Above: members of the Search Committee during an all-day, marathon session of Zoom interviews with 11 potential finalists, discussions, and votes.
The Search for a New Music Director Kelly Vaneman “Hi Kelly—this is Karen Parrott. I’m on the board of the Spartanburg Philharmonic and am heading up the search for our new Music Director, and I’d love to talk to you about joining the search committee!”
to use by winnowing that number down to a workable amount. Though the committee had access to all the applications, we quickly focused in on the 46 that Henry green-lighted. And thus the “big lift” of the search process began—we each had to got to look through 46 files of letters, resumes, video clips, and websites and rank them before the first big meeting in late September, where we’d winnow the list down to 10-15 semifinalists.
I could not have been more pleased to receive that voice mail from Karen Parrott back in July. I actually really enjoy being on search committees—at their best, searches become broad learning opportunities—and the group that Karen outlined seemed perfect: four Philharmonic musicians, four board members, and two staff members, to be joined by Arts Consultant Henry Fogel. It’s a diverse group of folks from different backgrounds and skills and different musical experiences, but all share a love of music and the Spartanburg Philharmonic. We had our first meeting on Zoom in late August to get to know each other and lay out some procedures, and then we were off and running.
Music searches, in my experience, are usually more time-consuming than other sorts of searches, for the simple reason that music happens in time. You can figure out how to read through letters and resumes pretty quickly, but a video of the first movement of Brahms’ Symphony no. 1 is going to take as long as it takes—you can’t speed up the tempo. And each of those 46 applicants had sent us at least three different video links. Even if you don’t watch the entire Brahms symphony, that’s still about as many minutes of watching as the entire first season of Only Murders in the Building (but with less murder and more bassoons). To make the time line even more challenging for me, my September is always chock-full of college freshmen,
Over the next couple of months, the Philharmonic office received over 150 applications! Kathryn Boucher proved to be a master Dropbox organizer, and Henry Fogel put his formidable musical management skills 42
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