Symphonyonline summer 2012

LEAGUE

AT THE

It’s Essential Essentials of Orchestra Management, the League’s longrunning course on what it takes to lead an orchestra behind the scenes, is adapting to the needs of a changing industry.

by Susan Elliott

Faculty, staff, and participants in the League of American Orchestras’ Essentials of Orchestra Management seminar, January 2012

W

hat is the key personality trait for managing an orchestra?

Passion? Humor?

Confidence? Intellect?

“Humility,” said Deborah Rutter one morning last January, “is the key to good management.”

Rutter is president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She is also the co-leader, with San Francisco Symphony Executive Director Brent Assink, of the League of American Orchestras’ annual Essentials of Orchestra Management seminar.

“Orchestra management is a collaboration,” added Assink. “It is fun, exciting, confusing, and inspiring. And you have to be courageous.”

As the leaders of two of America’s healthiest symphony orchestras, Rutter and Assink know of what they speak. And this year from January 4 to 13 the pair generously shared their collective wisdom with some 30 would-be managers (and one fly-on-the-wall journalist) in the conference room of the League’s New York headquarters.

Launched in 2000 by Peter Pastreich, who had recently concluded his tenure as executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, the exhaustive (and exhausting) Essentials course is designed for early-career individuals with less than three years of experience in the orchestra field, or those from other professions thinking seriously about switching careers.

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This year’s crop hailed from orchestras small and large, volunteer and paid (or a mix thereof ), with a staff of one to a staff of 75.

Carrie Newman, newly named executive director of the Fort Collins Symphony Orchestra in Fort Collins, Colorado, had no previous experience in the field but plenty as a manager of nonprofits. Her orchestra, with 60 core professionals who live within a 100-mile radius, performs about 50 services a year in a variety of venues and cities, some requiring over two hours of travel time. Newman jokes that she is a staff of one and a half: “The development department is open when the file folder is open. HR is out right now.”

Newman was among the twelve executive directors attending the most recent

Essentials course. (Most of the others were from similarly small operations.) “The fact that more than a third of them are executive directors indicates to us that Essentials has become the place for new orchestra leaders to come,” says the League’s Polly Kahn, vice president for Learning and Leadership Development, the department under whose aegis Essentials falls. Indeed, of the 329 individuals who have attended Essentials over the last thirteen years, 224 are now active in the field and 59 are executive directors.

Among those who took the course and, as a result, changed professions are Cleveland Orchestra General Manager Gary Ginstling, who arrived in January of 2003 from Sun Microsystems, where he was senior marketing manager, and Peter symphony

SUMMER 2012