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Hi, Jeffrey, how are you?
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I'm doing good, thanks.
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Thank you for joining me.
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Okay, diving right in, arts entrepreneurship.
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Have you seen any changes in students or the field post pandemic?
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Yes, I think I have.
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And I think there were some trends that maybe were beginning even before the pandemic, but
the pandemic has amplified them.
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Namely that I think students are much more aware of the challenges that they're gonna face
out there in the world with their careers.
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You know, when I started doing this back in 2009, there were still a...
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fairly large chunk of students, maybe not a majority, but a large percentage who needed to
be convinced that this was something that they should pay attention to or care about.
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They still were under this idea that somehow the world was gonna beat a path to their door
because of their wonderfulness.
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uh now I really don't see too many students who have that idea.
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And as I say, that was starting to already change.
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before the pandemic, but since then, I think all of that has just ramped up because
there's so many other factors in the world that are underscoring the challenges that all
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young people are gonna face with their careers, regardless of whether or not they're in
the arts.
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So um that's been a pretty big change, I would say.
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It's interesting because hearing you say that to me, that almost sounds like that was it.
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That's a benefit, right?
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That that they're more aware than maybe thinking, as you said, everything is going to come
to them and it's going to be fine.
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Well, I think it depends on sort of what the person does with that knowledge that maybe
things are not going to be so easy.
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um Because on the one hand, if that motivates them to put more energy into these kinds of
things and to be thinking entrepreneurially, then you're absolutely right.
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There's a benefit there.
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But if that just generates more anxiety about the future,
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which again, I think students of all fields these days are experiencing enormous anxiety
about what awaits them out there in the world for all sorts of reasons, right?
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um If that contributes to anxiety, then that's not necessarily a positive thing.
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And I think that maybe for many students it ends up being just another thing to worry
about.
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Right, and not to sound harsh, sometimes I like to push one end or the other, but it's a
tough field to be in.
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It was a tough field to be in, you know this, pre-pandemic.
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So for me, not saying anxiety's a good thing, but it's a stressful job to be an arts
administrator and have to worry about boards and audience and artistic excellence and
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funding disappearing, you know what I'm saying, on and on and on.
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So for me, that's why I see that maybe, and again, I'm not promoting anxiety in the least,
but that preparedness in those that are determined that, this is what I want to do.
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Perhaps it's hardening us a little bit to look at this like any other industry.
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Yeah, think that's valid and I think ultimately that is a good thing.
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You know, one of the harsh realities right now for those of us in higher ed is that we are
graduating way more graduates than there are jobs in music in particular.
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so it's, we need to face that.
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One of the ways that I face that is to talk a lot about transferable skills, to recognize
that musical training prepares you for all kinds of other pursuits, and that if a student
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decides partway through their music major that they don't want to be a professional
musician, that...
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They absolutely have not wasted their education or wasted time or they have certainly not
failed.
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You know, that there are lots of other ways that they can take these skills that they're
developing and apply them to a satisfying career.
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And so that's certainly something that um maybe another change that's happened over the
recent years is that I'm spending even more time talking about transferable skills than
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ever before.
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Which I talk about that all the time because when I'm trying to get funding for the arts,
I talk about how you can't be innovative if you're not creative and entrepreneurs, I would
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argue an artist or creative is the very foundational.
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Example of an entrepreneur, right?
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And but yet I know one university that they measure program success based on.
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how many people graduate and get jobs in that field, in the field that they graduated
with, right?
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So the arts on one hand could get dinged and maybe is getting dinged because we can
graduate our students and they can have those skills transfer into any industry.
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Do you see that?
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You're nodding, so I'm assuming that yes, that relates with you as well.
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Absolutely.
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I really think that's not just unique to music if we're talking about transferable skills.
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mean, music is, I think, particularly rich in transferable skills.
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But I think it's true for virtually any college graduate.
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And we have data that shows that, right?
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That people not only will change jobs multiple times over the course of their career, they
will change their career direction.
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more than once.
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uh Many, many, many people, right?
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And so the idea that I'm going to major in, fill in the blank, doesn't, it could be music,
it could be business, it could be anthropology, I don't care.
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That somehow your undergraduate education is gonna be the thing that you're gonna stay in
for the rest of your life.
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We know that's not true, and it hasn't been true for decades.
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And so...
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I think that schools that are still using that as a metric are really doing themselves a
disservice, doing the students a disservice.
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They're missing the boat because that's not the way professional lives unfold these days.
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The idea that, know, my grandparents who maybe, you know, one of them was a photo engraver
for the newspaper.
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That's where he worked his entire life and he started there as a young man and he retired
from there and that just hardly ever happens anymore.
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Right.
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It's interesting.
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I'm recalling a New York Times article that I just read the other week about uh Gen X
generation and how we were brought up with no technology.
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Right.
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And, I went into journalism and now journalism's dying.
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I think there's so much thing.
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There's so many aspects of what technology has done to drive and change landscapes of
jobs, graphic design, animation, arts, all of that, that, yes,
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it would be unheard of for us today to start out in our 20s in one job and still be there
in our 50s.
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So there's a lot of change.
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Yeah.
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And I wish that higher education was more comfortable talking about that because I think
many people are uncomfortable talking about it because they feel that that means that
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somehow as a music educator or as an anthropology professor or whatever it is that I'm
teaching, that somehow if all my kids don't go forward and be anthropologists, that
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somehow...
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That's a failure on my part.
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And so we sort of shy away from talking about that.
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And I think we should press into that because not only is it the reality that students are
going to face, but it's...
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it relieves one of the major drivers of that anxiety that I was talking about.
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The idea that the kids have in their head that they've got to have it all figured out now
at age 19.
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I didn't know where the heck I was going at age 19.
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I didn't figure it out for, I like to say I didn't really figure it out until I was in my
40s.
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oh
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mean, Jeffrey, I'm still trying to figure it out.
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you know, I completely get it.
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mean, so there's so many overlapping topics or questions with that.
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One comes to mind is STEM.
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I don't think it's a coincidence that for the last 25 years we've seen, quote, creativity
die or diminish in the workplace, right?
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As we've taken out
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the arts or creative ways of teaching or thinking in school.
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And we've solely focused on STEM.
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I think that's one dimensional.
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As we're seeing higher ed go through a lot of this, these pressures to streamline and cut,
and we're seeing the arts and humanities get removed.
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There was one university president who was one of the beginning schools that started
cutting humanities and creative.
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courses and he said, you know, we are determined to be an engine of creativity and
innovation.
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And I just laughed at that hole in which you did too.
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I mean, where do people think creativity comes from?
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Well, that's right.
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And I think that the um almost fetishization of STEM, if you will, uh in education is
because STEM is so much easier to evaluate.
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We can test on it more easily.
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We can say, well, the person who majored in engineering, they went on to become an
engineer.
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It's much easier.
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to quantify and we seem to think that that's what we should be doing with education.
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And the arts are so much harder to kind of, you know, to get your hands around.
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But you're absolutely right.
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You know, where is creativity gonna come from?
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And in those STEM fields, creativity is essential to the next breakthrough or the next
technological advance.
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And...
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There's so many things about that.
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I mean, when I was in college, I also fell in love with geology.
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And so I ended up double majoring in music and geology.
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So I understand the joys of studying science and always have that sort of that part of my
brain.
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But I always saw that these two parts of myself were really complimentary.
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That in order to be a good geologist, my...
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oh
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my artistic mind informed the way I looked at challenges that I was finding out in the
field or in the laboratory, that these things are not mutually exclusive.
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Somebody somewhere along the line coined this phrase that STEM needs steam to rise,
meaning we need to the A in there.
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And that's really the way I look at it.
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So I mean, anybody who says, well, we're going to just focus on STEM and we don't need the
arts and humanities.
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I think they're being extraordinarily short-sighted because...
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But yeah, to me it says they don't understand what we're getting from the arts and
humanities for them to say that.
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So to go back to an earlier point and just this whole notion of more anxious students and
how do we prepare them for the future, it kind of gets into my eh noticing a little
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frustration with this notion of status quo and that I often hear arts leaders say, well,
we've always done it this way.
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And I thought that the pandemic could have been the opportunity to really shake the
bedrock of our sector to say, okay, now we can actually change and we need to change.
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But yet I'm seeing, or I saw a lot of people falling back to status quo and this scarcity
mindset, right?
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And survival mode.
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Are you addressing that with students or how can we best prepare the next leaders in the
arts?
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to take a fresh approach, to kind of push back against this notion of we've always done it
this way, so this is how we should continue to move forward.
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Yeah, yeah, and I'm reminded of somebody like Warren Buffett or somebody like that who
said, you know, that's the deadliest phrase for any organization is we've always done it
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that way.
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Right?
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um Well, I start again with kind of taking a uh kind of a STEM approach to the question to
say, okay, let's start with data.
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Right?
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Let's say what the numbers show us.
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And we can see
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uh Because the NEA has, at least until now, uh know, tracked attendance data in all of the
arts.
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can look at that information and we can see audiences declining over the last 30 years.
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We can see um funding for the arts decreasing over the last 30 years.
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So the notion that any administrator would say, well, you know, it's too risky to...
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to risk changing or trying something new.
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Well, you know, that's the definition of insanity, right?
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Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
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And that's what many folks in the arts have been doing for the last 20 or 30 years.
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And so, I mean, what stronger argument do we need that there is a need for some new
approaches?
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I do think that, again, the students...
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the younger generation is much more open to that idea because they are more aware of the
realities as we were talking about a minute ago.
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And so they do see the need to try new things.
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They're just always not sure how to go about.
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developing those ideas and evaluating them and implementing them.
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And then of course that's where I come in and say, okay, well let's talk about the
entrepreneurial process.
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Let's talk about how you evaluate an idea, how you even come up with an idea to begin
with, and m then how you implement that idea out in the marketplace.
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And I feel like my role is really about empowering our students to, first of all, see that
they're
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perspective matters and that their creativity can be brought to bear on these things and
that there is an imperative that they do that because the existing models continue to
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struggle and they will continue to struggle until we come up with some new ones.
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Yeah, and so I'm reminded that you are a McDowell Fellow and a professor.
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So you are not, uh you are very used to marrying art and thought leadership together in
your career and in your day-to-day life.
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How can we help emerging arts administrators, arts entrepreneurs in looking at the
possibility of becoming a thought leader, whether it's in civic leadership?
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or getting into roles where we're not talking about we need a seat at the table, but we're
actually taking a seat at the table and then applying what we know that we get from the
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arts to problem solving in every community.
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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I think that part of the answer anyway is for the would-be administrator or entrepreneur
to not ever see that as being separate from their artistic practice.
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ah And that's certainly something that I'm very passionate about.
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I'm still active as a composer.
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I view my work as a composer.
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as being absolutely hand in glove with my work as an entrepreneur and as an advocate um
because it's all in service to the art.
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And I think that while administrators do need to think entrepreneurially, they do need to
think about the business side of things because there are realities, they have budgets,
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have financial limitations, they have to address those things, of course.
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But...
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to recognize that if the way they are advocating, the way they are promoting their
organization, the way they are thinking about their programming, if they start with the
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art and the audience that they're trying to connect with, and they look about how to make
that connection the most vibrant connection that they can make.
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Most of the rest of it will more or less, I won't say it'll fall into place, but it will
emerge, the path will emerge about how to go about the rest of it.
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But so often we disconnect those two things and we make assumptions about what audiences
want or what they will tolerate or what they're looking for.
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And we don't challenge those assumptions and we make programming decisions.
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and institutional strategy decisions based on those assumptions.
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And it's no surprise that then things sometimes go off the rails.
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You're making me think about, um and I don't know if you can think of an example, but when
we think about traditional arts, classical music, um theater, um fine arts, anything that
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we have, it's evolved over time, right?
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So now when we have organizations worrying about aging audiences or not being able to
engage,
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younger audiences are, is there an example, and I don't know this answer, uh is there an
example where we've adapted historically to, okay, my mind now goes to, okay, this is
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where I'm gonna like the pause edit, my mind goes to Bernstein, right?
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Where, and he brought classical music to the masses through television, making it
approachable.
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Are there examples like that that you can look at to say how we as a sector today should
be adapting to be more relevant to the current potential audience member?
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mean, there certainly are.
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um
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Well, I'm thinking about, for instance, like the LA Phil and the work that Dudamel has
done there, where because he came from the El Sistema tradition and built a really robust
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El Sistema uh program and culture in Los Angeles, that he began to uh sort of position the
role of the orchestra in the community in a different way, right?
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I haven't done a uh deep dive case study of the LA Phil to know well that reflected in X
number of increases in attendance or donors or whatever.
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But I do know that as orchestras go, that orchestra has done pretty well over the last 20
years.
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And when he announced that he was leaving, there was a lot of grief and angst in LA
because he has been such a force for good.
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And I think that's.
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one example of the kinds of things that orchestras can be doing to become more relevant in
their community.
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Unfortunately, most of the examples that I can think of are negative examples.
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uh One of my favorite stories, and I won't name the orchestra, but uh a friend of mine is
a principal in a major orchestra.
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We'll just put it that way.
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And he posted something on uh social media.
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This is...
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before the right before the pandemic.
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So it's a while back now.
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And he said, Hi, everybody, I need a little little crowdsourcing here for me.
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I've been put on my orchestra's diversity committee.
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I'm not really quite sure why maybe it's because I'm a gay guy.
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Otherwise, I'm just a white guy, right.
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But I'm on the diversity committee.
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And we've been tasked with trying to come up with some programming that will reach
underserved and minority and marginalized communities in our city.
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And I have, just, don't even know where to start.
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So I would love to hear your ideas.
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And I thought, oh boy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop some popcorn here and I'm just gonna watch
the comments, right?
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And so for several days, you know, 125 comments or so that people say, well, you should
try this.
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You should try this.
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You should try this.
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You should try this.
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And I'm thinking to myself, well, some of these might be great ideas, but they have
skipped over.
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the most essential thing.
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And finally, when I couldn't stand it anymore, I commented.
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said, well, if you want to reach marginalized communities, why don't you talk to them
about what they want?
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Right.
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And it just shut the whole conversation down.
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I was just like, you know, I don't know if any of these ideas are good.
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Maybe some of them are brilliant ideas, but you're skipping the most important step.
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You've got to figure out what your community wants.
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And like I was saying, I think instead we make assumptions.
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like the classic one is people won't, our older audiences, our aging audiences, they don't
want anything new, right?
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They only want the traditional canon and that's all they will tolerate and they will walk
out and boycott it.
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There is so much evidence that that's not true.
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um And yet that assumption remains so deeply ingrained, especially in the orchestra world.
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um
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that it's kind of maddening because first of all, it's patronizing and condescending to
your audience that they're not capable of or open-minded enough to experience something
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new.
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And we have all this evidence that shows that they're open to it.
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Well, sometimes I wonder how much is it that we don't ask because we don't want the answer
that we're gonna get.
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Well, I think that's true for sure.
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um know, mean, change is hard, right?
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I mean, just, institutions get ingrained, they get established in their way of doing
things, and it's very difficult to change them, and I will acknowledge that.
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um And I think that there are some reasons beyond just worldview.
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why arts organizations have a difficult time changing.
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And one of them is our funding structure.
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So there are plenty of foundations out there that may give you a grant to try for a year,
a community outreach program or something like that, or maybe it's a two year grant.
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That's really, you know, now we're really getting, you know.
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And the heart is in the right place, right?
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We want to support.
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these arts institutions coming up with new and innovative ways to reach their community.
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And they might, in fact, come up with some new and interesting ways.
246
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But then the funding gets cut off.
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Or you spend those two years really figuring out what's gonna work.
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mean, the entrepreneurial process is all about iteration, right?
249
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It's always about evaluating your first go and then trying to have a...
250
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2.0 version 2.0 and version 3.0 and sometimes it takes some of that iteration before you
find the right thing and unless funders are willing to give organizations a longer runway
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and Then once they find the the thing that works that clicks in the community to continue
to support that Then what are you supposed to do if you're if you're in an arts
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administrator?
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You're gonna be like well.
254
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I Don't know that I want to go through all this
255
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all this thing just to know that in a year it's gonna the plug's gonna get pulled anyway.
256
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yeah, I agree with you.
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And I've said for a long time that we need to revolutionize how we view and invest in the
arts and the model maybe worked 30, 40 years ago, but really the model has not changed in
258
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all that time.
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And so I think that a lot of times funders or actually sometimes I will refer to them as
funnelers because they're really the funneling, the funding.
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that a public entity is allocating to them.
261
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And so the funnelers have the challenge of proving to the funder why or what the return on
art will be by giving us this money.
262
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And so forever we have been measuring outputs, not outcomes.
263
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We're measuring how many tickets, how many artists, how many programs.
264
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And I think that's been the cycle of we'll fund it for a year or two, but then we've got
to go to the next because we've got to go back to the funder and say, look at all these
265
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people that we're serving.
266
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And what I'm thinking is we need to say not how many as much as what happens to the many
that participate.
267
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And that gets into that data that you talk about too.
268
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Yeah, oh gosh, I mean, every time I write a grant as a composer for just some of my own
work, one of the questions is almost always, how will you measure the success of this
269
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project?
270
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And I'm like, well, I'll write the piece and they'll play it.
271
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Like, I don't know what else to say, right?
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And so, you know, it's how we have to say, well, you know, we'll track ticket sales and
we'll do an audience survey at the end and, you know, but.
273
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It's just, it goes back to what we saying before that the arts, it's harder to get your
hands around impact.
274
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And the idea, the argument that, well, the arts enriches culture and our society, that
becomes so sort of diffuse and abstract that a lot of people are just like, well, I don't
275
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know, show me the numbers.
276
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Exactly.
277
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So I don't know if you knew that we've been working on building the last year a metric
tool that actually can show the numbers.
278
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So we're measuring impact, empathy, critical thinking, creativity, like other industries
assess outcomes.
279
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So for example, hospitals used to measure impact on how many surgeries they performed in a
year.
280
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That's like measuring how many people attended to the concert.
281
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Hospitals now measure how many surgeries were successful.
282
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And so we are looking at how is our programming creating a more empathetic community, a
more uh community that has lower anxiety levels, better mental wellbeing, uh more
283
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connection, right?
284
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More job transferable skills.
285
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So we're looking at the 21st century uh skills, the four C's, communication,
collaboration, creativity, and
286
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critical thinking, and we're taking that, we're now measuring those and we're turning that
into the return on art.
287
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So it goes right to the heart of everything that you're saying is we've got to have the
language that other industries use if we want to get that investment.
288
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And we have to come out of the box and say that we should be looking across industries for
collaboration and support, not just
289
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this one little area.
290
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You know, that again, that gets into that scarcity mindset.
291
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also gets into change is hard.
292
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We've always done it this way.
293
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There's so many layers upon layers on that that we've got to break out of that.
294
00:29:33,102 --> 00:29:34,933
Yeah, absolutely.
295
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One of the things that I constantly try to do in my own creative work, but which I'm also
preaching to students all the time, is that partnerships are one of the most valuable and
296
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most underutilized uh methods to build support for your project and build an audience for
it.
297
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um
298
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You know, this piece, I was just in Nebraska this past weekend for a performance of a
string quartet that I've written that's about deforestation.
299
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And uh one of the things that we've always done every time the quartet has been played is
we partner with local environmental groups and we get them to come to the show.
300
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We get them to talk to the audience afterwards.
301
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We have resources to say, can you get involved in your community?
302
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um And not only does that bring something more to the audience than just a musical
performance, and hopefully it gives something that they take home with them and think
303
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about.
304
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um
305
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But also it helps you build an audience because those environmental organizations that
you're partnering with, they have mailing lists too.
306
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There's a very simple way to simply uh broaden the reach of this thing, sort of the
opposite of the scarcity.
307
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It grows the pie.
308
00:31:02,318 --> 00:31:10,776
um this weekend in Nebraska, they had the State uh Forest Service
309
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came and they actually had little seedlings of trees and we raffled them off after the
show like it was brilliant, right?
310
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um And there's so many ways to do those kinds of things reaching out across um communities
and you just have to be willing to try it and I probably spend more of my energy
311
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on simply convincing presenters that if you do something like this, it will be a success.
312
00:31:45,993 --> 00:31:51,540
And everyone's just so afraid of risk, and especially these days now, we're doubly afraid,
right?
313
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Well, if I do anything that's too woke or too progressive or whatever, I might lose all my
funding.
314
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when I think that unfortunately that this is happening because we're just starting to
realize, I think, the power of these kinds of partnerships.
315
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You're starting to see them more and more often.
316
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And I think it's just a critical way.
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People say the arts aren't relevant or the arts don't have something to say to me right
now in 2025.
318
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And it's like, well, let's talk about deforestation.
319
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Right?
320
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Let's talk about how that affects all of us.
321
00:32:28,032 --> 00:32:38,611
So when you're talking about those myths or those, uh you know, the art stereotypical,
we're not relevant, you're over there, we've got more important things.
322
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And then you come up with deforestation.
323
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Deforestation, as I say it correctly.
324
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Okay.
325
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Where does that come from?
326
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mean, how did, so yeah, tell me how, where, okay, pun intended.
327
00:32:55,164 --> 00:32:58,106
Where, when was the seed planted?
328
00:32:58,352 --> 00:32:59,054
you
329
00:32:59,054 --> 00:33:01,977
uh I'm so proud of myself.
330
00:33:02,058 --> 00:33:07,063
When was the seed planted and how did that come about?
331
00:33:07,063 --> 00:33:09,076
Like explain that.
332
00:33:09,113 --> 00:33:09,894
Yeah.
333
00:33:09,894 --> 00:33:16,480
So it actually goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about how.
334
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You know, the arts don't live in a vacuum, right?
335
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They relate to other disciplines around them.
336
00:33:24,687 --> 00:33:28,309
And for me, I grew up in the woods.
337
00:33:28,309 --> 00:33:32,370
I've always had a thing for trees since I was a kid.
338
00:33:33,811 --> 00:33:43,196
Then I studied geology and I'm thinking, how could my love of the earth and of nature
inform my creative work?
339
00:33:43,536 --> 00:33:54,536
And the real breakthrough on that point was when I wrote a geologic symphony back in 2013
about the geology of the Rocky Mountains and commissioned, again, talking about
340
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partnerships, commissioned by the Geological Society of America, which is based here in
Boulder, Colorado, and they were celebrating a big anniversary, so they were looking for
341
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something cool to do, And we had...
342
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hikes up into the mountains where we had little musical clips on a portable speaker and we
talked about the geology of the rocks and the music that corresponded to it.
343
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And we did all these things in the community.
344
00:34:19,417 --> 00:34:28,781
And that was when I really realized that this power of connecting with community
organizations and creating these partnerships.
345
00:34:28,781 --> 00:34:32,863
So the quartet about deforestation was really...
346
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uh
347
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you know, it was just sort of the next logical thing.
348
00:34:37,931 --> 00:34:51,006
I found out about a particular instance of this tree on Vancouver Island that was, uh
survived the loggers and was left in the middle of this devastation.
349
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One single tree, a thousand year old tree standing up in the middle.
350
00:34:54,288 --> 00:34:59,590
And it became this kind of rallying cry uh for this issue.
351
00:35:00,050 --> 00:35:04,642
And I heard about that and I'm like, I gotta write a piece about that.
352
00:35:06,044 --> 00:35:18,148
And so, but then it was about the next step about saying, okay, I'm gonna write a piece
about that, but that can't be just where it ends.
353
00:35:18,148 --> 00:35:24,669
Because then the piece gets played, people say, that's a really nice piece, and they go
home and they don't really think too much about it.
354
00:35:25,010 --> 00:35:33,512
So I said, what can I do to connect that dot for somebody to leave the concert hall and be
thinking, now I'm gonna think about.
355
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what can I do in my own forest community?
356
00:35:36,638 --> 00:35:39,211
What can I do to speak out about deforestation?
357
00:35:39,211 --> 00:35:45,967
How I understand a little bit more about how deforestation contributes to climate change
and all these things.
358
00:35:45,967 --> 00:35:55,856
Well, we need to first of all have some experts to come in and we need to figure out how
to get people to stick around for that part of the program.
359
00:35:56,357 --> 00:35:59,799
So then I incorporated visual images and...
360
00:36:00,272 --> 00:36:09,432
I interviewed a bunch of people for this oral history about memories they have of trees
from when they were a kid and wove that into the piece.
361
00:36:09,792 --> 00:36:21,352
And then when the piece is done and know, the string quartet is bowing and people are
applauding and I come up and I bow, then we say, you know, hold up our hands.
362
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Thank you so much for coming tonight.
363
00:36:23,652 --> 00:36:27,822
We're not quite finished and I'm gonna call.
364
00:36:27,822 --> 00:36:36,759
you know, our guests up onto the stage and we're going to do a conversation, have a Q and
A and a conversation about climate change and forests and what you can do here in your
365
00:36:36,759 --> 00:36:37,300
community.
366
00:36:37,300 --> 00:36:46,888
So it's, it's, and when we have done that without fail, even though me and the players are
also up there, they can ask anybody anything.
367
00:36:46,888 --> 00:36:48,989
Everybody wants to talk to the forest people.
368
00:36:48,989 --> 00:36:53,833
There'll be like one artistic question or five questions about the forest.
369
00:36:53,833 --> 00:36:57,728
And that tells me that this is something that people are connecting with.
370
00:36:57,728 --> 00:36:58,808
Right, 100%.
371
00:36:58,808 --> 00:37:12,562
I love how you've thought on all the aspects and the layers of visually and people talking
about memories of trees, but it's all around this central focus of music.
372
00:37:13,242 --> 00:37:18,964
And so that just goes to show that we can adapt and we can be relevant.
373
00:37:18,964 --> 00:37:24,825
have to think creatively about how we apply the work in community.
374
00:37:24,825 --> 00:37:27,786
So how much pushback did you get?
375
00:37:28,207 --> 00:37:33,192
When you come up or did you get pushback or or do you have these partners?
376
00:37:33,494 --> 00:37:43,726
These environmentalists or partners say wow like this is fantastic because some might
think it's just too much work I have the idea, but they're never gonna want to collaborate
377
00:37:43,926 --> 00:37:46,570
Did you come up against that?
378
00:37:48,393 --> 00:38:00,199
The only time there's been pushback has been from the musical presenters who are afraid
because this is something different for their audience.
379
00:38:00,199 --> 00:38:10,344
In terms of the community partners, I mean, you you call up the local nature conservancy
or the Arbor Foundation or whatever, they are in.
380
00:38:10,344 --> 00:38:17,368
Like you don't have to convince them at all because their whole mission is to try to reach
people and build awareness.
381
00:38:17,494 --> 00:38:20,546
So that's never where the pushback is.
382
00:38:20,786 --> 00:38:29,332
But it's sometimes the presenters are worried that the audience will be put off or that it
won't work.
383
00:38:29,643 --> 00:38:35,745
Isn't that interesting to think about where the pushback's coming from?
384
00:38:36,722 --> 00:38:43,768
And it's the same group that complains and worries about the lack of.
385
00:38:44,369 --> 00:38:48,050
And so for me, it's like, right?
386
00:38:48,431 --> 00:38:53,933
So what have you gotten feedback from those presenters after the fact?
387
00:38:53,933 --> 00:38:57,140
And do they see that in fact,
388
00:38:57,140 --> 00:38:59,201
there was an engaged audience.
389
00:39:00,194 --> 00:39:14,628
Yes, I think that what I have found though is that the folks who are really giving a lot
of pushback, you never get to the point of them saying, yes, we're going to program it.
390
00:39:14,868 --> 00:39:16,729
So I just move on to the next book.
391
00:39:16,729 --> 00:39:23,471
So the folks who say yes generally don't need to be convinced.
392
00:39:23,471 --> 00:39:29,352
And the folks that are resistant, there's almost nothing you can do to...
393
00:39:30,798 --> 00:39:33,000
to convince them to take that risk.
394
00:39:33,098 --> 00:39:34,599
you know, it's it's sad.
395
00:39:34,599 --> 00:39:37,901
uh Every industry has to adapt and change.
396
00:39:37,901 --> 00:39:44,083
That's you you you mentioned did you mention Warren Buffett earlier or did I just make
that up?
397
00:39:44,784 --> 00:39:48,085
OK, I'm like, but it's you.
398
00:39:48,085 --> 00:39:51,066
We always have to adapt and evolve.
399
00:39:51,246 --> 00:39:54,187
And it's no wonder that.
400
00:39:54,428 --> 00:39:59,550
Well, OK, I'm not going to go there, but this has been fascinating to me.
401
00:39:59,614 --> 00:40:04,871
I'd like to ask everybody that I speak with the same question at the end of the
conversation.
402
00:40:04,871 --> 00:40:07,536
So, Jeffrey, how do you define art?
403
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Oh, wow.
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Art is.
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whatever is presented as art.
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oh
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So that's a very, very broad definition.
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um But it's the only definition that I can come up with that allows for...
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can't remember the artist who did it, but the painting that is just a white square.
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and
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you might say, how is that possibly art?
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But the fact is, is that as soon as we hang it on a wall to be viewed by people who come
to look at it, who will then start to discuss what the heck this thing is and why it
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matters and what it might be saying to me or you.
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um Now it's art, it becomes art because of the way we interact with it.
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And so it's...
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To me, that's what art is.
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Thank you, Jeffrey.
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I really appreciate your time.
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It's been my pleasure.
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Hi, Jeffrey, how are you?
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I'm doing good, thanks.
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Thank you for joining me.
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Okay, diving right in, arts entrepreneurship.
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Have you seen any changes in students or the field post pandemic?
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Yes, I think I have.
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And I think there were some trends that maybe were beginning even before the pandemic, but
the pandemic has amplified them.
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Namely that I think students are much more aware of the challenges that they're gonna face
out there in the world with their careers.
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You know, when I started doing this back in 2009, there were still a...
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fairly large chunk of students, maybe not a majority, but a large percentage who needed to
be convinced that this was something that they should pay attention to or care about.
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They still were under this idea that somehow the world was gonna beat a path to their door
because of their wonderfulness.
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uh now I really don't see too many students who have that idea.
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And as I say, that was starting to already change.
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before the pandemic, but since then, I think all of that has just ramped up because
there's so many other factors in the world that are underscoring the challenges that all
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young people are gonna face with their careers, regardless of whether or not they're in
the arts.
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So um that's been a pretty big change, I would say.
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It's interesting because hearing you say that to me, that almost sounds like that was it.
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That's a benefit, right?
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That that they're more aware than maybe thinking, as you said, everything is going to come
to them and it's going to be fine.
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Well, I think it depends on sort of what the person does with that knowledge that maybe
things are not going to be so easy.
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um Because on the one hand, if that motivates them to put more energy into these kinds of
things and to be thinking entrepreneurially, then you're absolutely right.
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There's a benefit there.
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But if that just generates more anxiety about the future,
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which again, I think students of all fields these days are experiencing enormous anxiety
about what awaits them out there in the world for all sorts of reasons, right?
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um If that contributes to anxiety, then that's not necessarily a positive thing.
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And I think that maybe for many students it ends up being just another thing to worry
about.
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Right, and not to sound harsh, sometimes I like to push one end or the other, but it's a
tough field to be in.
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It was a tough field to be in, you know this, pre-pandemic.
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So for me, not saying anxiety's a good thing, but it's a stressful job to be an arts
administrator and have to worry about boards and audience and artistic excellence and
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funding disappearing, you know what I'm saying, on and on and on.
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So for me, that's why I see that maybe, and again, I'm not promoting anxiety in the least,
but that preparedness in those that are determined that, this is what I want to do.
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Perhaps it's hardening us a little bit to look at this like any other industry.
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Yeah, think that's valid and I think ultimately that is a good thing.
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You know, one of the harsh realities right now for those of us in higher ed is that we are
graduating way more graduates than there are jobs in music in particular.
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so it's, we need to face that.
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One of the ways that I face that is to talk a lot about transferable skills, to recognize
that musical training prepares you for all kinds of other pursuits, and that if a student
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decides partway through their music major that they don't want to be a professional
musician, that...
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They absolutely have not wasted their education or wasted time or they have certainly not
failed.
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You know, that there are lots of other ways that they can take these skills that they're
developing and apply them to a satisfying career.
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And so that's certainly something that um maybe another change that's happened over the
recent years is that I'm spending even more time talking about transferable skills than
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ever before.
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Which I talk about that all the time because when I'm trying to get funding for the arts,
I talk about how you can't be innovative if you're not creative and entrepreneurs, I would
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argue an artist or creative is the very foundational.
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Example of an entrepreneur, right?
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And but yet I know one university that they measure program success based on.
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how many people graduate and get jobs in that field, in the field that they graduated
with, right?
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So the arts on one hand could get dinged and maybe is getting dinged because we can
graduate our students and they can have those skills transfer into any industry.
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Do you see that?
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You're nodding, so I'm assuming that yes, that relates with you as well.
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Absolutely.
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I really think that's not just unique to music if we're talking about transferable skills.
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mean, music is, I think, particularly rich in transferable skills.
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But I think it's true for virtually any college graduate.
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And we have data that shows that, right?
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That people not only will change jobs multiple times over the course of their career, they
will change their career direction.
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more than once.
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uh Many, many, many people, right?
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And so the idea that I'm going to major in, fill in the blank, doesn't, it could be music,
it could be business, it could be anthropology, I don't care.
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That somehow your undergraduate education is gonna be the thing that you're gonna stay in
for the rest of your life.
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We know that's not true, and it hasn't been true for decades.
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And so...
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I think that schools that are still using that as a metric are really doing themselves a
disservice, doing the students a disservice.
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They're missing the boat because that's not the way professional lives unfold these days.
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The idea that, know, my grandparents who maybe, you know, one of them was a photo engraver
for the newspaper.
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That's where he worked his entire life and he started there as a young man and he retired
from there and that just hardly ever happens anymore.
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Right.
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It's interesting.
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I'm recalling a New York Times article that I just read the other week about uh Gen X
generation and how we were brought up with no technology.
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Right.
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And, I went into journalism and now journalism's dying.
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I think there's so much thing.
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There's so many aspects of what technology has done to drive and change landscapes of
jobs, graphic design, animation, arts, all of that, that, yes,
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it would be unheard of for us today to start out in our 20s in one job and still be there
in our 50s.
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So there's a lot of change.
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Yeah.
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And I wish that higher education was more comfortable talking about that because I think
many people are uncomfortable talking about it because they feel that that means that
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somehow as a music educator or as an anthropology professor or whatever it is that I'm
teaching, that somehow if all my kids don't go forward and be anthropologists, that
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somehow...
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That's a failure on my part.
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And so we sort of shy away from talking about that.
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And I think we should press into that because not only is it the reality that students are
going to face, but it's...
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it relieves one of the major drivers of that anxiety that I was talking about.
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The idea that the kids have in their head that they've got to have it all figured out now
at age 19.
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I didn't know where the heck I was going at age 19.
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I didn't figure it out for, I like to say I didn't really figure it out until I was in my
40s.
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oh
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mean, Jeffrey, I'm still trying to figure it out.
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you know, I completely get it.
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mean, so there's so many overlapping topics or questions with that.
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One comes to mind is STEM.
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I don't think it's a coincidence that for the last 25 years we've seen, quote, creativity
die or diminish in the workplace, right?
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As we've taken out
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the arts or creative ways of teaching or thinking in school.
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And we've solely focused on STEM.
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I think that's one dimensional.
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As we're seeing higher ed go through a lot of this, these pressures to streamline and cut,
and we're seeing the arts and humanities get removed.
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There was one university president who was one of the beginning schools that started
cutting humanities and creative.
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courses and he said, you know, we are determined to be an engine of creativity and
innovation.
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And I just laughed at that hole in which you did too.
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I mean, where do people think creativity comes from?
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Well, that's right.
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And I think that the um almost fetishization of STEM, if you will, uh in education is
because STEM is so much easier to evaluate.
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We can test on it more easily.
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We can say, well, the person who majored in engineering, they went on to become an
engineer.
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It's much easier.
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to quantify and we seem to think that that's what we should be doing with education.
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And the arts are so much harder to kind of, you know, to get your hands around.
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But you're absolutely right.
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You know, where is creativity gonna come from?
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And in those STEM fields, creativity is essential to the next breakthrough or the next
technological advance.
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And...
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There's so many things about that.
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I mean, when I was in college, I also fell in love with geology.
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And so I ended up double majoring in music and geology.
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So I understand the joys of studying science and always have that sort of that part of my
brain.
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But I always saw that these two parts of myself were really complimentary.
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That in order to be a good geologist, my...
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oh
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my artistic mind informed the way I looked at challenges that I was finding out in the
field or in the laboratory, that these things are not mutually exclusive.
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Somebody somewhere along the line coined this phrase that STEM needs steam to rise,
meaning we need to the A in there.
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And that's really the way I look at it.
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So I mean, anybody who says, well, we're going to just focus on STEM and we don't need the
arts and humanities.
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I think they're being extraordinarily short-sighted because...
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But yeah, to me it says they don't understand what we're getting from the arts and
humanities for them to say that.
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So to go back to an earlier point and just this whole notion of more anxious students and
how do we prepare them for the future, it kind of gets into my eh noticing a little
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frustration with this notion of status quo and that I often hear arts leaders say, well,
we've always done it this way.
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And I thought that the pandemic could have been the opportunity to really shake the
bedrock of our sector to say, okay, now we can actually change and we need to change.
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But yet I'm seeing, or I saw a lot of people falling back to status quo and this scarcity
mindset, right?
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And survival mode.
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Are you addressing that with students or how can we best prepare the next leaders in the
arts?
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to take a fresh approach, to kind of push back against this notion of we've always done it
this way, so this is how we should continue to move forward.
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Yeah, yeah, and I'm reminded of somebody like Warren Buffett or somebody like that who
said, you know, that's the deadliest phrase for any organization is we've always done it
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that way.
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Right?
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um Well, I start again with kind of taking a uh kind of a STEM approach to the question to
say, okay, let's start with data.
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Right?
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Let's say what the numbers show us.
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And we can see
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uh Because the NEA has, at least until now, uh know, tracked attendance data in all of the
arts.
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can look at that information and we can see audiences declining over the last 30 years.
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We can see um funding for the arts decreasing over the last 30 years.
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So the notion that any administrator would say, well, you know, it's too risky to...
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to risk changing or trying something new.
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Well, you know, that's the definition of insanity, right?
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Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
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And that's what many folks in the arts have been doing for the last 20 or 30 years.
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And so, I mean, what stronger argument do we need that there is a need for some new
approaches?
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I do think that, again, the students...
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the younger generation is much more open to that idea because they are more aware of the
realities as we were talking about a minute ago.
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And so they do see the need to try new things.
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They're just always not sure how to go about.
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developing those ideas and evaluating them and implementing them.
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And then of course that's where I come in and say, okay, well let's talk about the
entrepreneurial process.
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Let's talk about how you evaluate an idea, how you even come up with an idea to begin
with, and m then how you implement that idea out in the marketplace.
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And I feel like my role is really about empowering our students to, first of all, see that
they're
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perspective matters and that their creativity can be brought to bear on these things and
that there is an imperative that they do that because the existing models continue to
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struggle and they will continue to struggle until we come up with some new ones.
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Yeah, and so I'm reminded that you are a McDowell Fellow and a professor.
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So you are not, uh you are very used to marrying art and thought leadership together in
your career and in your day-to-day life.
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How can we help emerging arts administrators, arts entrepreneurs in looking at the
possibility of becoming a thought leader, whether it's in civic leadership?
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or getting into roles where we're not talking about we need a seat at the table, but we're
actually taking a seat at the table and then applying what we know that we get from the
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arts to problem solving in every community.
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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I think that part of the answer anyway is for the would-be administrator or entrepreneur
to not ever see that as being separate from their artistic practice.
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ah And that's certainly something that I'm very passionate about.
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I'm still active as a composer.
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I view my work as a composer.
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as being absolutely hand in glove with my work as an entrepreneur and as an advocate um
because it's all in service to the art.
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And I think that while administrators do need to think entrepreneurially, they do need to
think about the business side of things because there are realities, they have budgets,
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have financial limitations, they have to address those things, of course.
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But...
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to recognize that if the way they are advocating, the way they are promoting their
organization, the way they are thinking about their programming, if they start with the
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art and the audience that they're trying to connect with, and they look about how to make
that connection the most vibrant connection that they can make.
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Most of the rest of it will more or less, I won't say it'll fall into place, but it will
emerge, the path will emerge about how to go about the rest of it.
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But so often we disconnect those two things and we make assumptions about what audiences
want or what they will tolerate or what they're looking for.
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And we don't challenge those assumptions and we make programming decisions.
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and institutional strategy decisions based on those assumptions.
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And it's no surprise that then things sometimes go off the rails.
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You're making me think about, um and I don't know if you can think of an example, but when
we think about traditional arts, classical music, um theater, um fine arts, anything that
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we have, it's evolved over time, right?
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So now when we have organizations worrying about aging audiences or not being able to
engage,
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younger audiences are, is there an example, and I don't know this answer, uh is there an
example where we've adapted historically to, okay, my mind now goes to, okay, this is
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where I'm gonna like the pause edit, my mind goes to Bernstein, right?
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Where, and he brought classical music to the masses through television, making it
approachable.
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Are there examples like that that you can look at to say how we as a sector today should
be adapting to be more relevant to the current potential audience member?
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mean, there certainly are.
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um
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Well, I'm thinking about, for instance, like the LA Phil and the work that Dudamel has
done there, where because he came from the El Sistema tradition and built a really robust
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El Sistema uh program and culture in Los Angeles, that he began to uh sort of position the
role of the orchestra in the community in a different way, right?
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I haven't done a uh deep dive case study of the LA Phil to know well that reflected in X
number of increases in attendance or donors or whatever.
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But I do know that as orchestras go, that orchestra has done pretty well over the last 20
years.
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And when he announced that he was leaving, there was a lot of grief and angst in LA
because he has been such a force for good.
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And I think that's.
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one example of the kinds of things that orchestras can be doing to become more relevant in
their community.
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Unfortunately, most of the examples that I can think of are negative examples.
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uh One of my favorite stories, and I won't name the orchestra, but uh a friend of mine is
a principal in a major orchestra.
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We'll just put it that way.
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And he posted something on uh social media.
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This is...
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before the right before the pandemic.
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So it's a while back now.
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And he said, Hi, everybody, I need a little little crowdsourcing here for me.
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I've been put on my orchestra's diversity committee.
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I'm not really quite sure why maybe it's because I'm a gay guy.
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Otherwise, I'm just a white guy, right.
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But I'm on the diversity committee.
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And we've been tasked with trying to come up with some programming that will reach
underserved and minority and marginalized communities in our city.
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And I have, just, don't even know where to start.
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So I would love to hear your ideas.
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And I thought, oh boy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop some popcorn here and I'm just gonna watch
the comments, right?
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And so for several days, you know, 125 comments or so that people say, well, you should
try this.
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You should try this.
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You should try this.
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You should try this.
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And I'm thinking to myself, well, some of these might be great ideas, but they have
skipped over.
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the most essential thing.
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And finally, when I couldn't stand it anymore, I commented.
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said, well, if you want to reach marginalized communities, why don't you talk to them
about what they want?
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Right.
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And it just shut the whole conversation down.
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I was just like, you know, I don't know if any of these ideas are good.
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Maybe some of them are brilliant ideas, but you're skipping the most important step.
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You've got to figure out what your community wants.
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And like I was saying, I think instead we make assumptions.
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like the classic one is people won't, our older audiences, our aging audiences, they don't
want anything new, right?
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They only want the traditional canon and that's all they will tolerate and they will walk
out and boycott it.
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There is so much evidence that that's not true.
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um And yet that assumption remains so deeply ingrained, especially in the orchestra world.
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um
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that it's kind of maddening because first of all, it's patronizing and condescending to
your audience that they're not capable of or open-minded enough to experience something
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new.
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And we have all this evidence that shows that they're open to it.
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Well, sometimes I wonder how much is it that we don't ask because we don't want the answer
that we're gonna get.
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Well, I think that's true for sure.
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um know, mean, change is hard, right?
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I mean, just, institutions get ingrained, they get established in their way of doing
things, and it's very difficult to change them, and I will acknowledge that.
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um And I think that there are some reasons beyond just worldview.
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why arts organizations have a difficult time changing.
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And one of them is our funding structure.
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So there are plenty of foundations out there that may give you a grant to try for a year,
a community outreach program or something like that, or maybe it's a two year grant.
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That's really, you know, now we're really getting, you know.
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And the heart is in the right place, right?
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We want to support.
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these arts institutions coming up with new and innovative ways to reach their community.
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And they might, in fact, come up with some new and interesting ways.
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But then the funding gets cut off.
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Or you spend those two years really figuring out what's gonna work.
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mean, the entrepreneurial process is all about iteration, right?
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It's always about evaluating your first go and then trying to have a...
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2.0 version 2.0 and version 3.0 and sometimes it takes some of that iteration before you
find the right thing and unless funders are willing to give organizations a longer runway
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and Then once they find the the thing that works that clicks in the community to continue
to support that Then what are you supposed to do if you're if you're in an arts
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administrator?
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You're gonna be like well.
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I Don't know that I want to go through all this
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all this thing just to know that in a year it's gonna the plug's gonna get pulled anyway.
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yeah, I agree with you.
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And I've said for a long time that we need to revolutionize how we view and invest in the
arts and the model maybe worked 30, 40 years ago, but really the model has not changed in
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all that time.
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And so I think that a lot of times funders or actually sometimes I will refer to them as
funnelers because they're really the funneling, the funding.
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that a public entity is allocating to them.
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And so the funnelers have the challenge of proving to the funder why or what the return on
art will be by giving us this money.
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And so forever we have been measuring outputs, not outcomes.
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We're measuring how many tickets, how many artists, how many programs.
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And I think that's been the cycle of we'll fund it for a year or two, but then we've got
to go to the next because we've got to go back to the funder and say, look at all these
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people that we're serving.
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And what I'm thinking is we need to say not how many as much as what happens to the many
that participate.
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And that gets into that data that you talk about too.
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Yeah, oh gosh, I mean, every time I write a grant as a composer for just some of my own
work, one of the questions is almost always, how will you measure the success of this
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project?
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And I'm like, well, I'll write the piece and they'll play it.
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Like, I don't know what else to say, right?
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And so, you know, it's how we have to say, well, you know, we'll track ticket sales and
we'll do an audience survey at the end and, you know, but.
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It's just, it goes back to what we saying before that the arts, it's harder to get your
hands around impact.
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And the idea, the argument that, well, the arts enriches culture and our society, that
becomes so sort of diffuse and abstract that a lot of people are just like, well, I don't
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know, show me the numbers.
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Exactly.
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So I don't know if you knew that we've been working on building the last year a metric
tool that actually can show the numbers.
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So we're measuring impact, empathy, critical thinking, creativity, like other industries
assess outcomes.
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So for example, hospitals used to measure impact on how many surgeries they performed in a
year.
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That's like measuring how many people attended to the concert.
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Hospitals now measure how many surgeries were successful.
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And so we are looking at how is our programming creating a more empathetic community, a
more uh community that has lower anxiety levels, better mental wellbeing, uh more
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connection, right?
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More job transferable skills.
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So we're looking at the 21st century uh skills, the four C's, communication,
collaboration, creativity, and
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critical thinking, and we're taking that, we're now measuring those and we're turning that
into the return on art.
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So it goes right to the heart of everything that you're saying is we've got to have the
language that other industries use if we want to get that investment.
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And we have to come out of the box and say that we should be looking across industries for
collaboration and support, not just
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this one little area.
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You know, that again, that gets into that scarcity mindset.
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also gets into change is hard.
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We've always done it this way.
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There's so many layers upon layers on that that we've got to break out of that.
294
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Yeah, absolutely.
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One of the things that I constantly try to do in my own creative work, but which I'm also
preaching to students all the time, is that partnerships are one of the most valuable and
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most underutilized uh methods to build support for your project and build an audience for
it.
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um
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You know, this piece, I was just in Nebraska this past weekend for a performance of a
string quartet that I've written that's about deforestation.
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And uh one of the things that we've always done every time the quartet has been played is
we partner with local environmental groups and we get them to come to the show.
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We get them to talk to the audience afterwards.
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We have resources to say, can you get involved in your community?
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um And not only does that bring something more to the audience than just a musical
performance, and hopefully it gives something that they take home with them and think
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about.
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um
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But also it helps you build an audience because those environmental organizations that
you're partnering with, they have mailing lists too.
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There's a very simple way to simply uh broaden the reach of this thing, sort of the
opposite of the scarcity.
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It grows the pie.
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um this weekend in Nebraska, they had the State uh Forest Service
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came and they actually had little seedlings of trees and we raffled them off after the
show like it was brilliant, right?
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um And there's so many ways to do those kinds of things reaching out across um communities
and you just have to be willing to try it and I probably spend more of my energy
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on simply convincing presenters that if you do something like this, it will be a success.
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And everyone's just so afraid of risk, and especially these days now, we're doubly afraid,
right?
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Well, if I do anything that's too woke or too progressive or whatever, I might lose all my
funding.
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when I think that unfortunately that this is happening because we're just starting to
realize, I think, the power of these kinds of partnerships.
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You're starting to see them more and more often.
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And I think it's just a critical way.
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People say the arts aren't relevant or the arts don't have something to say to me right
now in 2025.
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And it's like, well, let's talk about deforestation.
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Right?
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Let's talk about how that affects all of us.
321
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So when you're talking about those myths or those, uh you know, the art stereotypical,
we're not relevant, you're over there, we've got more important things.
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And then you come up with deforestation.
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Deforestation, as I say it correctly.
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Okay.
325
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Where does that come from?
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mean, how did, so yeah, tell me how, where, okay, pun intended.
327
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Where, when was the seed planted?
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you
329
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uh I'm so proud of myself.
330
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When was the seed planted and how did that come about?
331
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Like explain that.
332
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Yeah.
333
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So it actually goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about how.
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You know, the arts don't live in a vacuum, right?
335
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They relate to other disciplines around them.
336
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And for me, I grew up in the woods.
337
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I've always had a thing for trees since I was a kid.
338
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Then I studied geology and I'm thinking, how could my love of the earth and of nature
inform my creative work?
339
00:33:43,536 --> 00:33:54,536
And the real breakthrough on that point was when I wrote a geologic symphony back in 2013
about the geology of the Rocky Mountains and commissioned, again, talking about
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partnerships, commissioned by the Geological Society of America, which is based here in
Boulder, Colorado, and they were celebrating a big anniversary, so they were looking for
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something cool to do, And we had...
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hikes up into the mountains where we had little musical clips on a portable speaker and we
talked about the geology of the rocks and the music that corresponded to it.
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And we did all these things in the community.
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And that was when I really realized that this power of connecting with community
organizations and creating these partnerships.
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So the quartet about deforestation was really...
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uh
347
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you know, it was just sort of the next logical thing.
348
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I found out about a particular instance of this tree on Vancouver Island that was, uh
survived the loggers and was left in the middle of this devastation.
349
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One single tree, a thousand year old tree standing up in the middle.
350
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And it became this kind of rallying cry uh for this issue.
351
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And I heard about that and I'm like, I gotta write a piece about that.
352
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And so, but then it was about the next step about saying, okay, I'm gonna write a piece
about that, but that can't be just where it ends.
353
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Because then the piece gets played, people say, that's a really nice piece, and they go
home and they don't really think too much about it.
354
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So I said, what can I do to connect that dot for somebody to leave the concert hall and be
thinking, now I'm gonna think about.
355
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what can I do in my own forest community?
356
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What can I do to speak out about deforestation?
357
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How I understand a little bit more about how deforestation contributes to climate change
and all these things.
358
00:35:45,967 --> 00:35:55,856
Well, we need to first of all have some experts to come in and we need to figure out how
to get people to stick around for that part of the program.
359
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So then I incorporated visual images and...
360
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I interviewed a bunch of people for this oral history about memories they have of trees
from when they were a kid and wove that into the piece.
361
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And then when the piece is done and know, the string quartet is bowing and people are
applauding and I come up and I bow, then we say, you know, hold up our hands.
362
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Thank you so much for coming tonight.
363
00:36:23,652 --> 00:36:27,822
We're not quite finished and I'm gonna call.
364
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you know, our guests up onto the stage and we're going to do a conversation, have a Q and
A and a conversation about climate change and forests and what you can do here in your
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community.
366
00:36:37,300 --> 00:36:46,888
So it's, it's, and when we have done that without fail, even though me and the players are
also up there, they can ask anybody anything.
367
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Everybody wants to talk to the forest people.
368
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There'll be like one artistic question or five questions about the forest.
369
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And that tells me that this is something that people are connecting with.
370
00:36:57,728 --> 00:36:58,808
Right, 100%.
371
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I love how you've thought on all the aspects and the layers of visually and people talking
about memories of trees, but it's all around this central focus of music.
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And so that just goes to show that we can adapt and we can be relevant.
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have to think creatively about how we apply the work in community.
374
00:37:24,825 --> 00:37:27,786
So how much pushback did you get?
375
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When you come up or did you get pushback or or do you have these partners?
376
00:37:33,494 --> 00:37:43,726
These environmentalists or partners say wow like this is fantastic because some might
think it's just too much work I have the idea, but they're never gonna want to collaborate
377
00:37:43,926 --> 00:37:46,570
Did you come up against that?
378
00:37:48,393 --> 00:38:00,199
The only time there's been pushback has been from the musical presenters who are afraid
because this is something different for their audience.
379
00:38:00,199 --> 00:38:10,344
In terms of the community partners, I mean, you you call up the local nature conservancy
or the Arbor Foundation or whatever, they are in.
380
00:38:10,344 --> 00:38:17,368
Like you don't have to convince them at all because their whole mission is to try to reach
people and build awareness.
381
00:38:17,494 --> 00:38:20,546
So that's never where the pushback is.
382
00:38:20,786 --> 00:38:29,332
But it's sometimes the presenters are worried that the audience will be put off or that it
won't work.
383
00:38:29,643 --> 00:38:35,745
Isn't that interesting to think about where the pushback's coming from?
384
00:38:36,722 --> 00:38:43,768
And it's the same group that complains and worries about the lack of.
385
00:38:44,369 --> 00:38:48,050
And so for me, it's like, right?
386
00:38:48,431 --> 00:38:53,933
So what have you gotten feedback from those presenters after the fact?
387
00:38:53,933 --> 00:38:57,140
And do they see that in fact,
388
00:38:57,140 --> 00:38:59,201
there was an engaged audience.
389
00:39:00,194 --> 00:39:14,628
Yes, I think that what I have found though is that the folks who are really giving a lot
of pushback, you never get to the point of them saying, yes, we're going to program it.
390
00:39:14,868 --> 00:39:16,729
So I just move on to the next book.
391
00:39:16,729 --> 00:39:23,471
So the folks who say yes generally don't need to be convinced.
392
00:39:23,471 --> 00:39:29,352
And the folks that are resistant, there's almost nothing you can do to...
393
00:39:30,798 --> 00:39:33,000
to convince them to take that risk.
394
00:39:33,098 --> 00:39:34,599
you know, it's it's sad.
395
00:39:34,599 --> 00:39:37,901
uh Every industry has to adapt and change.
396
00:39:37,901 --> 00:39:44,083
That's you you you mentioned did you mention Warren Buffett earlier or did I just make
that up?
397
00:39:44,784 --> 00:39:48,085
OK, I'm like, but it's you.
398
00:39:48,085 --> 00:39:51,066
We always have to adapt and evolve.
399
00:39:51,246 --> 00:39:54,187
And it's no wonder that.
400
00:39:54,428 --> 00:39:59,550
Well, OK, I'm not going to go there, but this has been fascinating to me.
401
00:39:59,614 --> 00:40:04,871
I'd like to ask everybody that I speak with the same question at the end of the
conversation.
402
00:40:04,871 --> 00:40:07,536
So, Jeffrey, how do you define art?
403
00:40:08,375 --> 00:40:09,672
Oh, wow.
404
00:40:14,038 --> 00:40:15,282
Art is.
405
00:40:17,740 --> 00:40:19,857
whatever is presented as art.
406
00:40:19,857 --> 00:40:20,680
oh
407
00:40:22,352 --> 00:40:24,075
So that's a very, very broad definition.
408
00:40:24,075 --> 00:40:34,675
um But it's the only definition that I can come up with that allows for...
409
00:40:36,878 --> 00:40:43,104
can't remember the artist who did it, but the painting that is just a white square.
410
00:40:45,029 --> 00:40:45,853
and
411
00:40:47,566 --> 00:40:50,017
you might say, how is that possibly art?
412
00:40:50,317 --> 00:41:02,660
But the fact is, is that as soon as we hang it on a wall to be viewed by people who come
to look at it, who will then start to discuss what the heck this thing is and why it
413
00:41:02,660 --> 00:41:05,741
matters and what it might be saying to me or you.
414
00:41:05,741 --> 00:41:12,403
um Now it's art, it becomes art because of the way we interact with it.
415
00:41:12,403 --> 00:41:16,424
And so it's...
416
00:41:17,604 --> 00:41:19,210
To me, that's what art is.
417
00:41:20,802 --> 00:41:21,621
Thank you, Jeffrey.
418
00:41:21,621 --> 00:41:23,465
I really appreciate your time.
419
00:41:23,598 --> 00:41:24,973
It's been my pleasure.
