EXPANDING HORIZONS
Field Trip: Lincoln Center Festival 2007
Twenty-six members of Philadelphia’s nonprofit arts community joined PMP staff and representatives from The Pew Charitable Trusts for this year’s professional development trip to the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City. These included leaders of music institutions and performing ensembles, as well as guests from other disciplines, including visual arts and dance. From July 26 – 29, trip participants attended six symposia on a broad spectrum of artistic and administrative topics; five performances encompassing multiple disciplines; and took a tour of Richard Serra’s sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art.
Two of the artistic symposia attended by the group were curated by the Lincoln Center Festival: a discussion between choreographer Frédéric Flamand and architect Liz Diller (of Diller Scofidio + Renfro) about intersecting aesthetics in dance and architecture, as explored in Flamand’s “Metapolis II;” and George Benjamin, composer of “Into the Little Hill,” discussing the process of bringing his first opera to the stage.
In addition, PMP curated two artistic panels for trip participants. These were moderated by Limor Tomer, adjunct curator of performing arts at the Whitney Museum and executive producer in the music department at WNYC Public Radio. The first featured three New York music curators: George Steel, executive director at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre; Ronen Givony, who directs a relatively new chamber series called Wordless Music; and Neal Goren, founding artistic director of Gotham Chamber Opera. The panelists responded to questions about audience engagement, and how to create programming of contemporary work with broad appeal. George Steel stated simply: “I think if you put arresting, startling music in front of an audience—that is engagement. Everything else is fake and peripheral—the great art, that’s the real thing.” Along similar lines, Ronen Givony shared that he doesn’t run program notes for his concerts because he thinks that “there’s a feeling that classical music is something that people need to be brought into—that it’s not something a person off the street can just walk into a room and start listening to. The intention is good—to bring people into music and to educate them. But I think it actually ends up mystifying people more than not when you open up a program book and there are three pages about a Beethoven sonata. People are smart, and I think there’s a lot of hidden condescension in the way that concerts are presented. I really think that less is more.” Limor Tomer mused about her first eight months at WNYC and her quest to introduce new music programming there. “The first thing I did was I lost the word ‘classical.’ It’s not that we’re abandoning the 19th or 18th centuries—in fact, we’re having monthly commitment ceremonies with The Great Music. But we’re losing what I call ‘classicoid,’ you know, that kind of sound.” Tomer explained that WNYC hired her precisely because she offered them an outsider’s perspective—her background is not in radio, but in music presenting. “I was in the trenches for so long I’m used to fatigues and fighting the system. Now I am the system, so it’s an interesting way to be in New York, and it’s an opportunity for the New York cultural scene to speak with the press from a different kind of view.” The second PMP-curated panel featured three New York music artists: Michael Cain,
jazz pianist and composer and teacher at the New England Conservatory; Matt Moran, percussionist, composer, and leader of the band Slavic Soul Party; and Marilyn Nonken, pianist and director of piano performance studies at New York University. Marilyn Nonken told the story of her experiences starting out as a new music pianist when many around her were skeptical that this was a career path she should pursue. “At Eastman (School of Music), she recalled, “I fell in with a group of composer friends who were at this school with all sorts of talented, great players, but they couldn’t find anyone to play their music because people just wanted to play ‘the classical music.’ So I thought, ‘There’s a need for me to be playing this music—this is a way I can use my talent.’ It seemed very obvious to me that this made me valuable as a player.” Michael Cain narrated his journey from classical piano to jazz improvisation, and how he realized at a certain point that he wasn’t enjoying a lot of the music he was making, and he wanted to know why. “We like music that’s funky. In a lot of the musical communities I work with, whether we say it or not, the Holy Grail is to be funky.” A technically trained dancer, Cain mused on the role played by dance in the music that inspires him and that he wants to perform: “There’s a larger beat that includes the whole room. I want to know how people dance
Left to right: “Second Visit to the Empress”; “Mongolia”; “The Full Monteverdi,” photos by Stephanie Berger, www.stephaniebergerphoto.com
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Lincoln Center Festival 2007
to the music.” He then pointed out: “If it’s dance music, chances are it’s not in the Academy, and I want to know why that is.” Attendees were also treated to developmentfocused presentations by Susan Shiroma, senior librarian at the Foundation Center, and Kelly Cooper-Kordylewski, program associate at the MAP Fund (Multi-Arts Production Fund), a program of Creative Capital, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, both of whom suggested new avenues for arts funding. Ms. Shiroma informed attendees that the Free Library of Philadelphia is a Regional Foundation Center, offering the region’s largest public information collection on all aspects of fundraising, institutional advancement, and general philanthropy. In addition, Doug Bohr, senior program associate in Culture at The Pew Charitable Trusts, Martin Cohen, director of the Philadelphia Cultural Management Initiative, and PMP Director Matt Levy shared updates on new initiatives at Pew, PCMI, and PMP, and asked constituents for feedback on ways that Pew and its initiatives can further strengthen the music community. Much of the trip participants’ time was spent
in performances. These included “The Full Monteverdi,” a site-specific performance by Britain’s I Fagiolini vocal ensemble of Claudio Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of Madrigals. The performance felt at times like a series of private conversations on which the audience was eavesdropping, as six couples seated at tables around the audience sang an intimate sequence of breakups, make ups, and quarrels. The Ballet National de Marseille’s “Metapolis II,” featuring choreography by Frédéric Flamand, hinged on a convergence of ballet, film, video, and architecture. Set on a futuristic landscape, the ballet synthesized live film with the dancers’ movements and a set of interconnected silver sculptures. “Mongolia: Dance, Music and Ballad,” a concert intended to mimic the rhythms of community gatherings and entertainment in Mongolia, featured seven artists from different areas of the country. The energetic performance offered melodies from traditional popular songs performed on various lutes, fiddles, flutes, and a two-stringed horse-head violin (morin khuur), as well as indigenous dance (biyelgee), epic song (tuul), long chant (urtyn duu), and overtone singing (khöömii). British composer George Benjamin’s chamber opera, “Into the Little Hill,” created in collaboration with playwright Martin Crimp, was written in two parts specifically for soprano Anu Komsi and contralto Hilary Summers, each of whom played multiple roles. A retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story, this “lyric tale” revealed the classic not as a children’s story, but as a terrible allegory of betrayal, deception, and the power of music. “Second Visit to the Empress,” the first production of the classic Chinese Opera repertory piece in over 200 years, was conceived and directed by choreographer Shen Wei of Shen Wei Dance Arts. Sourcing 10 years of high-level opera training in his native China, Shen Wei incorporated four traditional Beijing Opera luminaries—Ms. Zhang Jing, Mr. Deng Mu Wei, Mr. He Wei, and Ms. Song Yang—into this, his first opera production. Experiencing and discussing art with such intensity over the course of four days proved fertile ground for participating members of PMP’s music and arts community, spurring new ideas for collaboration. “I was truly inspired by so much of what I saw,” wrote one attendee upon returning to Philadelphia.—E.S.
Left to right: “The Full Monteverdi” and “Into the Little Hill,” photos by Stephanie Berger; www.stephaniebergerphoto.com
Cambodian dancer Thavro Phim, photo by Toni Shapiro-Phim
FIELD TRIPS:
Spotlight: Philadelphia Folklore Project
Founded in 1987, the Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP) originated as a coalition of folklorists wanting to consider how best to mark the 100th anniversary of the American Folklore Society. Folklorist Debora Kodish and others established an office in a third floor room at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, and began by conducting fieldwork to familiarize themselves with the current state of folk traditions around the city. From the beginning, PFP’s mission has been defined by a commitment to sustaining cultural heritage in Philadelphia’s many neighborhoods. PFP’s approach of learning from—and with—communities makes a lot of sense when one begins to examine what folklore is, and what it means for life in Philadelphia. The term “folklore” was coined in 19th century England by scholars who began to study and document rapid changes in daily community life resulting from the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Kodish explains, “There have been many other names for this kind of attention to the arts and culture of everyday life, and the origins of the field of folklore can be pushed back even further, and to other places.” But, she adds, “overall, folklore represents a movement of scholars and activists from around the world interested in the costs of modernization, progress, and particularly in the arts and practices—handmade, community-rooted, vernacular—created by ordinary people, as part of everyday life.” Folklore’s origins seem particularly salient today, as the influence of American mass-produced culture reaches more places around the globe than ever before. Contrary to the common perception that folklorists are engaged in the romantic pursuit of remnants from a time past, they are more often seeking to document living traditions, to understand how they are created, evolve, and how they help their communities make meaning out of daily life or strengthen common bonds.
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by Emily Sweeney
Support for cultural diversity can take many different forms at PFP, from long-term collaborative projects culminating in concerts and exhibitions to professional development for individual folk artists, grant writing workshops, educational programs in public schools and community centers, and strategizing around broader political issues of resource allocation and city planning. “Biodiversity gets respect these days,” wrote Kodish in an email she circulated in April of 2001 reflecting on the success of Philadelphia’s Chinatown in resisting plans for a new Phillies stadium. “We need to begin to think about cultural diversity in the same way. Rather than erasing community differences, we should be preserving those neighborhoods that serve important and unique functions in our cultural ecosystem.” To that end, PFP began in its own backyard, creating programs focused on the folklife of family businesses and Italian folk arts, traditions from the South Philadelphia neighborhoods surrounding the Fleisher Art Memorial. During those first years, PFP also established the Philadelphia Folklife Archive; in 2007, the Archive houses more than 65,000 items, including photographic materiPMP 61