Cultural Entrepreneurship: Attraction and Balance.

How does a twenty-first century arts institution find that equilibrium between what Matthew Arnold defines as “the best that has been thought and said,” and “the property of an educated elite… which involves intellect and study,”[1] with a more populist approach. After all, “the majority of the audience for culture consists of “omnivores” who have both traditional and popular forms of culture on their menu and alternate between them.”[2] As further noted in the Compendium: Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe: The Netherlands, “A strict division between the state domain and the commercial market …[is] no longer realistic.” Rick Van der Ploeg, Professor of Economics University of Cambridge and Fellow of European Economic Association further stressed,

“Subsidy should … be used to get a grip on the cultural market, in order to make artistically high value performances more popular, and utterances of popular culture better in the sense of a more artistic content. Cultural entrepreneurship would open up possibilities to reach a multicultural or similarly diversified audience.”

Rick Van der Ploeg, “Compendium: Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe” [3]

What is Cultural entrepreneurship? The Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship defines it as: “commercial ventures that connect creators and artists to markets and consumers. They create, produce and market cultural goods and services, generating economic, cultural and social opportunities for creators while adding cultural value for consumers.”[4] This entrepreneurship shifts the cultural sector’s focus on “the commercial techniques needed to develop new audiences and generate independent sources of income.”[5] One celebrated example of this is the Detroit Symphony (DSO). Led by world-renowned conductor, Leonard Slatkin, along with its president and CEO, Anne Parsons, and its players, the DSO has been “working to reinvent what it means to be a symphony orchestra in 21st century America, convincing new audiences that such an institution is an essential part of a city’s personality.”[6] In the past few years, DSO’s musicians have played everywhere from high school auditoriums in blue-collar suburbs, to a Salvation Army rehab center on the city’s southwest side. In June 2010, the symphony performed a concert at Orchestra Hall that included Bernard Herrmann’s nightmarish score for the movie, Psycho.

“As a wildly mixed audience of T-shirted kids, goateed hipsters and larking baby boomers watched Janet Leigh’s shower scene, the orchestra’s string section provided the movie’s signature series of jagged shrieks with a way-better-than-Dolby vividness.”[7]

Also important in DSO’s outreach endeavors is its 18th annual free “Concert of Colors” – a musical celebration of metro Detroit’s cultural diversity presented by a partnership of the Arab American National Museum, New Detroit, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, ACCESS and the Detroit Institute of Arts.[8]  One feature of the celebration: the symphony recently gave a concert at the Matrix Human Services Center, a former church in northeastern Detroit. The audience was a collection of approximately seventy residents of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, all of them African American, many of them “confronted with classical music for the first time.”[9]

“If it seemed like an awfully small audience for a performance led by one of the U.S.’s best-known conductors, the loud clapping and hearty cheering suggested that such music might have a future in Detroit after all…”

Okrent, “And the Band Played On.” [10]

These tactics mirror those of the Berlin Philharmonic, a continent away. While the Berlin Philharmonic is not currently struggling financially, its mission is undoubtedly influenced by the need to draw new audiences while eschewing the Western ethnocentric programming that frequently begets an elitist label. For the 2010 – 2011 season, programming themes address Hungarian Music, while Zukunft@BPhil, Berlin Philharmonic’s educational program, promises an “Alla Turca”[11] chamber music series which “offers an intercultural dialogue in the form of workshops for entire families and other young people.”[12] Another project is “Coro,” described by its creator, Luciano Berio – an experimental Italian composer — as “an anthology of different modes of ‘setting to music.’ “ School students, as well as adults from different areas of Berlin, will create text collages reflecting their own particular cultural heritages. These will form the basis of an instrumental and choral composition focusing on the interaction, but also on the individualities of the participants to create a multi-layered whole.”[13]

“It is like the plan for an imaginary city which is realised [sic] on different levels, which produces, assembles and unifies different things and persons, revealing their collective and individual characters, their distance, their relationships and conflicts within real and ideal borders.”[14]

Like the tapestry that allows individual colors and textures to work together to form the whole without losing their individual characteristics, so does music inspire harmony, mutuality and cohesion rather than an amalgamation of cacophony. With this program, one can “…celebrate culture as a form of spontaneous, as well as deliberate, expression and as what is common to the people of a community or a region as opposed to what divides them.”[15]

 

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[1] As quoted in Hamilton, “Scruton’s Philosophy of Culture: Elitism, Populism, and Classic Art “.

[2] Bína, “Compendium: Cultural Policies and Trends in Europe: The Netherlands,” 8.2.1 page N 49

[3] Ibid, 4.1.

[4] Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship: http://culturalentrepreneurship.org/page1/page1.html

[5] Hagoort, “Cultural Entrepreneurship: On the Freedom to Create Art and the Freedom of Enterprise.”

[6] Okrent, “And the Band Played On.”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Kim Silarski, “Concert of Colors Expands,” in Detroit All-Star Revue returns with more local greats, ed. Aaron Barndollar (Detroit2010).

[9] Okrent, “And the Band Played On.”

[10] Ibid

[11] “Alla Turca” is an Italian phrase which translates to “Everything Turkish”

[12] Stefan Dohr, “Musikfest Berlin 10,” ed. Berliner Philharmoniker (Berlin2010).

[13] Ibid.

[14] Luciano Berio as quoted in Ibid.

[15] Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary.”