"Nightlife" Colombia

http://colombiareports.com/events-nightlife.html

Wikileaks

http://www.semana.com/multimedia-nacion/colombia-estados-unidos-vecinos/3903.aspx

Quotes I have received

Maestro Chris: I think there are some sound positions here. What do you think? Let me know.

Quotes:

"Instead of over-specialization and the exclusive pursuit of perfection dictated by the demands of the recording industry, let us instead strive for excellence, a broader set of skills for our musicians, and a new responsibility by our musicians to the community...
Let’s release our musicians’ creative potential in a directed and synergistic way for a whole community. Musicians are brilliant and wonderful people and can do anything; we need to trust their judgment and direction and creativity... "

The new model would not be based on confrontation and dysfunction. It would be about a shared vision, ownership, and musician empowerment...

"Orchestras could then focus upon community interaction with an educational bias. Musicians would have multiple functions and responsibilities, many of which would be self-managed and created in the community..."

"They would work as individuals but also as leaders in ensembles, and would come together in the larger ensemble of the full orchestra..."

I find the quotes you sent me full of double speak.  For example, "Musicians are brilliant and wonderful people and can do anything".  It is true I can do plumbing if I have to but it ruins my hands for performing.  While a musician is often involved in teaching, the article glorifies the multi-tasking idea.  To me they are separate things/issues. Performing is a full time job.  I can not stress this fact enough.  Performing involves concerts and rehearsal and lots of practice.  But perhaps I digress. First of all, Bogotá is not the States.  I don't see the problem as the same despite Uribe's push to gringoize the social system and particularly the way in which we think of money and the use of it.  For us, the OSNC and Colombia, the argument you forward is putting the cart before the horse in my opinion.  It would suggest that there is no audience for classical music in Colombia and no support.  However, if you look at concerts even in pueblos it is easy to find enthusiastic people who will fill the church if they know there is a concert.  Just look at the concert recently at Gaitan:  packed house of people paying as much as $300.000 for a ticket. What we need is a professional orchestra first, before you think about diversity.  We DO NOT HAVE A PROFESSIONAL ORCHESTRA. Fundraising, promotion, consistency is what we need first.  That and a full compliment of musicians in the orchestra!  Extranumerarios are not an orchestra. We need serious funding.  What we have now is amature.  One of the tragic aspects of the quote and one the main thrusts behind it is the theme of teaching "the young talent".  Young talent to do what?  There are no jobs for the young talent.  There is a lot of money in Colombia.  Just look at the bribes those guys got for transmilenio. Double our budget in corruption for just one of them!  Look at all those people who showed up for the Gaitan concert.  The money is there but we need a good product, which we still do not have, then we need to sell the product.  This takes a lot of fundraising and convincing over a long period of time.  There needs to be a solid system in place and long term goals with a way to sustain it...in this case it is very much a political issue.  Minds at the very top need to be changed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I find it remarkable that so many want to throw in the towel on orchestras. The musicians role is to make great music. That doesn’t leave time for a whole lot of ambassadorship. That said, most orchestras have been doing community and educational work for decades. If they had stopped, then shame on them. The problem lies entirely with management, plain and simple. The musicians simply want respect and decent earnings. The management seems to want to keep it to themselves, to over-control everything, and the blame most likely falls in the weird training they must receive as “arts administrators.” Remember when one man and a small staff ran a whole orchestra? It can be done. And that a young musician’s training is being warped from being a superb musician to being a jack-of-all-hats, is most alarming.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

One only has to look back to their “A” and “B” scenarios in the initial negotiotions to see that incorporating closer ties to the community was no admirable vision, but rather a pressure tactic. How typical of poor managers to ignore the views of those in the field, dictating what must be done to solve the industry’s problems to the out-of-touch players. The similarity to haughty academics is not surprising, but remains tiresome.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Rather than blaming the players for this sad state of affairs, those who love their symphony orchestras should applaud the musicians of the DSO for refusing to be guinea pigs for their management’s short-sighted, punitive “vision”. No one is saying that community involvement isn’t necessary, but to look at the DSO management’s plan as some sort of beacon for positive change is naive. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Should musicians perform in schools? Absolutely. Should this be a substitute for quality general and instrumental music education programs in schools? Absolutely not. We must be careful that in their reinvention, orchestras do not absolve the public school education system of its responsibility to provide substantive arts education from K-12. Exposure to the arts is critical to a ‘complete’ education, and school administrations are derelict in their responsibilities if they let programs whither because of a perceived shift in public priorities.

Over the past two decades, as music programs whithered and dissappeared, orchestras and orchestral musicians were passive bystanders; we realize now to our peril. No amount of ‘community outreach’ is going to quickly make up for this gap in education.

Maestro Abreu has been steadfast in his assertion that the success of Sistema is that it is a social not a music program. It may be time to sell this idea to our educators.