office payoff, are there trade-offs in that for you? CAHILL: One thing that happened with the Knight program that was rather trans formative was that we invested in active community engagement. We had the init ial hope that this concert audience would become new consumers of our concerts and come to BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Philharmonic’s home venue]. Well, what we learned is exactly what Knight reports here: They don’t come to BAM. But, we had a huge institutional shift to say, “Now, wait a minute. What makes it wrong for them not to come to BAM?” What we learned from the data is that they are much more likely to come to something in their neighborhood. And where is it written that providing that kind of programming in those settings makes it of lesser value? That was a significant institutional mindset change for us. And because our programs are free, and we are now programming throughout our borough, in this respect we have been able to leverage public funding—quite effectively. FORSYTE: If you didn’t have a seat to sell…I mean you were sold out, wall-towall, do you think you would still do it? 31
CAHILL: Yes. Absolutely. Because it gets absolutely back to our mission. If nothing else, we’ve learned that serving our community is the way we’re going to engender support and actually meet our mission. ROSEN: It sounds like an emerging change around the relative importance of contributed and earned income. What you’re saying is there’s value from a mission standpoint in doing work that may not result in subscriptions and box-office revenue, because it actually creates other revenue opportunities on the contributor side. CAHILL: Without question. Our bal ance has dramatically changed because of it. Frankly, it’s helped us on our sheer survival, on a very practical basis. But it’s not just about survival. It’s much more about “Who are we serving and why are we here?” WOODCOCK: I think that if there was a Knight 2—for me—it would be about the role of the orchestra in its community. What’s the structure to support that? How do you achieve financial stability to make all of that work?
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ROSEN: I want to ask about the music directors who, of course, are not seated around the table. One of the report’s observations was the difficulty in bringing them to the table throughout. The ones who did come—what role, if any, did they continue to have as the Magic of Music unfolded? Were they equal partners with musicians and trustees and staff in developing, sharing, producing, generating the work? WOODCOCK: It was sort of peripheral. CAHILL: It was cosmetic, at best. And I had a music director who actually did participate at appropriate times. It goes back to a more fundamental question that came up earlier. If this was really a ten-year R&D adventure without prescriptives and
marketing studies and other things that morphed as the years progressed, there might have been a greater opportunity for some music-director participation. Music directors plan their schedules three to five years out. If it had been absolutely all about R&D and meetings would occur while the music director was in town, in their location—as opposed to summoning
“They gave us the resources to build a program that has had an impact after their funding finished. It’s been instrumental in helping transform our relationship to the community.” —Catherine Cahill them elsewhere—it might have been a very different opportunity. I think as the program morphed, it got further away from the music director anyway. Because it became about marketing. ROSS: I don’t really think it had to do with planning far enough in advance, because regardless, our music director would have needed more things on the grass-roots level to be able to participate in meetings and understand what’s going on. WARD: I would say David Robertson, the music director we have now, is a learning animal. He just takes everything in and processes it. Someone like that exposed to this information would be reflective of a change. He would be open to it. He would learn. He would evolve. I believe that many music directors, by the time they’ve reached that point in their careers, are no longer learning animals. They’re established animals. May–june
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ROSEN: What do you believe has been the single most important benefit of the Magic of Music program?
evaluating, so we understand that there’s a life cycle, that you have to constantly re-evaluate what you’re offering. We were changed by the experiences with our consortium—our experience of learning from the other orchestras, seeing what worked and what failed and taking those lessons back and saying, “How do we reconcile this within our organization?”
WARD: I think also there is a necessity to come up with measures of success for the R&D. And that should be open to totally different conclusions, which is to me one of the real faults I’m observing here. The measure of success became so narrow that the projects by themselves begin to feel wrong, even though they may not be.
CAHILL: They gave us the resources, the confidence, to go figure out how to reposition our role in our community. We needed to do that anyway. They gave us the resources to build a program that has had an impact after their funding finished, and has been instrumental, really, in help ing transform our relationship to the com munity, making a real difference in some people’s lives. Whether it’s our seniors programs or our programs that we do in churches where maybe somebody has never heard a violin before, or when we’re in libraries and we’re connecting literature and music and there are people who never knew there was a Brooklyn Philharmonic—and there are plenty who don’t. We’ve learned that they don’t come and buy tickets. So if that’s the measure of success, then we failed. But I think overall it was an enormously transformative invest ment in us that helped transform the way we see ourselves and the way we conduct business.
ROSEN: Let’s pretend that you’re a panel of advisors brought in to consult with a major national foundation that wants to make a multi-million dollar investment in orchestras. They want to do something that’s helpful, but they’re not quite sure what that is. What would you tell them?
ROSS: As a musician, too, how do the musicians take value from the community piece? Can they find it in themselves to say, “This is really important and this is why it’s important.”
WARD: I think a lot of what has happened in the field—and some of it is attributable to Knight—is the lack now of distinct boundaries. Like your description of the ability of the constituencies to work better and be willing to listen to each other and to have some belief that there may be truth instead of untruth and posturing. I think that’s huge, and I hope it continues to evolve. The first meeting I went to began a personal transformation, which has changed my life. It took me on a journey of learning that I never imagined.
CAHILL: No, no, no. I’m saying that if the resources are going into an R&D program, you’re giving the underpinning, allowing that to occur.
WOODCOCK: I think it expanded the experience of the Oregon Symphony— hugely. I think it’s created a very interesting dynamic within the orchestra, a certain curiosity about other ways of thinking.
CAHILL: I would argue that whatever the grant is, a piece of it should go to the organization’s general operating sup port, which is not attractive to some funders, but that consumes a lot of our time to secure. A piece should go to an endowment fund—make it restricted to R&D. Because without that, we end up spinning our wheels, turning into pretzels to satisfy a new funding agenda. WOODCOCK: If I were the foundation offi cer, I wouldn’t find that attractive enough. You’re basically saying to me, “I want business as usual and when I’ve got that stabilized, I’ll do R&D.” That’s what I’m hearing.
CAHILL: If the discussion were to move to a Knight 2 and it was about community, et cetera, you might want to have a couple of the key music schools come to the table. Because that’s the training ground for musicians, to understand that they’re not just being trained to sit on stage for eight services a week and that just playing those excerpts does not make a full career for a musician in today’s environment. WOODCOCK: I would really support that. ROSS: I agree. I mean just in talking to some of the New World Symphony fellows as well, just when they’re coming out of school with some of their preconceived notions of what their job is going to be when they get into the field. I think that’s important. WARD: Big time.
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ROSS: As far as Fort Wayne, Knight was very important for us—financially—to get us through sometimes. But also we focused on the Unplugged product, the audiencedevelopment concerts that we are now res y m p h o n y
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