Thomas Cabaniss

To bring those personal artistic experiences to our audiences, I'll restate the thesis of our adventures this weekend.

We musicians have the opportunity to connect meaningfully and personally through encouraging musical creativity. Those experiences with creativity can lead to deeper and more perceptive listening, they can put audience members back in touch with their own personal creativity, and they can satisfy people's innate desire to play.

Jon Deak is a perfect embodiment of that notion, since he plays nightly on the concert stage but is also clearly devoted to his role and responsibility as composer to bring his passion for creativity to others. But there are also other of us, inside and outside of the core body of musicians with interests and skills related to musical creativity whose passions can be tapped. I noticed that the Fall retreat materials contained the following:

"Among the innovative acts at the core of an orchestra is that of the composer (alive or past) who, in creating and shaping sound into complex architecture, addresses thousands of issues around
innovation, every time he or she begins work. If and when a piece gets completed, it stands as a living
testimony to a struggle with, and a discovery about, the medium of music, balancing always, and in
different ways, the renewal of a tradition of order and the entry into a place of novelty. Related acts of
innovation occur when interpreters come together to perform compositions."

All of us as musicians can encourage creativity. We can support the endeavors of amateur musicians who crave the experience of interacting with the orchestra. We can nurture the interactive community that Doug suggests through our artform if we have the courage to open it up through a spirit of risk-taking and play.

This is not a call for new programs but a shift in thinking about what our expanded role is as a musical organization going forward. Lowell exhorted us to be "unbounded" in our imaginings, and I think it can lead to new thinking in concert presentation, audience building, and institutional growth.

John Shibley

A long time ago I watched an aggressive, domineering executive learn a set of collaborative tools, only to use these tools to take over meetings more effectively. It was a stunning lesson: unless you change your intention and your beliefs, changing what you DO simply makes it possible for you to do the wrong thing more effectively.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but as I reflect it seems that there are two types of changes we talk about for orchestra.

In the first type are changes that preserve the orchestra’s intentions and collective beliefs about itself but change how those beliefs find their way into the world through action.

I think the ubiquitous pre-concert lecture is a good example. They are an interesting thing to do that is entirely consistent with the basic assumptions of the orchestra: that information moves from the stage to the audience for example, or that what the audience needs to enter more deeply into the musical experience is to simply know more about what is already occurring on the stage.

The second type of change reflects shifts in intentions and beliefs, in what the orchestra assumes.

I was talking with Marianne Lockwood and Katy Clark at the last Forum, and they were explaining to me some of the ways that St. Luke’s works. I was struck by 3 “rules” or governing principles they described for the Orchestra (I hope I am getting these correctly):

• Individual musicians play the gigs they want to play
• The Orchestra will entertain any request to play, and the musicians as a group decide what gigs to take
• Musicians get paid for services

See? These changes represent different tactics, certainly, but more significantly, they reflect very different beliefs about where choice and responsibility should reside in the orchestra structure. It may not be a world everyone wants to live in, but it represents a very different kind of change than instituting pre-concert lectures.

The question I’m chewing on is what needs to change in orchestras – their activities, or the intentions and beliefs that drive those activities?

Thomas Cabaniss

What needs to change, John Shibley asks. Is it activities or intentions and beliefs? I agree that a change in intentions and beliefs is preferable to pasting another program onto an already overcrowded set of initiatives.

To take John's example of the preconcert lecture, here is a story from Philadelphia that might prove useful.

Last season, as part of our efforts to bring a shift in thinking to a variety of our audience engagement efforts, we decided to experiment with our preconcert lectures. On certain nights we opted not to have our usual suspects -- musicologists, music historians, all very knowledgeable and generally engaging folks -- but to have musicians and yours truly the animateur instead. In each of these sessions we included an interactive element which asked the audience to "do something" -- make an artistic choice, perform some simple musical material, something drawn from the spirit of our retreat's musical adventures. The musicians spoke, demonstrated, responded to audience questions. All of the information about the piece came about through this interactive experience.

How did it work? What did we discover? (We conducted surveys and videotaped focus groups to test the experiment) The half-filled concert hall (where we held these events) was not a particularly hospitable place for inviting interactivity (we expected that to an extent...). Our preconcert lecture audience (core audience with a high level of knowledge) was intrigued but not bowled over by the interactive portion. (Groups of college students who uncharacteristically stumbled in on a couple of nights, on the other hand, were quite enthusiastic.) The main thing that everybody loved was hearing directly from the musician, hearing them play and asking questions.

This season, trying to learn from our missteps in an otherwise laudable experiment, I fired myself and kept the musicians in the mix. Now they undertake these preconcert events themselves with a little less challenging interactivity and more direct engagement with audience members (sometimes an animateur's job is to get out of the way!). We still have our musicologists and music historians, but we have injected the events with more musician involvement than we had in the past, and both sides of the equation (audience/musicians) seem happy with the balance.

We still need to address the finding that our college students expressed a vastly different reaction to the interactive nature of what we did...

Thomas Cabaniss

Here is the article I mentioned on the first day of our retreat -- a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry that highlights the usefulness of play.

American Journal of Psychiatry 163:682-688, April 2006
doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.163.4.682
© 2006 American Psychiatric Association

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/163/4/682

Natural History of Male Psychological Health, XV: Retirement Satisfaction

George E. Vaillant, M.D., Ana C. DiRago, Sc.B. and Ken Mukamal, M.D.
OBJECTIVE: Although previous studies of shorter duration have identified numerous risks and protective factors that powerfully influence outcomes in young adulthood and midlife, this long-term prospective study examines the effect of these prognostic factors on age at retirement and satisfaction with retirement. METHOD: In this prospective study, a cohort of socially disadvantaged men (N=151) were followed from adolescence until a mean age of 75 years (SD=2). Periodic interviews, biennial administration of questionnaires, and physical examinations every 5 years were conducted to determine biopsychosocial risk variables, age at retirement, and satisfaction with retirement. RESULTS: Early age of retirement was found to be a function of preexisting mental and physical health and later age of retirement a function of occupational status. A surprising finding was that risk factors such as poor objective physical health, low income, and depression, which are commonly associated with poor outcomes in young adulthood and in midlife, were largely unrelated to satisfaction with retirement. CONCLUSIONS: A relatively high level of satisfaction with retirement was often attained by men who had reported many risk factors for poor child and midlife development (e.g., low IQ, dropping out of school, poor mental health, and being part of a multiproblem family) but who in later life had some positive resources (e.g., a good marriage, a low level neuroticism, enjoyment of vacations, and a capacity for play). In short, retirement may offer some men a fresh lease on life.