collaborator regarding education, but there are many, including senior centers, secondary schools, and community centers. Others suggested that if orchestras could behave more like educational institutions, and less narrowly as purveyors of concerts, the results would be broad and profound, and that their value to their communities might be significantly increased.
to teacher, board member to civic leader.” Central to both community engagement and education is partnership, which served as a unifying theme for the summit’s final panel, “Sustainable Partnerships: What Works?” While most orchestras take part in one or more cooperative ventures, many partnerships are artistically ineffective and financially unsustainable. Accord-
Left to right: University of Michigan Associate Professor of Strategy Michael Jensen, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra President Lawrence Tamburri, and Summit organizer Michael Mauskapf speak at a panel on “Thinking Outside the Box: Organizational Structures and Strategies.”
Ayden Adler, director of education at The Philadelphia Orchestra, re-examined the values implicit in American orchestra culture to expose its hidden hierarchies: art over entertainment, professionals over amateurs, concert halls over community venues, symphony concerts over education concerts. Adler argued that orchestras often focus on increasing the supply of concerts rather than attending to audience demand, and advocated for thinking of art as a spectrum of possibilities. Reno Philharmonic CEO Tim Young and Music Director Laura Jackson said their orchestra, which remains in the black and continues to expand its programming despite Nevada’s dire economy, has increased community investment in part through an active online dialogue with its audience. As a result Reno just founded a third youth symphony and included more than 400 community musicians in its sold-out holiday concerts. For Jackson, “artistic wealth is created one neighbor at a time—person to person, musician to listener, conductor americanorchestras.org
ing to Russell Willis Taylor, president of the nonprofit National Arts Strategies in Washington, D.C., partnerships must be undertaken strategically and in a spirit of mutual investment. Each partner organization must align its efforts and goals, focusing on both what it “brings” to the relationship and what it “gets.” For Taylor, collaboration is a muscle that must be exercised regularly—with every arts organization’s first and most important collaborator being its audience. Aaron Dworkin—founder and president of the Sphinx Organization, who has initiated numerous partnerships as an administrator and a violinist—offered advice about creating successful collaborations. Dworkin said that partnering organizations must create written, plain-language documents that make mutual expectations and responsibilities clear, but warned that they should “trust but verify.” For Dworkin, verbal arrangements are not sustainable and successful partnerships need to make sense not just to a few individuals, but to the whole or-
ganization. Many on the panel suggested that being selective in identifying partners and integrating these relationships deeply into an organization’s activities is more effective than creating a number of superficial associations. Susan Key, director of education for the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score project, highlighted, for example, the importance of the symphony’s deep, ongoing relationships with local music teachers. What then, might a successful collaboration look like? One example suggested at the conference of a thematic festival that successfully integrates the work of scholars, historians, administrators, and musicians was panelist Joseph Horowitz’s “Dvorak in America,” a collaborative public program that often involves orchestras as well as teachers and students from kindergarten through graduate school. Scholars from organizational studies and other business disciplines need to do more to help understand what motivates listeners to attend classical concerts. Academics participating in collaborations with orchestras need access to current data and historical records as well as the ability to publish results in academic journals. Orchestras, on the other hand, need practical (not just theoretical) conclusions and some protection of confidentiality. Barbara Haws, the creator of the New York Philharmonic’s extensive new online archive, urged orchestras to study, value, and leverage their own histories, but also asked participants to lobby for the inclusion of music and orchestras into the broader narrative of American history. If the histories taught in secondary schools and colleges ignore the contribution of music and orchestras to American life, it becomes that much harder to make the argument that music matters to our future donors and policy makers, who have no exposure to the art form in school. One concept that gathered momentum over the course of the summit was service exchange. Introduced in the opening panel by Ryan Fleur, service exchange refers to the hiring of musicians for services outside of rehearsals and concerts, such as teaching, mentoring, or even hosting a local radio show. When implemented cooperatively by musicians and management, this model can strengthen an orchestra’s social-service mission and eventually may help to balance its budget and multiply its community connec-
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