Audience Engagement
GUEST PERSPECTIVE
Why Willing Volunteers Still Don’t Show Up: How youth music programs can turn goodwill into support
Kathleen Staten, Founder, Your MBA Friend Consulting
Last month, my daughter’s choir director needed parents to take tickets to the year-end concert. I had been a choir singer and director myself, so I know the invisible work it takes to put students on a stage. When the request came, I wanted to be the kind of parent who showed up.
Then, my week got overwhelming. By the time the concert arrived, I was no longer deciding between helping and not helping. I was deciding which responsibility would boil over first if I took my attention off it.
Concerts for Babies Transform Stages Into Communities
Paulo Lameiro, Founder and Artistic Director, Concerts for Babies
In my small Portuguese village of Pousos, between the giant waves of Nazaré and the Shrine of Fátima, we had a community band. I joined at age 8, playing flugelhorn. I’m forever grateful for this decision, which launched a life in music. But it wasn’t until years later, when I served as the director of several conservatories, that I began asking why it took so long to get started.
One-Day Choirs
One-day choirs are growing in popularity.
EDITORIAL
Practicing Collaboration
Angelica Cortez, Executive Director, Suzuki Association of the Americas
In arts education programs, we tend to work with our heads down. Doing our work every day is enough: it takes more time than we have to create our lesson plans, to build healthy organizational infrastructure that is adaptive and responsive, or even to collaborate with the colleagues within our own organizations. As artists and arts leaders, we forget to look up and out. But as various crises combine forces to pull us away from each other, our need for collective work is not something we can afford to have on a backburner. It needs to be a central focus. We need to build strong local networks and to diversify our collaborators.
We need to connect—with fellow arts organizations, and with organizations we might never consider in our daily work.
World Orchestra Week at Carnegie Hall
James Ross, Orchestra Director, NYO-USA and NYO2-USA; Music Director, Alexandria Symphony, VA, USA; Director of Orchestral Studies, Curtis Institute of Music
Carnegie Hall’s World Orchestra Week festival in August was a week of one “WOW!” after another, as seven youth orchestras from five different continents joined forces in and around Carnegie Hall to play for and with each other, to share singular musical works and ethos from their countries, and to show us all what the next generation’s Wishes for Our World might be.
