Elegy for Lauren Hoffman

Today was one of the most difficult days of my life. On Saturday, one of my eldest daughter Shayna's friends, Lauren Hoffman, was suddenly killed when a truck went out of control and slammed into her car during bad weather. The funeral was today, and not only was it tragic, but heart-rending, a horrible loss for our entire community.

The College Music Society had issued a call for scores for their 2008 national convention in commemoration of their 50th Anniversary - 50 scores would be selected, each limited to around 50 seconds each. I knew I wanted to submit something, but wasn't feeling inspired.

When I got home from the funeral with my girls, I felt the need to express myself through music, and composed the following lament:

http://www.xb5.com/mp3/elegy.mp3

This piece is too short, like her life. I don't know why things like this happen. It all seems so wrong and unfair. She was only 17...
- posted by Michael @ 12:55 AM

 
I recently received news that the Columbus Symphony was melting down ($4 million loss over the last two years), so I wrote to one of their musicians who was an Eastman classmate of mine to find out what happened. It resulted in the following email that I sent to the chairman of their board of directors. To date, I have not received a reply.

Dear Mr. Trafford:

I write to you not as a critic, but as a friend of the Columbus Symphony, a group with which I know you have devoted an enormous amount of effort and energy in addition to your busy law practice.

I'm not writing to you to put in my two cents about what you should do about the current dilemma that the orchestra is facing. Short of donating $4-5 million dollars, I'm not sure I can be of much help.

Rather, I am writing to you to espouse some ideas that might be useful food for thought for the future. I also write to you from the unique perspective of someone who has been both a major symphony orchestra musician, and a C level executive with a quarter billion dollar logistics firm. Indeed, my last position was as a principal in the business strategy group of a $2.5 billion telecom firm. I also went to school with some of your musicians. I wear two hats, and mix the two by teaching and training musicians to be entrepreneurs for the arts.

I will be blunt. I believe your orchestra needs to be completely restructured if it is to have a future as a vital part of the Columbus arts community. I see your orchestra wavering under a by-gone model that has administration pitted against musicians, with both losing. Both groups are culpable, and unfortunately it is an archaic model all too common in American orchestras. On one hand, the administration views the musicians as a group of savants that cannot do anything beyond playing their instruments. The musicians, for their part, look at the administration as having only one goal: raise more money to increase their salaries.

Both are flawed approaches.

I found it noteworthy in visiting your orchestra website, that on the orchestra personnel roster, they also list who is their collective bargaining representative. I found that the musicians also maintain their own website, separate from the organization. To me, these are small indicators of a pathological organization, one where you have enmity within itself, let along cooperation, kind of like an animal that feeds on its own limbs.

I've spent a lifetime with orchestra musicians, and believe that they can be tremendous assets beyond the mere playing of their instruments, and are a huge untapped and wasted resource in your organization. While they tend to be a conservative lot, they are remarkably devoted and self-disciplined and self-motivated individuals. You need to tap into this wellspring of talent and draw them into the success of the organization, rather than ignore them. They are smart people that can possibly make the difference between a thriving successful arts organization, and one that loses almost $4 million over the last two years.

Similarly, you need to rethink your community outreach and marketing approaches and be creative. This is a huge challenge. Maestro Leonard Slatkin recently said he does not "anticipate much more than 4% of the population as regular concertgoers." What marketeer would ever ignore 96% of the marketplace when trying to sell a product to the public?

If I was going to start an arts organization, I would never start a symphony. It is too costly to put all those musicians on stage, and that is why we both know that orchestras are inherently money losing organizations, where ticket prices represent only a fraction of the cost of putting on the concert. We also face a dying demographic amongst our clientele. Go look at your audience - look at the gray hair! This is a diminishing group that needs a fresh influx of interest. Even the New York Philharmonic faces the phenomena where people donate money, but don't go to concerts. Instead, we need to communicate to the entire public why we are moved by this music. Tenor Paul Potts did this in an astounding way last summer, and with opera, no less. If you haven't seen this video, you should:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA&

You also need an administrative and development staff that understands this, and is willing to be creative AND tap the huge resource that you have been ignoring - the orchestra musicians - and rethink your approach to selling the Columbus Symphony. If you continue down the same road, you will continue your downward spiral and lose more millions. One definition of insanity is doing the same think over and over and expecting a different result. I believe you need to chart another path for the Columbus Symphony.

What I am espousing is not a new concept; it is one that is or has been adopted by a number of similar-sized orchestras in America, including the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the New Jersey Symphony. I would be glad to introduce you to my old friend Bob Wagner, who is one of the leaders of the League of American Orchestras. It might be useful to have a phone conversation with him about some new approaches.

So, to summarize, I believe you need to restructure your organization, including its marketing approach, and move to a collaborative model where everyone - including the musicians - work together and have a personal stake in the success of the organization. I know it is easy for me to say this and difficult to implement, but clearly the methods of the past do not work unless you are willing to let the Columbus Symphony degrade into a part time orchestra with a limited season.

I beg your forgiveness for this presumptive email, but I am passionate about music. If there is anything I can do to be of assistance, please do not hesitate to let me know or contact me.

I wish you the best of success in all of your future endeavors.

Sincerely Yours,

mld
- posted by Michael @ 3:15 PM

 
In the beginning of July, I penned the following essay to the NETMCDO email list, and this formed the basis of my opening speech at the North Carolina BCOME conference, on July 27, 2007 at the Brevard Music Center.

Folks:

After reading the depressing NY Times article "Why Isn't Classical Music Front And Center" (see below), I still can't accept the notion that classical music is dying and will perish from the earth, or will at best be totally marginalized in our society. Even though I have somewhat taken on a role of evangelist for music entrepreneurship, and even though it appears that most music schools are still graduating thousands of music performance majors into a society that does not see "classical music" as a primary musical priority in their lives, I still cannot give up the notion that there is great value in what I have been taught about music. But frankly, I am just not sure how that value should be communicated, and that's what we are all struggling with.

Perhaps it is the venue. I have to admit that I would rather take my family to a park band concert (and get less objections) where we can spread a blanket, sit on comfortable beach chairs, sip wine and munch on noisy potato chips, talk when we feel like it, than to get dressed up, sit in uncomfortable theatre seating (always a challenge for me, being 6'6"), sit still and be quiet in a concert hall. I went to hear the Berlin Philharmonic perform Ein Heldenleben at Carnegie a couple years ago, and it was as if I was at a funeral - everyone sitting perfectly still during some of the most rousing music ever written, performed by one of the world's great orchestras.

Perhaps it is the medium. I attended Fromme Week (or "Crazy Music Week" as we called it) when I was a Tanglewood Fellow, thinking of how much we were on the leading edge of music. Leading edge of what? Over the years, I've attended concerts with "contemporary music" and come to the conclusion that folks by and large don't like it and I have been to New York Philharmonic concerts where I have actually heard the audience boo, and loudly. Or perhaps they do like it, but when it is in the context of film music, like strings playing in dissonance during a tense scene, or aleatoric music when portraying aliens. While everyone understands that context, few seem to want to go to concerts to hear "contemporary" music. How many folks do you know that bubble with enthusiasm as they proclaim, "I love atonal dissonant music! I am so moved." I don't intend demeaning sarcasm here; I merely wish to illustrate a point. The only exception I can think of was when Philip Glass's minimalist music became trendy, and I had yuppies asking if I could get them tickets - this was a rare exception. We all laughed at the Elliot Carter April Fool's Day joke email that I recirculated about a month ago, but what made that missive extremely clever was how close to the mark it came, and in no disrespect to Elliot Carter, try to name one piece of his that you can hum off the top of your head.

We all know the examples of classical music making it into popular culture - Bach appearing Beatles tunes, Rite of Spring and Mars from Holst Planets, Barber Adagio, Ride of the Walkures going into films, Clair de Lune in Ocean's Eleven. Perhaps it is the context....maybe we need to get unstuck from the notion of the concert hall as the primary purveyor of music, to something else...if we want to reach an audience. When the Goldman Band was in its heyday performing 50 concerts a year in New York's Central Park, it was said that most New Yorkers learned about classical music listening to their park concerts - not from the Philharmonic - where they weaved in transcriptions of Dvorak symphonies along with marches, show tunes and other music not considered "serious."

I also can't help but notice where the composing giants of our time have gone, and we all know that historically composers have followed the money trail, unless you follow the Charles Ives model and compose avocationally. John Williams writes phenomenal music for film, Andrew Lloyd Webber writes phenomenal music for the stage, Paul McCartney and his compatriots write phenomenal popular music -even Leonard Bernstein, our protean classical music genius of the 20th Century, is largely known as the composer of the Broadway musical West Side Story - is it heresy to agree with many peoples opinion that "Maria" is the finest art song of the 20th century? You can point out that John Williams conducted the Boston Pops for many years, but I will bet you that he conducted to much larger audiences than the Boston Symphony. So many of our giants wrote for film - Copland wrote the score for "Of Mice and Men" and "Our Town" (for which he received Oscar nominations), Malcolm Arnold wrote the score to "Bridge Over the River Kwai" (for which he did win an Oscar) and the list goes on and on. What do they know that we don't?

I was recently asked to consult on marketing for the Austin Symphonic Band, one of the finest concert bands in the nation. They wanted to figure out how to get more people to come to their regular concerts (as opposed to their park concerts). My response was, "why?" They were getting a nice audience of friends and family. I told them that they could probably go to a lot of effort to try and market the group to the general population, but I doubted that they would get much traction in getting many more people to go to a concert hall to hear their music. Instead, enjoy the wonderful concerts they are doing with their current audiences, and perhaps look elsewhere - perhaps getting into Austin's South By Southwest (SXSW) and accompanying (as an 90 piece ensemble) some big popular artist, and that will raise the awareness of the band in a way that they could never achieve in trying to market their concert hall programs. Maybe the conclusion here is that if you want to put on classical concerts in concert halls, you need reasonable expectations in our society and culture - be happy that people are showing up at all, and figure out some combination of subsidization or low expenses in order to finance them.

I'm not advocating that we musically "sell out," but I seriously question the financial viability of "classical music" in the way that it is currently being presented and I abhor the fact that we continue to blindly graduate performance majors and continue to hold the Symphony Orchestra as the shining model of what what we should aspire to in our "classical" careers. Instead, we need to be continuing to look at the fundamentals of what drives us as artists and how we can get that message to those that might be receptive to our message, and not be hampered by the old 19th century structures, such as the symphony orchestra, and rethink how we can achieve success in doing so. Rather than having to raise $20,000 to put a 60 piece professional symphony orchestra on stage for one concert, maybe that means following the Charles Ives model and sell insurance so that we can write revolutionary music and not care whether it generates an income. Maybe it means writing music for the likes of something like World of Warcraft, which as of last counting has 7 million subscribers. Wouldn't you want your music to be heard by 7 million people, even if they are gamers?

Have you taken a look at Spoken Word (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_Poetry_Club)? Poets have transformed themselves into performers and found a powerful medium for communicating their poetry. If poets can do it, anyone can!

I think we need to continually rethink about what we are doing, and the guidance we are giving those who come into our academic folds with dreams and stars in their eyes, and continue to push the notion that the world awaits them. Perhaps not as a symphony player, but as a purveyor of what moves them as artists in some other form. My Eastman clarinet teacher Stanley Hasty used to encourage us by telling us, "if you are good, there will be a symphony job out there for you." I would now modify that to the following: "If you are good, there is a way that you can earn a living and communicate your artistry to an audience out there."
- posted by Michael @ 10:03 AM

 
The New York City Musician's Union paper posed another question: "Labor Day is Sept. 3, a day when this nation recognizes the role of working people and their unions. As a professional musician and a union member, do you view yourself more as a 'worker' in the entertainment industry or more as an 'artist'? Who do you believe you have more in common with: other 'workers' -- or those who view themselves as 'artists'? Regardless of your answer, should musicians care about the labor movement?" Here is my full response:

I once had a friend who was an artist - a painter - who questioned whether musicians qualified as "artists" since we primarily reproduce music that was written by someone else.

Certainly, if we judge painters by whether they are performers or not, we would similarly question whether they were artists. Even further, as musicians, we are trained to be followers from the moment we set foot in an ensemble, not as leaders.

The issue of whether we are labor or artists, or leaders or followers is secondary to the larger issue of what we want our music world to look like, and what we decide should be our role in that world, which continues to change and evolve as we speak.

If one limits their view of the world of musicians to one where we relegate ourselves to being labor, or in the case of freelancing, contract labor, then I suppose that unions and collective bargaining take on a more important role. But as we all know,
music has been transforming itself through an increasingly digital age, with more music now being distributed through electronic media than through the concert stage.

The challenge we have, as musicians, is our legacy of always working for someone else, whether it be for a symphony or pit orchestra, and as we all know, those opportunities are shinking. Are you content to be an "artist" solely dependent on others hiring you (which categorizes you as labor), or do you take control of your destiny and seek alternative means of expressing your art, and becoming the employer rather than the employee?

Ever since Ronald Reagan became President, the arts in America have suffered a slow decline due to both reductions in government subsidies as well as a public that has turned their interest to other genres than the ones in which we have been trained.
However, music itself is alive and well in our country, but it is now being distributed by the likes of Sony Music, aired on the radio by Clear Channel and played on iPods made by Apple Computer.

Are we merely music labor scrambling for jobs in live music in a digitally recorded and regurgitated world? Where does that leave us?

Amazingly empowered, is the answer. The labor movement may be dead when it comes to music, but we live in a time when we have unprecedented access to our listening public through the internet and other forms of distribution. No longer are we limited to what record companies decide to put on store shelves. We now have the
ability to seek out our niche market and find a way to make money off of it. But only if you are an enterprising musician, and not an artist that feels that they should be entitled and served by non-existent employers.

This isn't the 19th century - the world has moved on, so be a force for change rather than inertia. Where there is change, there is opportunity, and the real question is whether you can look beyond the end of your music stand for what
awaits you in our amazing world.
- posted by Michael @ 11:43 AM

 
The following is an email I sent to Joel Seligman, the new President of the University of Rochester, my alma mater. I penned this on the occasion of their announcement of Douglas Lowry's appointment as new dean of the Eastman School of Music. So far, I have not gotten a reply.

Dear Dr. Seligman:

I am very concerned that Eastman has or is on the verge of losing its leadership position in the music world, and hope that the appointment of Douglas Lowry as Eastman's new dean may give us a new opportunity to halt Eastman's slide.

I am writing to you after attending the Kauffman Campuses Annual Workshop in Kansas City as a guest participant, as a graduate of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, a former major symphony clarinetist, a business executive and strategist and many other things I can list in my title and bio. I have also had a close relationship with several of your previous Eastman deans. I consider Bob Freeman a good friend, and met about every six months with Jim Undercofler. I have also lectured, performed and given master classes at my alma mater. I have been proud to be an Eastman graduate.

I am also the Executive Director of the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship (BCOME), held each summer at the Brevard Music Center in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, which has been funded with generous grants by the Kauffman Foundation. BCOME has assumed the position of mover and shaker in entrepreneurship in music, and an incubator and educator for the academy, and indeed it has been attended by two previous Eastman deans, Bob Freeman and Jamal Rossi. I was also recently appointed to the Committee on Career Options and Entrepreneurship of the College Music Society, and I have lectured at their National Conference for three years in a row.

My interest in helping to restructure the classical music world into line with the rest of our entrepreneurial capitalist economy was sparked in 2000 when Bob Freeman invited me to be keynote speaker at a symposium he held at the University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts where I posed the following question:

"Where are the incubators of the fine arts world?"

At the time, I was an executive in one of the leading web design firms in New York's Silicon Alley (in fact I personally managed our Carnegie Hall account) and saw the changes that were occurring in the United States.

I subsequently echoed this concern to Jim Undercofler, whom I met when I gave a master class and lectures in Eastman's Arts Leadership Program two days after 9/11. I asked him how in good conscience he could continue to graduate musicians into a marketplace he very well knows doesn't exist - our academies of music graduate roughly 16,000 music performance majors into a society that only supports 22 full time full year symphony orchestras, and that number is dropping. He invited me to meet to discuss the issue with him, and I told him that musicians graduating from Eastman need a third career path more in line with the rest of America besides teaching and getting a job working for someone else.

I didn't start out intending to be a moving force for "music entrepreneurship"; I didn't even use that word. Having worked with over 30 startup companies to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street, I just felt that musicians should be able to forge their own career paths as almost every other industry in our country does, especially having lectured on the subject as the Chair of eCommerce Management at Columbia University and as a lecturer at the University of Chicago.

In our meeting, Jim offered Eastman's efforts in their Arts Leadership Program and Institute for Musical Leadership, a program started by Doug Dempster under Bob Freeman's leadership. I told him that I had looked over all of the courses in those programs, and very little or none of the courses had anything that would solve the problem ("Viola da gamba ornamentation"). It was clear that the program had degraded into a catch-all for non-credit courses. Indeed, you have an Institute for Musical Leadership that ironically doesn't teach leadership, and when I was at the Kauffman shindig, there was much discussion on how Eastman squandered their million dollars in Kauffman money with little or nothing to show for it - no leadership and certainly no entrepreneurship. The term used to describe Eastman at the Kauffman meeting was "missed opportunity." ALP and IML are both nice titles with no substance.

Jim did challenge me to create what I thought would be an appropriate curriculum and degree program for Eastman, and I did so, and he had me present it to a select group of Eastman faculty. By and large it went the way we thought it might: one third were very excited and said "Drapkin, how soon can you implement this?" One third were ho-hum and didn't care, and one third didn't want to have anything introduced into the curriculum that would distract their students from spending every free waking moment practicing their instrument.

I urged Jim to implement entrepreneurship as part of the Eastman curriculum and told him that I thought it would have the most profound effect on music in higher education since Freddy Fennell founded the Eastman Wind Ensemble.

Following that presentation, Jim told me that he "couldn't implement such a program because his Humanities Department was out of control and they controlled all non-musical elective courses." It made me wonder who was running the school. Eastman was a lost cause.

The grand irony of this debacle was Jim contacting me prior to our first Brevard Conference a couple years ago where he said "Michael, it is bizarre that Eastman isn't involved with BCOME given our ALP and IML programs." I told him "great...I would love my alma mater involved. Who do you have that can lead a session on anything to do with entrepreneurship?" "No one" was his reply and that ended the discussion.

Also ironic is that Juilliard, who has been blasted in the NY Times for catering to the chosen few and abandoning or ignoring most of their students, threatens to eclipse Eastman due to Joe Polisi's hiring of the very capable Derek Mithaug as the Director of their Office of Career Development. Derek is now the Chair of the CMS committee of which I am a member, and Eastman is nowhere to be found, even though I constantly badgered Jim Undercofler to get Eastman involved. The irony is that I have met with Joe Polisi, President at Juilliard, and challenged him to transform Juilliard from a 19th century trade school model still in use in most music academies in America where faculty tell high school students that if they come and study with them that magically someone is going to hand them a job in their field. I cajoled him to come into the 21st century, and he proudly told me that he was championing a Juilliard program to teach his students to better read and write. Can you imagine a head of a college considering it innovative to teach college students to read and write? Yet, Juilliard, with Derek at the helm, has been assuming the leadership position, while Eastman has squandered opportunity after opportunity and wasted its Kauffman money.

If anything is "bizarre" it is that I am now working with Juilliard on a national basis to address the issue of "Career Options and Entrepreneurship" instead of Eastman.

How do we judge the worth of a music academy? By the size of its endowment (Eastman's quarter billion) or the number of students it graduates or apply or its ranking in US News (Eastman gained its #1 ranking under Bob Freeman). Instead, I'd hope it gets judged by the positive effect it has on our society, and if Eastman's role continues to be to merely supply the nation's few and dwindling symphony orchestras, then it is failing miserably.

I am very glad that you have finally chosen a new dean for my alma mater. I am hoping and praying that this will be a new opportunity for Eastman to assume a leadership position in the music world, and not just maintenance of the status quo.

I'd like to invite both you and Douglas Lowry to attend the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship (http://www.bcome.org) July 27-29 as my personal guests to see how we are addressing these very vital issues and hear our keynote speakers Bill Ivey, the Director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Clinton, and Arlene Shrut, Founder and Artistic Director of New Triad for Collaborative Arts and fellow Eastman graduate.

If that is not possible, I would be happy to fly to Rochester at my own expense to discuss this and Eastman's future with you and Douglas.

How you would like to proceed?

By the way, I am proud to tell you that my niece Rebecca Gormley just finished her freshman year at the U of R.

Best Regards,

mld
--------------------------
Michael Drapkin,
Executive Director

Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship
July 27-29, 2007
Brevard Music Center, NC
Phone: 512-772-1774
Cell : 512-590-2544
Fax: 501-631-3311
Email: mdrapkin@bcome.org
Web: www.bcome.org

Be Noteworthy
- posted by Michael @ 4:53 PM

 
Here is a piece that is going to be published in the International Musician - the monthly newspaper of the American Federation of Musicians - the musician's union.

The Top 10 Questions You Need To Ask About Becoming A Music Entrepreneur

by Michael Drapkin

The days where the music you were offered in stores and the radio were controlled by a handful of large corporations are rapidly receding. Increasingly, both headlining musicians and those starting out their careers are following their own pathways – and hearts – by becoming music entrepreneurs and are reaching out to their audiences and customers directly and in record numbers. The internet has become the rock that has shattered many of the traditional models in music, and many are finding it very tempting to bypass the traditional musician career pathways of either teaching or getting a job working for “someone else” and starting their own ensemble, organization or company.

But before you tell that annoying conductor what he can do with his baton, you may want to think about the following issues, which are common to all entrepreneurs:

1. What Makes You Different? You are competing with many other people with similar dreams as entrepreneurs. What is different about what you want to do? How are you going to stand out from the crowd? Give a lot of thought to what you are proposing to do and see if it fulfills one of the following: Do you save or make people money? Do you make people’s lives easier? Do you entertain them? If you cannot say yes to one of these three, then get a new idea. I suspect most of your ideas will fall into the last category.

2. Can You Take Initiative? Every journey starts with the first step, and that is true with new ventures. Just taking the plunge is a huge challenge. Can you bring everything together that is needed to make a go at success?

3. Can You Make Decisions? Just having the title “Chief Executive Officer” does not guarantee success. In fact, I have seen more startup firms fail because of lack of decision making ability. Sometimes even a wrong decision is better than no decision at all. Sometimes it isn’t clear what to do next, so find mentors or friends that can give you good advice, and then execute! That’s what “executives” do.

4. Are You An Innovator? Do you sense opportunities that perhaps few others see? Do you “have a vision?” Here are three kinds of ways that people start businesses: 1) a professional practice, like a doctors or lawyers office. Free-lance musicians probably fall into this category. 2) you think you see a market for something that doesn’t yet exist. The risk here is that it may not exist because there is no demand – no one wants it! 3) You see an existing market and think you can do it a little better – this is Ben Franklin’s “build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Apple did this great with the iPod.

5. How Do You Deal With Risk? Are you afraid that if you fail you will be homeless and your kids will wear burlap sacks? Unlikely, but if you only see a gray cloud of uncertainty instead of a fantastic opportunity about to come in the door, then don’t be an entrepreneur.

6. Are You Organized? Unlike in a big company with lots of staff and resources, you are going to have to start out doing most things yourself. Are you a natural organizer with “to do” lists?

7. Can You Sell? Oooohhhh..there is that dirty word. The truth is that as musicians, we sell ourselves every time we play. Now just apply that passion to your venture, and that really isn’t selling, is it? You’re just spreading the word about what you love.

8. Can You Plan? The traditional way of starting a business is to write a business plan, and there are a lot of tools and resources for doing that. In order to be successful, you need to understand what you want to do, how you plan to do it, and what it will cost.

9. Where Will You Get The Money? It takes money to make money. Now that you have made your business plan - including a budget - where will you get the funds you need in order to be successful? This is the single biggest reason that businesses fail – lack of capital (a.k.a. “money”).

10. Are You An Optimist? Yes, you can be a realist, but you still have to believe in yourself and what you are doing and see a pathway to success. Entrepreneurs, by their nature, are optimists. Are you?

So many issues, and just think – you haven’t even started rehearsing yet! But thank God we live in a free society where you can take risks and follow your own path and dreams. We are a nation based on the notion of entrepreneurship and good old Yankee Ingenuity, and finally those concepts are coming to our music world!

The answers to many of these questions can be explored further by attending our conference at Brevard this summer (see below). To help our fellow AFM members, we are setting aside two full scholarships exclusively for AFM members. Send an email along with a statement of need to afm@bcome.org, and we will select two folks to attend…all you will need do is find a way to get there and find a place to stay, and we’ll take care of the rest, including meals!

Michael Drapkin is the Executive Director of the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship, being held at the Brevard Music Center July 27-29 in North Carolina. For more information go to http://www.bcome.org.
- posted by Michael @ 11:18 AM

 
Mikael Elsila, Editor of the "Allegro" - the newspaper of Local 802 (New York City) of the American Federation of Musicians (the musician's union) sent out the following question for his monthly column "Beat on the Street": "May is Labor History Month. Union membership has been dropping in recent decades. Do you know musicians who aren't union members? What should Local 802 -- or the labor movement in general -- be doing about this situation?" My response is below. This is being published in the May 2007 issue of Allegro:

Hi Mikael:

The question is why should someone join 802? The vast majority of musicians are primarily concerned about getting jobs, and the musician's union does not help with that nor assist and never has. 802 only comes into play once a musician has completed the hard part - getting a job - and then needs union membership in order to play in a union-contracted ensemble.

The world is changing. We live in a music world dominated by the likes of Vivendi, iTunes and new technology, disintermediation of the big record labels by the internet, and the rise of the entrepreneurial musicians and bands that reach out directly to their customers. Established music is on the decline. Broadway and the number of musicians it hires has been declining steadily through one non-advantageous contract through the next. Funding for the arts has been shrinking since Reaganomics, and even older symphony orchestras have the phenomena where patrons contribute money but do not attend concerts.

These are the real issues. If the musician's union does not take it upon itself to address these issues and be involved in job growth, rather than trying to hold onto the shrinking number of venues that warrant union involvement, then musicians will not see any reason or have any motivation to join, and the membership will largely consist of a small number of established musicians in the few union jobs that are left, while most of the work is either non-union or outsourced overseas, where it is cheaper.

The old saying is "you can only continue coasting when you are going downhill." Will the musician's union coast and continue to decline, or will it become a force for positive change that justifies the dues we pay annually to be members?

Regards,

mld




- posted by Michael @ 12:59 PM

 

I recently had an inspiration and penned this piece about the bass clarinet. It will be published in an upcoming of the Conn-Selmer Artist Newsletter.

Bass Clarinet - Not Just a "Harmony" Clarinet

by Michael Drapkin

My lifelong love affair with the bass clarinet started at the end of high school. I graduated a semester early from high school in Los Angeles, and even though I was already accepted to start school at Eastman the next fall, I decided to enroll as a freshman at nearby Cal State Northridge (CSUN) so that I could "see what college was like' before I entered conservatory.

I enrolled as a freshman music major at Northridge, and although my main clarinet teacher was studio and L.A. Chamber Orchestra clarinetist Gary Gray, I spent a semester studying the clarinet with the famous Charles Bay. Dr. Bay convinced me to buy a bass clarinet (from him) as a way of getting more opportunities playing in the orchestra.

That summer I attended the Aspen Music Festival, and immediately won an audition to play bass clarinet on Richard Strauss' monumental tone poem "Ein Heldenleben." I was lost for the entire first rehearsal! In Aspen I also got to know fellow Gary Gray student John Bruce Yeh, who was to both become my best friend and best man, as well as a member of the Chicago Symphony. Through John, I discovered that the bass clarinet wasn't just a strange kind of clarinet on uncontrolled steroids, but a beautiful solo instrument of its own right. Just a couple of years later, at age 19, John won his first orchestra audition to play bass clarinet in the Chicago Symphony. Not a bad entry level position!

I entered Eastman that fall and found out that the local Rochester Philharmonic was holding an audition for an extra position playing bass clarinet. I was told that it would be "highly unlikely for a freshman to win that position." In fact, I was runner up, and ended up playing with them anyway during my time at Eastman. It was very clear that the bass clarinet was not only a ticket to getting into the orchestra, but a position that gave you a great deal of importance and independence within the clarinet section, and indeed I discovered that if you weren't playing principal clarinet that it was a lot more fun playing the bass clarinet. Orchestral scoring for the bass clarinet, I learned, was not at all like the writing you came across in band music. In the orchestra, the bass clarinet is by and large treated as a solo voice, and when you played tutti, it might as easily be with the celli/basses as with the rest of the clarinet section.

While many think of the bass clarinet as relegated to inane Alberti bass lines, this is an soloistic instrument that has multiple personalities. In the low register, it is robust and massive - causing your teeth to vibrate and projecting for miles. In the middle register, it is a plaintive and lonely tenor, calling out pleading passion to the world. In all cases, it projects a gorgeous tone that is unmistakable in the orchestra, from the enormous expressive full page solo in the Bartok Second Suite, the perilous but humorous solo in Grofe's On The Trail, the breathless technique required in the Schuman Third Symphony, and the unmistakable solos in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. These are not the fare of amateurs, and require remarkable technique and consistency of tone and fluidity from the bottom of the "Low C" to the top of the instrument.

The summer after my freshman year at Eastman, I made a serious commitment to the bass clarinet, and searched all over Los Angeles for just the right Selmer Model 33 Low C instrument - the instrument of choice for professionals. I became the compleat bass clarinetist, able to take on all literature down to the bottom of the horn - such as the amazing bass clarinet solo in the slow movement in the Khatchaturian Piano Concerto, with facility across the entire range. I then felt like I could leap tall buildings, or registers, in a single bound!

Gary Gray used to talk about "getting to first through bass" - he had gotten into the Kansas City Symphony on the bass clarinet, and I came to discover that there were very few bass clarinet specialists - that most fine bass clarinetists were also equally fine clarinet players. As mentioned, my pal John Bruce Yeh got into the Chicago Symphony on bass clarinet, but subsequently moved up to Assistant Principal Clarinet. His section leader, Chicago Symphony Principal Clarinetist Larry Combs, had previously played Bass Clarinet in the Buffalo Philharmonic. My colleague Eddie Palancker, Bass Clarinetist extraordinaire of the Baltimore Symphony, also played Principal Clarinet at the Eastern Music Festival. These kinds of stories go on and on.....great clarinetists...and great bass clarinetists!

For my part, my day would come a couple of years after I graduated from Eastman. After settling into New York City to freelance until I got an orchestra job, I won an audition to play Principal Clarinet in the New York City Touring Company. Ironically, the guy who played second next to me was the same clarinetist who played Principal Clarinet on Ein Heldenleben years earlier at Aspen! But the real excitement came a year later - I made my first orchestra finals for the Principal Clarinet position in the Indianapolis Symphony. I was stunned when they called out my number! That job went to my Eastman classmate Dave Bellman, who still has that position. Next I made finals (three rounds) for Principal Clarinet in the Oklahoma Symphony...getting ever closer. Next there were two openings back to back in the Portland Symphony in Oregon - first for Bass Clarinet, then for a one year position as Principal Clarinetist.

The Portland folks at first weren't going to let me audition for both Bass Clarinet and Principal Clarinet, especially since the auditions were one day apart with different repertoire lists. They didn't think it was reasonable for someone to be competitive in both. But they relented and let me do both anyway. The first day, I was runner-up for the bass clarinet job, and their comment was "you play the bass clarinet more like a solo clarinetist, and the winner played more like a bass clarinetist." Now that was criticism that I liked! The next day, I auditioned for Principal Clarinet, and again made the finals...they were stunned when I walked in for the final round for the second time in two days!

Finally, I was invited to audition for the position of Associate Principal Clarinet/Bass Clarinet with the Honolulu Symphony, a position I felt was tailor-made for me: when I wasn't playing Principal Clarinet, I would play Bass Clarinet - two solo positions! I knew I was going to win that job, did so, and went packing off to paradise.

I cannot forget that it was the bass clarinet that got me my first major symphony job, and indeed while my first love is as a clarinet soloist and chamber musician, I am best known for the series of orchestral excerpt books I wrote for the bass clarinet ("Symphonic Repertoire for the Bass Clarinet, Volumes One, Two and Three" published by Roncorp) - again, the bass clarinet being the fulcrum of my fame and fortune (well, maybe not so much fortune). But I do consider myself fortunate to have discovered the bass clarinet and its wonderful attributes - a very powerful tool in my clarinet arsenal that has always brought me much success.

- posted by Michael @ 12:10 PM

 
On Saturday, February 3, 2007, I was the keynote speaker at the Arts Entrepreneurship Day at the University of Nebraska. Below is the speech I delivered.

I’m very excited to be here and honored to be able to deliver this speech, and I’d like to thank John Richmond for bringing me out here to Nebraska.

Last time I was in Nebraska was in 1976, and I was driving cross country with my best friend. We were heading east to our summer music festivals.

So, arts entrepreneurship - what does that mean? Right now, most of you are only thinking of how to make it though your next lesson where you will be tortured over some difficult orchestral excerpt, or have to perform some intricate dance move in front of your highly critical classmates. What you’ll be doing after you graduate is only some vague concept, and pretty much spelled out for you by the educational system you are going though:

• I want to be a concert soloist
• Play in a string quartet
• Be in the corps de ballet
• I want to be a professional musician, dancer, artist, composer, teacher, etc. etc.

Our early years are spent learning the basics of our craft, and they also define for us what “success” means. You come into this college experience young, impressionable and vulnerable, and you are swept up into a morass of competition with other students who are older and some of which are more advanced than you. And you look up, especially at the seniors, and wonder if you will someday become one of them – such a seemingly insurmountable hurdle, but to you – a worthy goal.

In this setting, the notion of success is by and large set by others: If I win this solo, or get this chair in the orchestra or win this award, that means that I am being successful. Don’t forget also that people come from different walks of life. I was lucky. I came from a public school in Los Angeles that had loads of talent. I was just one of several talented clarinetists in my school. Some kids come from small towns where they were the star – the hero. It can be tough for them to come into a melting pot like this fine school where everyone is a star.

But that immediately raises the next question: Is the goal here to create stars? Who decides what constitutes being a star? Is that right, and is that right for you? What does “being a star” mean once you leave the artificial microcosm of the academy and venture forth into the outside world?

Let me relate some of my own experiences:

I journeyed from my native Los Angeles to the Eastman School in Rochester, New York fresh out of high school, ready to set the world on fire and take it by storm. It was also a big change moving to an area that gets a lot of snow, kind of a new thing for an L.A. boy.

My first semester at Eastman was also the first semester for flute legend James Galway, who had briefly joined the Eastman faculty. That first week, they held convocation where Galway played a recital in front of the whole school. We were electrified by his performances of the Poulenc and Prokofiev sonatas – and at the end, we leapt up en masse, screaming in ecstasy, kind of like the reaction my kids get when they flip the channels on TV and discover some rap star doing a commercial for some horrible junk food.

Eastman director Bob Freeman gave a speech before that recital, and in addition to the usual welcoming platitudes and directorial comments you would expect him to do, he took the opportunity to cajole us to think broader - to think beyond the music sitting on the stand in front of us.

“Think about what you can get out of your education here, about what the Eastman School has to offer you,” he would say. “The violinist becomes a composer, the clarinetist becomes a conductor.” This was a message he continued to say very consistently during my four-year stint in Rochester. I understand now what he meant then. Today we would call it “thinking out of the box” – getting your head out from being buried in that score, and thinking larger about what you can do as opposed to what you are being told to do.

When you enroll as an arts major, most of your courses of study are pretty much laid out from the very beginning. Your faculty lays out a formula for you to follow – they give you a structure. Part of the reason for this is that they are drawing on their experiences as pedagogues in determining what the masses that go through the programs here should be expected to know by the time they graduate. I understand this, as I created my own curriculum for the eCommerce Management program I chaired at Columbia University.

But this is just a framework, and like with statistics, it is designed for a broad range of students, and not necessarily the individual – you! Thank about it: every year, in America, we graduate 12-16,000 music performance majors into a marketplace that only supports 22 full time full year orchestras, as defined by the American Symphony Orchestra league.

Some people say that in high school, you are taught how to learn, and in college, you are taught how to think, and this is where you need to take personal responsibility and go beyond the curriculum.

I started working with computers in L.A. my last semester of high school. I had graduated early and enrolled at a local college because I want to see what “college” was like, knowing that going to a conservatory was going to be somewhat different. That was where I took my first programming courses, and I loved it.

When I went to Rochester, I continued to take technology courses through the University of Rochester, and Eastman even offered a class my sophomore year called “Computer Applications to Music,” which was really just a programming class. It actually was a graduate-level class, so I got permission to take it, and then I discovered that I was in a class with both my freshman and sophomore music theory teachers who were both grad students. That really annoyed them.

I had to do a final project and at the time I was running the instrument rental department for Music Ed majors, so my boss suggested I write a program to automate the rental process. When I was most of the way through, he asked me if I was tracking my time so he could pay me for it, so I got paid for doing my final project, and I parleyed that into a part time job for two and a half years. He asked me what I should be paid per hour. I didn’t want to be greedy, so I said, “make it one cent more per hour than the piano accompanists” whom I knew got the highest rate. He did, and I became the highest paid student in the school – by one cent per hour. A year later, I got a raise!

Another endeavor that went well in school was my “Drapkin Reading Orchestra.” Eastman, like most music schools, doesn’t have enough string players to make orchestras that can accommodate all of the wind players. So they warehouse you in ensembles, telling you what an honor it was to play in groups like the Eastman Wind Ensemble. I didn’t buy that and being single-minded in my pursuit of an orchestra career, I started a reading orchestra in the middle of my freshman year. We typically read large symphonic works of composers like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler.

I learned a huge business lesson organizing that group. At first, I picked the piece and recruited all of the individual players. That proved to be very time consuming, and I came to realize that I only really cared about a couple of things:

• What piece we were playing
• Who was in the clarinet section
• What part in the clarinet section I wanted to play

Ultimately I outsourced most of the work to other students. I had a regular grad student conducting – Paul Phillips, who now teaches conducting at SMU, so each week I told him what we were going to play, I got the music from Eastman’s fabulous ensemble library and handed the music to section leaders who then recruited people to play in their sections. It took me very little work, and I only retained control of the things that were important to me. I had learned the important principle of delegating responsibility.

My ensemble was very successful and became very well known in the school, to the point that it became the subject of a discussion on orchestral ensemble experience at a faculty meeting, since we were drowning them out in the rehearsal room next door, playing Also Sprach Zarathustra!

Ultimately, I worked out a deal with the Rochester Philharmonic to borrow their music, and by my senior year I was granted funds from the Student’s Association and matching fund’s from the Director’s Office.

I still follow that great delegation model in my own business today. Do only those things that are important for only you to do, and hand off the rest to someone else!

Here’s another one: I made the Bass Clarinet my minor and got the school to grant me private bass clarinet lessons in addition to my primary clarinet studies with Stanley Hasty. It wasn’t a wasted effort on the school’s part. I performed a bass clarinet recital, and I researched and published a book called “Symphonic Repertoire for the Bass Clarinet” which still sells like clockwork. I joke about it with my non-music friends – a book of difficult passages and important solos from the orchestral literature for the bass clarinet – I tell them that I am internationally famous among bass clarinetists in an amazingly razor thin area. But now, it is a series of three volumes, and when orchestras hold auditions for bass clarinet, they often cite my books as the source of the required audition material.

When I went to make a pitch to the Eastman faculty I always made sure that I was fully prepared for why they should let me do what I wanted to do, and they almost always agreed. I found out later on that other students went in to pitch ideas to the administration and when they were turned down, they said, “why does Drapkin get to do his things,” and the answer was “because Drapkin always comes in with a fully prepared proposal, and doesn’t give us any reason to say no.”

I prepared for success, and part of it was just asking, and this is another great business lesson! It reminds me of the old job-seeking acronym AIDA, like in the movie Glenn Garry Glen Ross: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action – ask for what you want! Promote yourself. We have this funny sense that things will magically happen to you – that if you spend enough time in the practice room and can regurgitate those orchestral excerpts well enough that success will be bestowed upon you. Maybe.

But I’ve always felt that you have to be ready to take advantage of success when the opportunities knock on your door. Are you ready to jump into the breech when someone needs you? Are you ready to take a risk or do you have to have everything spelled out for you? One definition of a great leader is someone who can make good decisions based on partial information. Can you make the intuitive leap?

I like being a maverick. I like to take risks, but I do it from a position of strength. I am ready if an opportunity comes my way, and I am ready to pounce if it looks good. I don’t need it spelled out. Life is not so neatly ordered like classical music, it is more like jazz; only you don’t always have the changes written down on the music in front of you.

Now, we’ve talked about how the college curriculum provides a basic educational framework for learning, and how you really can go beyond what has been designed for the masses, and I’ve given you some examples of what I did in college: computers, bass clarinet, Reading Orchestra, and what I learned and got out of them. What are you going to do? Most people breathe just enough air into their lungs just to stay alive, but we wind players know how to get a huge deep capacity out of our lungs to produce richness of tone. What are you going to do with your time in college or your life to produce richness? Let’s talk about the role of the Arts school and what you can get out of it that can be applied throughout your life.

I often preach and have been asked in the press about developments in contemporary media, about what will be revolutionary. I tell them about how people haven’t even dreamed yet about how some of the new technologies will be used, and that businesses on the scale of Amazon and Yahoo have yet to be formed, as we have seen recently with YouTube and MySpace, and the 8 million people that pay $15 a month to kill each other on World of Warcraft [raise your hand if you play WoW].

We use the terms “incubator” and “accelerator” to identify venture capital-backed firms that provide resources, funding and infrastructure to budding entrepreneurial firms. Part of the role of the music schools and colleges of fine arts are as the incubators and accelerators for the budding minds of tomorrow. You. Your faculty is here to goad you into thinking beyond the music that is sitting on the stand in front of you.

When I was in school, invariably we would have discussions where we would question whether we were getting a college education or just attending a trade school, and we wondered whether it would be just as effective to take lessons and practice on our own rather than spending all of this time and money to get a college degree when we were really just judged on how well we played. Ironically, there is a similar argument made about getting an MBA or “B-School” as some call it.

My friends who have MBAs all claim that B-school isn’t about the coursework or education but the vocabulary and business contacts you get. I always tease them that I am a “feral” MBA since I can use terms like “monitization” and “value proposition” just as well as they can. I think that the real difference between Arts school and B-School is really a question of markets. There are a lot more and higher paying jobs for people who get an MBA vs. a degree in the Arts, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be equally as successful, because your education here provides you with a great number of things perhaps you weren’t aware of:

Let me touch on some of them:

• Freelancing as a musician and organizing ensembles prepared me for being an entrepreneur, a project manager and starting businesses. I didn’t start out working a traditional 9 to 5 job, so my perception of work models is much different, and I like that.

• I think creatively. This is a good thing, and ultimately one of the most valued attributes.

• I play solo as well as in ensembles, meaning I can do my own thing and work independently, but also work effectively in groups.

• I competed in auditions and did live performances, so I can work under pressure, and am able to channel my enthusiasm into action. The ability and understanding of how to achieve is again a highly sought after commodity. Remember, it isn’t performance anxiety, it is performance anticipation!

• Life is more like sight-reading at an audition: who knows what they will put down on the stand in front of you – gain the inner confidence of knowing that you can sight read. Again, I am comfortable with that. Sight-read your way through life. Yes it is based on skills and experience, but at the end of the day, put yourself out there and go for it, and start getting that experience here.

• I write well. Yeah, I know that most English classes in an arts school are lame, but DO NOT underestimate the power of the pen. Writing is a big key to success. I’ve now written seven books and numerous articles – including a commission by the New York Times, but my real power is as a wordsmith. Because of my writing ability, I can get to people and arouse their interest. And writing also gets better with practice!

• Finally, I am self-motivated. You have to be in order to get yourself to practice. That is so key to achieving success, and all of you have it here. That is your secret weapon; no matter what career you create for yourself.

Here is the harsh reality: you may enter college full of idealism, expecting that you will be a concert soloist, or will win a job with a major orchestra, but guess what happens when most people graduate?

They have to get a job.

They have to pay rent.

They get into the same rut as every other working stiff in our society. Out goes the idealism, as well as your career. That cradle that your faculty and school rocked you in – that structure is no longer there. Nobody will be there yelling at you to practice. No ensembles, no faculty advisors. Guess what? Most people drop out and do something totally different almost the minute they graduate. What happened to the idealism? What happened to your dreams? What are you going to do now? Let me talk about some of my own experiences.

From my early days playing the clarinet, I was convinced that what I wanted was to win a job playing with a major symphony orchestra. I practiced every day and three years after I graduated from Eastman I finally broke through the plateau. I auditioned for six major orchestras, made the finals in five and finally won a job playing Assistant Principal Clarinet with the Honolulu Symphony. Sounds like I made it to paradise, literally, right?

I hated it! Here’s why:

The administration was horribly incompetent and the orchestra tottered on the brink of bankruptcy – the director was an ex-Army Colonel! Lousy orchestra management!

The musicians were all unhappy and depressed because they were stuck in their job – usually the only one in their state, and think of the cost of flying to auditions with other orchestras when you live in Hawaii. There was a Harvard study published in New Yorker magazine on job satisfaction a number of years ago that said that the lowest job satisfaction was in two categories: symphony orchestra musicians and prison guards. Now to be totally fair, my best friend has been playing in the Chicago Symphony for over 31 years now, and likes it, even though he’s performed the same pieces zillions of times.

(sung to the tune of the opening of Tchaikowsky 5th Symphony)
I’m a depressed Russian composer…
I drink too much vodka…
I put it into my music

I’d want to shoot myself!

Finally, the conductor: Horrible! I remember the first rehearsal watching him flail his arms at us, and I looked at one of the other clarinetists who rolled his eyes and said the immortal words: “welcome to the pros.”

Seriously, that was a tough time for me. I wasn’t happy, and decided that orchestra playing wasn’t for me, but at least I had achieved my goal, and I made my decision based on strength, instead of wondering for the rest of my life what it would have been like.

The problem then was “what do I do now?” That was difficult. Fortunately I had other interests in which to fall back. I reached the Nirvana of my profession, only to find that instead of Shangri-la, it was more like Purgatory!

So what are you going to do? Is the path you are on realistic? Is this really what you want to do? Who is pushing you? Will you survive being pushed out of the nest after college? Most don’t. They hit the ground, go into survival mode, and start doing something else – just for now – just to pay the rent. And that “now” becomes “forever.”

Instead, think about what you really want, and take the plunge – fly! You’re here for Arts Entrepreneurship Day, and Webster’s defines entrepreneurs are people that assume the risk of starting a business or enterprise. By being an entrepreneur, you run the risk that when you try to fly that instead you may crash and burn. I’ve been involved with well over 30 start up firms in my career, and I want to share a secret with you: I’ve learned way more from the failures than from the successes.

Let’s look at the concept of success. What does success mean to you? At the end of the day, the only arbiter of success is determined here, in your gut! Yes, only YOU can decide what success means.

However, to achieve success, it means that you have to take risk, and sometimes you fail. I love to ski, and one of ways I tell whether I really had fun skiing was whether I fell or not. If I didn’t fall, then it meant I wasn’t really having a good time.

But let’s continue the skiing metaphor: Sometimes when you are skiing, you’ll come to a point in the trail where there are a bunch of people standing across the trail looking down the slope. That usually means that you’ve gotten to a point where there is a steep drop-off, and they are all trying to get up the nerve to go down it.

Guess what? That is the reality of life! Are you going to stand around trying to get up the nerve, and possibly wimp out and take an easier route down, or are you going to commit yourself to the mountain, knowing you might fall? Are you going to lean into the fall line – where you feel the power of gravity yank out at you, pulling you down, almost out of control? And don’t forget: once you start, you can’t climb back up, and the truth is that you will get down one way or another. Do you make gravity your friend or your adversary?

You were all smart enough to get into college, so I don’t think it is likely you will die if you take a risk in your career. Do you think you will become homeless if you take a risk and it doesn’t work out? I don’t think so. More likely, you will learn from the experience and do better the next time, knowing what things to watch out for.

By the way, there used to be a “Ski Nebraska” poster that caused me endless amusement – it showed some guy on skis in the tuck position in the middle of a corn field.
Let’s talk about risk.

When you think about risk, do you think about Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” or do you think of the image of Tiger Woods declaring victory?

How do you feel about risk, because that really is the issue, isn’t it? Taking a risk generates fear, because you stand to lose something. Some people just don’t have a stomach for risk, which is why they end up being stuck as a 9 to 5er. You have to decide how much risk you are able to take, and by the way, companies devote huge amounts of money to what is called “risk management” – but at the end of the day, it is no different for you as individuals. Here’s what you have to assess:

• What is the downside for attempting something? Is it time? Money?
• What is the upside? Does it sufficiently outweigh the possible risks? Is there a sufficient return on investment – ROI?
• Do you have the resources to pull it off? Skills, funds, whatever…

Do the analysis – run the numbers, as my B-School friends like to say. What does your gut tell you?

Remember what I said about practicing and writing? Well the same is true with risk, by the way. The more risks you take, the easier it gets. Sometimes you fail, but the optimist will say that each failure brings you one step closer to success.

Now that I’m older, I think a lot about what my life means to me, and what I really want to do with my life. I think a lot about the things I want to achieve, but more about how I want to continue to live my life. I hope that when I finally go crawling into my grave - that I can look back at my life with the satisfaction that comes having known that I have led an interesting and fulfilling life, filled with the usual trials, tribulations and milestones, but also knowing that I’ve taken risks, failed some, hopefully succeeded more, loved, laughed, and spent the shot I’ve been given in life doing interesting and fulfilling things to the best of my abilities and had a positive effect on those around me, because at the end of our days, that is the only real immortality.

So, in conclusion, when I look back at my college days, what did I gain? Did it prepare me for the world? Was it relevant? Yes, I learned proficiency on the Clarinet by studying with the masters, and I was able to achieve my professional goals on my instrument. But I will always think back on that first speech at that James Galway convocation/recital, where Bob Freeman gave one of his many famous talks on broadening your horizons – the “clarinetist becomes a conductor” speech. I now understand what he meant then, that college is a place where you learn how to think, and maybe all of us are lucky here, because as artists, we all perhaps think a little differently and maybe that is a good thing. That is the gem that is ours to gain.

Learn to think. Challenge your peers and your faculty. I think you’ll get a big smile out of them if you do, especially if you have thought out your proposition and give them no other option but to say “yes.” College is a time where you can safely take risks – they lay out a safety net for you. Take the leap – take risks.

Then, when you graduate, DON’T STOP!!! Keep taking risks and keep pushing. Be a leader and a force for change – be the fulcrum! Change occurs when the status quo becomes unbearable. Carve the world – your world - into what you want it to be, and keep pushing. Take the “road less followed” ----- and it will truly make all the difference.

Thank you.

By the way, two plugs:

First, I got to hear Maria Schneider speak about a year ago at a private Eastman event, and I think she is terrific and what she has achieved is terrific.

Secondly, write down www.bcome.org – my Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship held this July 13, 14 and 15 at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina. Scholarship money IS available, plus now you have an in with the Executive Director.

- posted by Michael @ 10:26 AM

 
The following is a letter I sent to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. I never received a reply.

Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas
New World Symphony
541 Lincoln Road
Miami Beach, FL 33139

November 20, 2006


Dear Maestro:

Much time has passed since we recorded Steve Reich’s Desert Music together with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

My career began with a lifelong dream: as a clarinetist with a major orchestra. But the reality wasn't nearly as thrilling. After attaining a position with a major symphony, I began working in technology, which led to significant experiences in management, strategy, leadership and entrepreneurship, including work with over 30 startup firms. Ultimately, I missed having music an active part of my life. I thought a lot about how what I learned in music affected what I did in business, and about how what I learned in business affects what I do in music.

This led to an examination of the fact that we graduate 16,000 music performance majors annually in the US without significant planning as to their part in the larger role of the fine arts in our society, especially in a market-driven economy like America’s that responds to supply and demand. It also led me to thinking about the New World Symphony.

In the beginning of 2006, I was introduced to Howard Herring through my close friend and colleague John Bruce Yeh. At the time, Howard was seeking a new Dean of Musicians for the NWS, and called me with great enthusiasm about my potential candidacy. At the time, I had mixed feelings about the NWS. Given the huge oversupply of orchestral musicians in America, and the poor health of symphony orchestras in general, I did not understand how an orchestral training academy would ultimately help the symphony world in particular and society in general.

Tayloe Harding, the President of the College Music Society, recently introduced me as “the leading proponent for music entrepreneurship in America.” Indeed, my Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship, held last summer at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, was a great success – it sold out, and 100% of our post conference survey respondents indicated they would recommend it to their friends. I have lectured on the subject at both Eastman and Juilliard, and have made presentations on the subject at the national conference of the College Music Society for three years in a row now. I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how we can build up the arts in America, and music in particular.

Which leads me back to the New World Symphony:

After giving it a great deal of thought, I saw that the NWS was sitting on an enormous opportunity, unique in the music world.

What if those 400 NWS graduates playing in orchestras were not only trained in advanced orchestral performance, but also in governance, best practices, organizational management, audience development and many of the other issues vital to the long term health and growth of orchestras in our country? It seems to me that the only long term viable model for orchestras is one of collaboration between musicians and administration – the entire organization needs to operate as a team. Many orchestras, such as the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony and the Colorado Philharmonic are already successfully following this model.


What if the NWS was not only creating the best orchestral followers, but also the best orchestra leaders?

What if the NWS creates great musicians that can expand the number of full time, full year orchestras in the nation from 22 (according to the ASOL) to 44?

Can you imagine having former NWS leaders inviting you to come conduct their vital, thriving orchestra – orchestras that were not previously MTT quality?

I see the NWS as a goldmine – greenfields – with the potential and opportunity to have a greater and longer lasting impact on American orchestras than you are already doing.

I would like to help you realize a greater mission for the NWS, in addition to the fine work you are doing. I would be happy to discuss this in person with you.

Maestro, is this of interest to you?

Regards,

Michael Drapkin

- posted by Michael @ 12:33 PM

 
On December 26,2006, my severance arrangement with IDT Telecom ran out, and I took the occasion to write a note of encouragment....well, mostly....to their CEO Yona Katz. I never received a reply.

Dear Yona:

On the occasion of the completion of my severance agreement with IDT, I wanted to thank you for your generosity in helping ease my transition from IDT to my present location in Austin, Texas.

When I was working for Lehman Brothers back in the late 1990s, we found and moved into a house we liked in Monsey. To my great surprise, I discovered that my friend Avery Kornbluth, whom I knew from Lehman, lived walking distance from my home. Over the ten years I lived there, I periodically attended services and events at Rabbi Levitan's shul, and always felt a warm welcome. I also davened with Motti and the crew from IDT, not knowing that eventually I would work with them.

In 2004, Avery introduced me to Peg Lockwood, and we really hit it off, but was unable to hire me at the time. Eventually, Avery hired me into E&O, which was not my preferred location, but I still did the best work I could do for them - I fixed and delivered the MasterCard POSA system, wrote the entire integration plan for Sonus as a core carrier switch, and came up ideas which led to two patent applications in my name for IDT. Eventually, I met Monte Banash, and we hit it off, and I believe I also delivered him a great deal of value. I also had the honor of working with Ashish, whom I also consider to be brilliant. I still consider both of them to be friends as well as colleagues, and stay in touch with them.

I am, and will remain grateful for the time I spent at IDT. I not only learned an enormous amount about telecom - valuable in filling in gaps I had in previous roles as CTO with other firms, but more importantly I met an enormous number of truly wonderful people, many of whom I know will be lifelong friends. It is not a stretch for me to say that I had more friends at IDT than at any of the numerous firms for which I have worked.

Even though IDT laid me off, I still hope and wish for the best for IDT and am still in awe of its enormous potential. In good conscience, I cannot finally close the doors on IDT without rendering the following advice and thoughts:

- Please consider the POSA patent I invented and the income value it has to IDT. This patent and the accompanying business model represent a way for IDT to monetize its existing back end systems, as well as give you a way to cross-sell into companies that you might not ordinarily access. Various people in IDT see this as a business with potential in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

- I suspect that my analysis on your "triple-play" offering never made it to you. I have seen your efforts in this area, and they are proceeding as I have foreseen. If you haven't read that analysis, Ashish has it.

- I still feel that you have enormous potential in the CPS area by leveraging the huge amount of customer data IDT has and identifying the markets sensitive to IDT's remarkable ILD rates. I wrote a proposal on this area, but I again do not think it ever made it to you. Again, Ashish has it.

- I used to work for a brilliant and enormously successful leader on Wall Street that said he had two criteria for the people he hired: they needed to be smarter than him, and they needed to know things that he didn't know. Now that IDT is a middle growth company, I strongly urge you to hire executive talent with experience at running companies of IDT's size with the know-how to take it to the next level. I think you all have done a remarkable job, but - to be blunt - IDT has made no significant growth since I joined it in mid-2004 (the exception being your marvelous M&A deals, but this isn't enough for sustainable growth).

If I can render a single bit of advice, it is to implore you not to be satisfied with the status quo. I know you can all do better, and still see enormous opportunities for IDT, and my biggest frustration in working as employee was my inability to help move you forward, although I certainly tried. Keep pushing until something breaks loose - always rethink your strategies until you find something that works. I want you to succeed.

Again, in the midst of this holiday season, I wish you all the best for success in the future.

Regards,

mld


d r a p k i n t e c h n o l o g y
______________

michael drapkin

512.590.2544

http://www.drapkintechnology.com

- posted by Michael @ 12:23 PM

 
Amy Rhodes was appointed Director of The Academy -- A Program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute, which is a two-year fellowship providing the post-graduate musicians with performance opportunities, advanced musical training and intensive teaching instruction. Her program was announced in NETMCDO. Several email exchanges prompted me to pen the following email (December 18, 2006). I received no reply.

Amy:

Thanks for the update. I am very passionate about addressing the huge oversupply of musicians (12-16,000 music performance majors graduate every year) and lack of demand for their skills. Our higher educational system also only provides two career paths: teach (school, privately, college), or work for someone else (either as a soloist, member of an orchestra or ensemble).

I believe strongly in a third career path: entrepreneurship. I've put my money where my mouth is and created the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship, which sold out in its first year. We also just received our second large grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation - the largest grantor of money to entrepreneurship programs in America.

I would strongly urge you to consider adding another line to your list of goals below. Please teach these musicians leadership. We both know the Carnegie Hall board of trustees is the premiere board in NY - filled with great leaders and captains of industry. You could have them share their enormous vision and leadership with your fellows, and have them do more than be soloists and teachers. Have them be part of the supply side, not just create more demand. All of the CEOs on your board understand this.

When I was chair of the eCommerce Management Program at Columbia University, I did such a thing - I ran a program that took senior managers and trained them to become executives, and brought in CEOs from many of the top firms in New York - from finance, media and entertainment, pharma and technology.

There is no shortage of great performers and teachers in America. What we lack are leaders - leaders in the mold of the great Isaac Stern, who not only was the premier performer of his time on the violin, but also saved Carnegie Hall and acted as its leader - chairman of the board. Can you help create more Isaac Sterns? What could be more fitting to his memory?

By the way, I have had a long standing relationship with Carnegie Hall - I was the Director of Technology for Avalanche, which won all sorts of awards for the beautiful website we created for Carnegie hall.

Please pardon my boldness, but I do feel very passionate about what I do.

Regards,

mld
--------------------------
Michael Drapkin,
Executive Director

Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship
Brevard Music Center, NC
Phone: 512-772-1774
Cell : 512-590-2544
Fax: 501-631-3311
Email: mdrapkin@bcome.org
Web: www.bcome.org

Be Noteworthy
- posted by Michael @ 12:29 PM

 
From December 4 to December 6, 2006, I visited the campus of DePauw University in Indiana to interview for the position of Dean of Music. While they showed amazing unenlightenment by not selecting me for the position, I did do a good showing and write a good speech, which I delivered to their faculty, as follows:

Traditions, Trends, and Traps:

How Can Music Degree Programs Respond to 21st Century Realities?


Thank you for bringing me here to Greencastle to meet with you and to explore whether I should become your next Dean of Music.

I’ve had a rather unusual career, the sum of which has led to my standing before you here today. I started out with hopes and aspirations which were pretty similar to those of many of your students today. I loved music and I loved playing the clarinet, and I couldn’t think of doing anything else in my life. When I was in high school, I heard a performance of that gorgeous clarinet solo in Resphigi’s The Pines of Rome, and said to myself, “that’s what I want to be able to do someday.”

So, with the single-mindedness of purpose characteristic of music performance majors, I left my filial home in Los Angeles, traveled to Rochester, New York to the Eastman School of Music, discovered cold weather and snow for the first time, and set out about the task of learning how to become a great clarinetist so that I could get a job playing in a major symphony orchestra.

By the grace of God, I did reasonably well in that task, and in one spring a couple of years after I graduated, I finally broke through a plateau, during which I took six auditions for major clarinet jobs, made finals in five of them, and ended up landing the position of Assistant Principal and Bass Clarinet with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.

Now I could talk about what my experiences where like playing in a full time professional orchestra, but that isn’t really why I am here today. After I achieved that lofty life goal of landing a major symphony gig, I took a 23 year sabbatical, which led to significant experiences in management, strategy, leadership and entrepreneurship, including work with over 30 startup firms. I thought a lot about how what I learned in music affected what I did in business, and about how what I learned in business affects what I do in music.

You see, while I was a student in Rochester, I not only learned how to play the clarinet, but I also took advantage of other resources around the University of Rochester. I took courses in economics and computer science, and I landed a part time job at Eastman in the instrument rental department where I computerized their systems, and generated beer money for about two and a half years.

My freshman year, I also organized a reading orchestra, using Paul Phillips, a grad student that now teaches conducting at SMU. At first, I got all the individual players myself, and then thought, “this is nuts - too much work.” So I analyzed what was really important: what piece we were playing, and what part in the clarinet section I wanted to play. I found section leaders and let them recruit people in their sections. I learned an important management principle: how to delegate responsibility. It worked so well that I received money from the Student Association and the Dean’s Office in order to rent music.

I used my undergraduate years to explore, learn new things, try stuff, sometimes fail, and more importantly, I learned to think larger than merely what I was presented with. I went beyond the curriculum.

Which gets us to the topic at hand: How can music degree programs respond to 21st Century realities?

Let’s look at these realities:

Here’s the good news:

- Music is alive and well in America. Huge, in fact. If you turn on the radio, most of the channels will be playing music. People spend a lot of money on music, with new delivery vehicles like iTunes making it easier than ever, and the tiny iPod turned around and brought success to Apple Computer in a way that never could have been predicted.

- There are tons of music performances going on. Our youth spend a lot of money buying tickets to concerts. Austin, Texas touts itself as the “live music capital of the world.”

- Music is huge in our public schools. In any given high school, you will have hundreds of kids actively participating in concert band, orchestra, and chorus – even marching band.

Here is the reality, however:

- The music on the radio, by and large, is not classical music, nor are they downloading Mozart. It is a well known fact that the classical CD market died several years ago. How many recordings of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony do you think the market can support?

- Yes, there are a lot of music performances going on, but most of them are not in our genre of choice. Youth spend a lot of money going to rock concerts and not the symphony, and even the biggest orchestras have the phenomena where folks donate money, but don’t attend concerts. Live music in Austin means, country, rock and jazz – I don’t know of any string quartets playing on 6th street.

- And music is huge in our public schools. But why do they drop their involvement with music by the time they get into the work force, yet go to sporting events and not concerts?

And the largest challenge is one you will hear from me several times over the next few days: America’s colleges of music graduate 12-16,000 music performance majors into a market that only supports 22 full time full year symphony orchestras. Do we dare cut back on enrollment and not let students pursue their dreams? No.

But we do focus on supply and virtually ignore demand. For too long, most music schools have followed a 19th Century trade school model that tells prospective high school students that if you come study with me at music school, someone is magically going to hand you a job, then we graduate them into the workforce without significant planning as to their part in the larger role of the fine arts in our society, especially in a market-driven economy like America’s that responds to supply and demand.

The question you all want to hear me answer, is what I think the DePauw University School of Music can do to address these issues while still supporting our primary goals of training fine undergraduate music educators and performers.

Well, in order to achieve anything, you first have to decide what you want to do, and I will save that for the facilitated discussion we will have later in my visit.

You also need to look at the resources you have at hand - a fine music faculty, a new performing arts facility coming online this summer, an exemplary liberal arts college that is a magnet for some of the nation’s finest graduate schools. There is a lot to work with here.

I’m also going to head off a question that I know many of you are wondering, “Why is Drapkin interested in coming to a small school like DePauw?”

The answer is simple. It has been my experience in my professional life that a small, focused and highly motivated group of individuals often can achieve far more than large groups.

If change is going to occur, and we are going to figure out what we are going to do with all of these thousands of music school graduates, then it is going to happen at a place like DePauw, and that is why I am here.

The DePauw University School of Music is at a crossroads. You have the opportunity to bring in a new Dean that can help you “respond to 21st Century realities.” Yes, I have a great deal of experience in administration, facilitation, leadership and even success. But you’re not bringing in the Michael Drapkin School of Music. You’re deciding what you collectively want to do and where you want to go, and if that is truly what you want, then I think I can help you.

But I’m not done yet. Here is some more food for thought and then we can open up the Q&A:

It is said that in high school students learn how to study, and in college they learn how to think.

What kind of thinkers do you want to create out of your music degree programs here at DePauw?

My friend Bob Freeman, who just retired as Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas and my Eastman Director, says that when it comes to music students, we “overtrain and undereducate.”

And there lies the power of DePauw – a small focused school, outstanding faculty, all located in a single campus in Greencastle. Imagine the possibilities.

With all of the challenges I have outlined for our music world, can we create thinkers that will help solve them in ways that we can’t even imagine?

If you teach clarinet, wouldn’t you be just as proud to have educated a student that goes on to become the head of the Federal Reserve Board? Alan Greenspan studied clarinet at Juilliard.

Or, in addition to having cello students get jobs in orchestras, one goes on to be a leader in broadcast news? CNN’s Paula Zahn attended college on a cello scholarship.

Or have a piano student become the leader of a country? Paderefski was one of the world’s finest pianists and he became prime minister of Poland.

Or how about my classmate Mark Volpe, who became the Executive Director of the Boston Symphony.

Wouldn’t you be just as proud of all of them?

On the college level, DePauw University has been striving to use its legacy as a leading national liberal arts college to create the next generation of leaders that will make hard decisions and come up with the solutions to the problems we all face in the world. I was struck by a line I read from the strategic plan:

DePauw intellectually challenges students and inspires them to lead and to serve in an increasingly diverse and rapidly changing world.

Can we make the DePauw University School of Music stand out in the music world by creating leaders that can address the challenges facing our world: shrinking arts funding and audiences, lack of demand for music graduates – all against the backdrop of a huge American music world dominated by the likes of downloading, Brittany Spears and Clear Channel, and with one of the nation’s top five music schools – Indiana University – only an hour’s drive away? How do we to respond to the 21st Century?

The old fashioned way: by helping our students become the best that they can be, with the best education possible, but also coming up with new and innovative ways for them to take their place in the arts in our society. I have a lot of ideas for how we can collectively achieve this, but I certainly don’t have all of the answers. However, if we do our jobs right, the ultimate answers will come from our legacy: our graduates.
- posted by Michael @ 2:23 AM

 
On September 28, I threw a party to celebrate my being laid off from my most recent former employer, IDT Telecom. The follow is a speech I delivered at the party:

Now you’re seeing the REAL Michael Drapkin – the one you’ve heard me talk about but you’ve never actually gotten to see. This is the real me.

I live in two worlds. I live in a Willson-Osborne world, and I live in a Klezmer world. And the way the differences combine for me is what creates meaning, and beauty.

Think about creating beauty, in your own way, whether as a Rabbi that moonlights as a singer/songwriter in the clubs of the East Village, or as an engineer that creates a crystallinely gorgeous algorithm for optimizing toll-free usage. Beauty takes on many forms.

First off, I’d like to especially thank my good friend Avromy, er, I mean Avery for having brought me into the company. Well, his father did give me a directive that I am supposed to tell all his friends to call him Avromy – I’m just following his father’s wishes.

I am grateful for having had the opportunity to work at IDT. IDT has given me the opportunity to make a contribution to a remarkable organization, and in return I gained enormous insights into the telecom industry, got to work on some interesting stuff, had two patents filed in my name, and the company took good care of me. I cannot ask for more.

Two weeks before I came to IDT, I was flown down to North Carolina to interview for the position of Dean of Music at the North Carolina School of the Arts. I did 30 hours of interviews, and that would have been a dream come true for me. Unfortunately, I was late to the game and they were already negotiating with another candidate.

Instead, two weeks later I found myself at IDT!

Who is to say what our real destiny is in life?

I don’t know, but I can tell you this:

Here we are today. I am leaving IDT with an enormous number of wonderful relationships that I have made with people that have touched me and hopefully whom I have touched. And that will not end.

So maybe at the end of the day, that’s why I was meant to come to IDT. Maybe I was mean to come here to touch you – to cajole you – to push you and leave a couple of these thoughts with you at the end of the day, and maybe, just maybe, your life will go off in a slightly different direction. Maybe not a lot, but maybe just enough. Here are a couple of thoughts I want to leave with you:


Risk – Jewish Dance story,
How can you stand consulting story.

Learn to get comfortable with risk, and make it an invigorating part of your life.

Doing More – not getting complacent

Wind players like me learn to use all of their lungs. You use the bare minimum needed to stay alive. My advice to you is this: don’t live a bare minimum life – fill your lungs with all the marvelous things that surround you. Always do more.

Mozart Clarinet Concerto 2nd movement.

Do more, and figure out a way to do it now. A rabbi I know once asked me if I could suggest a business that he could get into so that he could make enough money to do the things he really wanted to do. Instead, I answered, “why aren’t you starting out by working on how to do those things really want to do RIGHT NOW, rather than work on how to do what you DON’T want to do.

Find a way to make things happen NOW, and always – always - follow your heart.

In conclusion, it is my blessing to you, that you take risks in your life so that you can do more – be more - and to bring kindness into this world. Maybe not by changing the world, but just one person at a time. Maybe it is just smile at someone when you pass them in the garage, like Renee Riehl mentioned I do with her. ‘Course, it is not hard to smile at Renee!

Now, we’ve all been granted a finite time on this earth, and every moment that we have is precious. It is my hope that someday when I am crawling into my grave that I’ve used the time I’ve been granted to the best of my ability – that I’ve laughed, loved, and had some positive effect on those I have been around. And I am grateful, today, to have been given life, for sustenance, and to be brought to this very happy moment.

Yes, I am leaving you today, but I’ll be fine, and you know that I have all sorts of things up my sleeve, which have been a poorly kept secret. Funny, this tune keeps going through my head:

Play some of the Yellow Rose of Texas

Not sure where that comes from!


My time at IDT has gone by so quickly, and I want to close with a brief poem I wrote about 9 years ago called “Flashes”:

I cry at the pain of life,
Mere existence taking its toll
Struggling I reach out
Across the abyss,
and find a hand to guide me across.
Through the most tenuous of links,
a slender strand gracefully bridges
the wide gulf.
Bringing the elusive image, filling
and warming me.
A dancing intermezzo in the maelstrom of life.


Thank you all for coming!
- posted by Michael @ 12:49 PM

 
Michael Drapkin's opening speech on July 14, 2006 for the Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship, held at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina.

I want to kick things off by making a few comments to set the tone for this conference.

It gives me great pleasure to stand up here in front of a group of about 70 winners. Yes - WINNERS. Why do I make such a statement? Because by being here, you've taken the first step on an amazing journey - one that most of the rest of industry in America has already figured out, but only now is coming to the area that we love - music.

Now that might be a bold statement, and we certainly can't give you the equivalent of an MBA in one weekend, but our goal here is to open your eyes to something that can not only change your life, but those of your fellow musicians, and indeed, the entire country. Sounds like I am some kind of infomercial or Est meeting, but trust me, we're not locking the doors.

Call it what you want - entrepreneurship, leadership, management, vision, but every great revolution starts with one person who has an idea and figures out a way to make it stick.

It is difficult to remember, since music - especially classical music - has become so institutionalized, that every great arts organization can trace its roots back to someone with a vision. Take the New York Philharmonic. Somebody started it - perhaps it was someone who felt there should be a symphony society and that there was a NEED for it. That person, who started that long chain of events that resulted in that fine orchestra in Lincoln Center - that person was a music entrepreneur.

And that's what we want you to be. We want you to leave here inspired. To become a visionary. To dream about what might be, and to acquire the know-how to make it happen. An army of visionaries fanning out across American making things work. Finding a way to make things happen and clawing and scratching until some brick in that immovable wall comes loose, and you slip through.

Whether you are a musician with dreams of your own ensemble, or a college teacher that wants to inspire others to follow their own path, or already in an organization that you'd like to see go in a new direction, our goal is to give you a taste of all the sweet things that go into making that happen, and have a lot of fun, make a lot of friends, and hear some great music in the process.

I love being an entrepreneur. I love taking risks and I'm not afraid to fail. Just ask Bob about my application to his Ph..D. program!

But thank God I've had enough successes to keep me going. Indeed starting this conference has been a great example of entrepreneurship. Do you think that it went like clockwork, that everything fell right into place. NO! Do you think that Brevard was the first place I shopped my idea for this conference? NO! I was turned down.

But I don't care about the failures. Boo hoo for them! All that matters is that we stand here today with a sold out conference with the nation's leaders in the music entrepreneurship movement here to share their knowledge with you. And it is our hope that you leave here energized enough to go off and do the hard work it takes to conceive an idea, grow it, and make it a success.

That is a big challenge in our society. You go to music school, and they offer you two basic career paths: teach - or go get a job in someone else's ensemble or organization.

But thank God we live in a society that was started by entrepreneurs, that allows you to dream and fulfill your dreams.

Here are some of the crazy things I think about. Maybe you can figure out some of the answers:

- In music school, I was taught about symphonies, sonata forms, all sorts of interesting ways to organize and present music, yet our society only has one. Why is it that the only commercially viable musical form in our society is the song?

- How come, again, is it that the only featured instrument in our culture is the male and female voice? Bennie Goodman led a highly successful band in another era; why can't a clarinet player be a rock star?

- Why is it that we have hundreds of kids participating in concert band, marching band, orchestra and chorus in our high schools, yet the football team, with a handful of kids participating, gets all of the funding?

- Even more, with these hundreds of kids participating in music programs in our schools playing everything from popular music to jazz to classical, why do they drop their involvement with music by the time they get into the work force, yet go to sporting events and not concerts?

- How come, when I go to a classical concert, it seems like I am attending a funeral? Last January, I went to hear the Berlin Philharmonic play Ein Heldenleben at Carnegie, and I was in utter ecstasy, yet I look around, and nobody is moving…they are sitting dead. Why have we put such huge barriers between ourselves and the music we love? Why can't we clap between movements, or allow the musicians to talk to the audience? As a clarinet teacher, I always push my students to do more…more swells, more expression. How do we move others in the way that we get moved? That feeling of sitting in an ensemble and everyone leaning into the cadence. How do we get our audiences to do that?

I challenge you to find answers to these and other questions that continue to baffle us. MAKE a difference. Be the fulcrum. Be an agent for change. What could be more satisfying?

Live the quote that we all know from Robert Frost:

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Well, by coming here today, you've taken the road less traveled, and let's see if over the next couple of days we can make a difference.


- posted by Michael @ 1:00 PM

 
For the last year, I've been playing on World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), which at this time has 6 million subscribers worldwide. Within the game, I belong to a highly organized "guild" called Denizen, which has a separate website for its membership. I posted this on that website today. Pardon the coarse language; it is written in the vernacular of the intended audience.

Yeah, I know I am the old guy in the guild, but I think there is an extremely important lesson to be learned here, so be my padawans for a few minutes, stfu and listen:

While you may not think this is a big deal, the guild's collective decision to move to Cho'gall, under Tasty's strong leadership, was pretty gutsy. To make a very disruptive decision like this on short notice, gain consensus, evaluate it, overcome fear, and above all - act - is a big deal, and would be impressive anywhere, whether in game or irl.

Make this a model for your life.

I know that most of you are in your teens and 20s, and at that age you not only think you are immortal, but that you have plenty of time to mould your lives. But that isn't reality.

Most people go to school, possibly to college, and at some point you are faced with living your real life - earning a living, paying your rent, etc. You then get some kind of job, get married, maybe buy a house. End of story......end of the REAL story. That's your life and that's all it will be, and that's it for most people. Boring job, financial obligations, millstones around your neck, and a million reasons to justify why your life is the way it is. Does this sound like the way your life is heading?

Take this lesson of action - moving to Cho'gall - as a life lesson. Seize the day - carpe diem. Don't settle....go take a risk. Find the Nefarians in your life and defeat them, whether they are solo or with a group of like-minded individuals like Denizen. It is too easy to just go out and get some job and make excuses about why you can't do more.

For example, I've given Cowfang (who is a friend irl) a lot of grief about getting his lazy butt out of BBY and taking those same excellent detailed skills he shows in WoW and apply them to the real world. That's where the real challenge is - not here. So what if you fuck up and fail? That's how you learn, and nothing ventured, nothing gained. No risk, no reward. Do you want your life to be Wailing Caverns, or AQ40? Do you really think you would become a homeless person if you fail? Every failure gets you one step closer to success.

Now maybe what you have is enough for you. Maybe you are willing to settle for "just enough" in your life, and that is certainly your choice and I can respect that, but going out with Tasty this morning on Cho'gall into WSG to "sample the local talent" reminded me of what I live for in WoW and in REAL LIFE - the thrill of the hunt. I like to win. More than that, I want to stomp the enemy, kill them, destroy them and kill them again. I am not satisfied with the status quo. I want more....bigger challenges to conquer, puzzles to solve, bosses to take down (of course I have worked for bosses irl that I've wanted to kill).

What are you going to make of your life?

- Are you working? Just earning a living isn't enough. Find out what your passion is in life, and find a way to make that your work. Money isn't the goal, although it is important.

- Are you in school? College? Use it as an opportunity to go beyond the set curriculum. Use it to explore what really gets you going, what makes you passionate, and take risks. Get comfortable with the idea of taking risks, and, when you leave school, DON'T STOP. Make striving for achievement and managing risk an integral part of your life, and enjoy the wild f'ing ride. I do.

If you can be organized enough to get into Denizen, and achieve what we have done here, then you can do anything. And that is something to think about.

[end of sermon]
- posted by Michael @ 3:37 PM

 
I wrote this in the car, dictating it into my handy dandy digital recorder. I also submitted it to my local paper. It was published in its entirety in my local Rockland Journal News under the title "Community View" on Thursday, June 3, 2005.

-----

May the Force Be With You, Always

By Michael Drapkin

Today, I had a rare Sunday business meeting in southern New Jersey, and on
the way back, I got on the New Jersey Turnpike and found myself in stop and
go traffic, an all too common occurrence. I called up my wife to let her
know that I would be getting home late, and she suggested, "Why don't you
get off the road and let the traffic pass? Go see the new Star Wars movie.
You know you've been wanting to go see it. You could always see it again
with me later."

Being in front of her computer, and with the power of the internet, she
found me a route that took me to a multiplex that was showing "Star Wars
III: Revenge of the Sith" somewhere in New Jersey. I got into the theatre
early, and parked myself dead center in a seat that would fill my eyesight
with the full panoramic view and experience, one of the reasons why I enjoy
a movie theatre instead of watching on my home TV.

I was not much older than Luke Skywalker when I went to see the first Star
Wars movie in my native Los Angeles. I stood in a long line with one of my
high school buddies (we're still friends) and went to a midnight showing in
a packed theater. The audience was electric. When the Millennium Falcon
went into hyperspace, the entire theatre came unglued as if it was
everyone's fantasy about outrunning the California Highway Patrol. I left
the movie theater knowing that both film and our culture had forever
changed. How much Star Wars captured our imagination - the classic struggle
between good and evil; to strive to achieve success against all odds,
something I have always tried to make a way of life.

Star Wars became entwined in the fabric of our society. When New York City
launched a fleet of buses with dark windows, people immediately dubbed them
"Darth Vader buses." Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative became
nicknamed the "Star Wars Missile Defense System," and to this day, when
someone does something very ill advised, we say they have "gone to the Dark
Side."

So it was with a sense of nostalgia, anticipation and excitement that I sat
down to watch this sixth and final segment of the Star Wars saga, which was
a "prequel," in a manner similar to Richard Wagner's four Ring Cycle operas,
which were written in reverse order over a 20 year period. Even though we
all knew exactly how this movie would turn out, it was still fascinating to
watch it unfold - a complex thread of George Lucas storytelling, mixing Zen
and morality, and the literal descent of Anaken Skywalker/Darth Vader into
hell. Even knowing this plot for over 30 years now, it was a fascinating
and complex story that left me feeling a little sad to see it end. In the
end, the question, was not "what was going to happen?" but "how could this
happen?" That was always the question in our minds, ever since that eerie
moment in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader said "Luke - I am your
father."

Now I understood why there have been reports of people leaving the screening
of "Revenge of the Sith" with tears in their eyes. I've lived most of my
life having Star Wars being a part of it. It was like seeing a movie of
your own birth and watching the looks in your parents' faces, or watching a
video taken by an omniscient camera of the live vivid story of a Holocaust
escape by someone you knew; the final closure to a question that you always
wanted to know.

It was interesting to contrast this with the recent cancellation and final
episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise," ending with the birth of the Federation.
As much as I also love Star Trek, that one had overstayed its welcome, like
the guest that doesn't know when to go home.

There is no question that there is a sense of nostalgia from those opening -
almost dated - rolling titles and the classic "a long time ago in a galaxy
far, far away" and hearing that familiar John Williams theme music one last
time. Of course at the very end of the movie, they tie up the loose ends,
thematically pulling in music from the original movie, as if to tell you
that you have arrived back where we all started 30 years ago. So George
Lucas is wise to end it where it is: at the end of the tale, bringing a
sense of both symmetry and sadness.

I pondered this at dinner after the movie, and got back into my car and
found that the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike was indeed still backed
up, almost unchanged from where I left it. But I didn't really seem to
mind, because while this was the end of an era, I know I had changed, and
that in my own small corner of the galaxy, life would go on, and it would be
good.
- posted by Michael @ 11:46 AM

 
Here is a piece that I wrote for Rose Sperrazza's website for the clarinet studio she teaches at Northeastern Illinois University in the Chicago area:

My Fellow Clarinetists:

By enrolling in Rose Sperrazza's studio, you have embarked in a wonderful journey of the clarinet, one that will hopefully bring you satisfaction, adventure and a pathway through life that is unique in our society. Even after all of the years and diverse experiences I have had so far in my life, and even as far away from music as some of the things I have done have taken me, I have and always will be a clarinetist. It is part of the fabric that makes me the person I am. If there is any single bit of advice I can give you, it is to find satisfaction in your world of the clarinet, and enjoy it for the wonderful universe that it creates for you.

Here are some ideas that might be helpful to think about. These are things that have worked for me; you have to find what works for you. Hopefully these can give you some direction to explore.

On Playing The Clarinet
-----------------------

The physical act of playing the clarinet and the beautiful things that it produces is a conglomerate of a diverse set of activities, and the whole, when working well, is definitely greater than the sum of the parts:

REEDS: Reeds probably have the single biggest impact on how you sound as a clarinetist, yet the vast majority of clarinetists don't know how to adjust reeds and make them work for you, rather than trying to adjust yourself to them. I've given a lot of reed master classes, both publicly or privately for friends, and I am still astounded at the lack of knowledge that exists among clarinetists regarding how to work on reeds. If you find reeds that work right out of the box, then you don't know how to work on reeds. If you use a reed clipper, or reed duplication machines, or your reeds only last a couple of days or weeks, or even know the number reed you use, then you don't know how to work on reeds.

Most clarinet players play on reeds that are too hard, because they tend to be more concerned about the number on the box (e.g. "I only use #5 reeds!"), so consequently they get fuzzy sounds and a tone that is non-responsive, especially in your ability to articulate and play soft in the upper register. While a full, substantive discussion of how to make and adjust clarinet reeds is beyond the scope of this piece, here are some tips:

- You need to start with good, aged, golden cane that is cut evenly, and the fibers must be absolutely parallel to the reed and be even, not clumped. You can't make a good reed if you don't start with good cane. Stick with a major brand like Van Doren (or "VD