The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

a leader and you have an incredible amount
of people who all have talent—but they are
at your direction. What seems increasingly
relevant—just like my old conducting teacher
said—“It’s my fault somehow.” The whole issue
about diversity is that each of us, like we said,
has a voice, and each of us has a background.
I want to talk about music education and
education in general. In the 1980s, we were
talking about justifying music in terms of other
things: “Music is like math because it has fractions;
music is like science because it involves
people; music is like social studies because
it involves, etcetera.” By the time we got to
the 1990s, we started trying to incorporate
music into culture because multiculturalism
suddenly became the major thing and we
started the Kodály Institute’s “so, mi, so, so, mi,
oh”—it is like all the other types of folk songs.
In reality, what Howard Gardner is talking about
is that it is not necessarily the content of what we
teach anymore that is important for people. 5 It
is not necessarily that we teach people about
SOCATOA—sine: opposite over hypotenuse.
The whole point of math is that it gives you a
way to think logically from step in progression;
it gives you a way to manipulate shapes. That
is the actual point of math. That is the reason
we have math and, if we teach that instead of
making sure that people can do their long division
when we relevantly have calculators now
or calculus, when they have their TI calculators,
it is the actual topics about education that we
want to get across. Likewise, there is an intrinsic
value to music that is the reason it is necessary
and is increasingly relevant in today’s society.
Coming out of the computerized age of inhuman
people, we have lost some spirituality.
Now, Howard Gardner also identifies this as
a half intelligence—it is actually up to eight
and a half, not seven, the other one being
botany—the half intelligence of spirituality
and music, obviously, is a way for people
to connect to their emotions, to connect to
other people, to share in this experience. 6
These social constructs, these large institutions
like the union, like bureaucracy—often we feel
like we are banging our heads upon them.
But, in reality, these things are all personal
because there are people involved in creating
these bureaucracies, there are people
involved in creating mental constructs that
exist. It is perfectly parallel. One example is my
executive director, Jane Hill, at the Sacramento
Philharmonic. We went into negotiations with
the AFM [American Federation of Musicians]
local union—and the musicians’ union right now
is fighting for its life. As a result, it has become
one of the most conservative institutions in the
U.S. It has fought back on recording music and
on distribution of music and has fought back
on a lot of innovations within the orchestra.
Even so, it is very difficult to have electronic
music instruments in the orchestra itself.
Jane Hill is an incredibly gregarious person with
such life and passion—she is so passionate. She
turned the negotiations with the musicians on
their head. She said, “Look, you’re musicians,
you want to be paid more money, you want to
be valued. Well, guess what? We value you,
too. You want a ten-percent raise? We will give
you a fifteen-percent raise. We will give you
these things. We will give you free parking, we
want to listen to musicians, we want to create
a musician advisory committee and whatnot.”
As a result, this solid, conservative institution
melted because it was run by people. She was
negotiating with people. She was not negotiating
with this inhuman mass of solid institution-land
bureaucracy—these are people. One result
was they gave her recording rights. That may
be a first. It was done to further foster connections
with other groups in the Sacramento area
because, in order for that group to combine
with us to create a stronger ensemble, they
wanted to make sure they had the rights to give
out a free recording to all of the members. That
is a big no-no in AFM land, and they decided
to give us that because they fostered this idea.
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