Re: [Futurework] Do I enjoy work?

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Interesting story Keith.    Could you have started Handlo if you didn't have that retirement and had to bring in money daily?  

 

I started my fourth ensemble in 1990 made up of individual investor performers.   Some were able to invest while others could not.   We worked together for five years which was the agreement.    None of them were music majors and so I set up a program for them that included constant lessons with four of the best professionals in New York.    The management agreed to invest in this group at about 2/3rds their regular salary while I took an $80,000 dollar hit on the costs of my teaching with them.   The going rate for lessons in NYCity are about $150 per hour.    They got their instruction for $11 an hour far below even the "Academics of Scale" in the colleges who don't do nearly as much.   

 

They got private lessons almost daily as well as dance and acting lessons for a couple of hours a day.    The "investing performers"  who had money agreed to support those who did not in order to have the requisite talent to cover the parts in the ensemble.    They met four hours a week in a business meeting to plan the business aspect of the company with the professional teachers providing the reality that they were learning.    Over the five years they developed a repertoire of 15 operas as well as choral music and solo work.    They were required to perform a minimum of three performances a week and developed repertory in various hospitals, nursing homes for the elderly as well as performing choral work in churches and synagogues that couldn't afford to have representative performances of their best choral music in full choir.   They also gave a performance once a week that was an open rehearsal on a different opera with a dialogue with the audience.   They ran a budget of about a quarter million dollars each year with some people paying $18,000 dollars while others paid basically their talent to fill out the ensemble.    Everyone had the same vote in the business meeting.

 

In the fourth year they made two world Premiere CDs on the works of Ned Rorem and Kurt Vonnegutt.   In the fifth year they became the first ensemble in America to premiere a completely Flamenco version of Bizet's Carmen with the entire company dancing and singing the opera.   (The ten performance season was something we could not have done due to the copyright issues if it were a new work. )   The company  was featured in a world Flamenco Special on Seville, Spain Television that year as the only Flamenco Opera company in existence.    At the same time they applied for professional membership in Opera America the professional opera company organization and were turned down since Opera America considered that our investment structure was not a professional company but a school.    They also applied for membership in the Union but the Union didn't know what to do with a structure where the company members were both labor and management and making personal investments of funds in the company.   The one thing they couldn't complain about was that we paid Union Wages and always paid on time but we were a confusion to them as much so as our Flamenco Gypsy Carmen which the real Gypsies told me was the first non-prejudiced production that they had seen.  

 

Economically we had to walk a very delicate line because our investments could only be listed as donations to a Not for Profit company.     So the term "investment" was not an appropriate one since neither profit or not-for-profit was equipped to handle our structure.    The money structure was very complicated to stay within the law on that.    Not for profit law is really not equipped to handle company situations although I think they work very hard to try to help us.    In five years we created four world premiere works originally evolved in company with the composers Ken Guilmartin and Joelle Wallach and in the fifth year we were in residence at the prestigious LaMama, ETC. theater of the Avant Garde as well as in the Saint Peter's Jazz Church who gave us space for our opera audience interaction programs.  

 

The young company was in the NYTimes in 1992 as we were developing our projects in the off-Broadway Theater in the Citi-Corp Center in NYCity.  

 

New York Times, November 1992

 "RAY EVANS HARRELL. started the Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble in 1990 with the idea of giving young singers not only stage experience. but also administrative experience.  The ensemble's; steady roster of 18-including singers, dancers, a stage director. a choreographer and a composer - doubles as an executive committee responsible for raising money and doing the other tasks that keep the company afloat...

...One thing the ensemble has learned is a sense of economy. The productions arc spare but evocative and the company takes an additive approach to its repertory.   The three one-act contemporary operas it presented last summer have been revived. with casts intact, and the troupe has worked up three more operas for the new season. The group is presenting these six works as a companion piece to installments in a serialized version of Carmen."
From an article by ALLAN KOZINN, THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the fifth year of the ensemble one of the lead members of the organization (a soprano) resigned, took her training and ran.    Since we had been working at the very minimum size due to the ensemble necessities and since everyone had trained daily together for four and 1/2 years it was impossible to find a soprano who could do all of the things that we had taught her to do.    That trashed several of our works in repertory.    Her defection effected the people in the company who were the leading financial supporters of the group and made them begin to withdraw as well.   They lost belief in the concept of company development.   Each person had learned a tremendous amount of skill as singer's, actors and dancers.     Just to give you an idea of what that was like here is an unsolicited letter by the artistic director of the respected Eugene O'Neill Theater Center when a private showing was arranged of our work by the Mohawk composer Dennis Yerry.

(Quoted by permission)

 

 

Dear Ray, 1994

Where do I begin to thank you and your incredible company for one of the most exciting hours of performance I've ever experienced in this city?

 

To be honest, as I'm sure you're aware Dennis can sometimes be a man of few words so I wasn't certain what exactly I was going to see.   To be honest in my mind it was something in my appointment book between a conference call and my meeting with Dennis. To be honest l wasn't expecting much. To be honest, I was blown away.

 

Your company is unique, beautiful, talented, amazing. Rarely have I seen singers who deserve to be called actors, actors who deserve to be called dancers.   Rarely have I seen the elements of performances so perfectly intertwined, a vision and concept so beautifully executed.

 

I extend my gratitude to you and your artists for an hour of "magic".

 

Warm best,

Christine Arnold

Managing Director

Eugene O'Neill

Theater Center

But, even with the loss of Intellectual Capital we still held it together to perform a large concert with chamber orchestra at New York's Merkin Concert Hall with both Ned Rorem and Kurt Vonnegutt in attendance and wonderful reviews by the NYTimes and NY Observer    Our recordings were reviewed not only with a huge article in the NYTimes but covered by Opera News, Opera Monthly, Gramophone and many other CD magazines.    Everyone gave good reviews for an up and coming professional young opera company.    In all of this success, we never got a state or NEA grant to pull any of this off.   When we applied they said that we hadn't been in existence long enough.    Or we were operating from a High Culture perspective and they were not funding those at the moment.   I'm not whining, these things go in cycles and we just happen to hit it on the wrong part of the funding cycle and so we did it ourselves.    But.....

 

Remember, up until this time no one was making any money.    In fact we were all putting money in to invest in the successful performances of the company.     My contract with this group was for five years.    At five years we realized that it was going to take longer and that we had just gotten started.     The average performer must work for seventeen years to get to the place that this group had gotten in five.    And yet it was not a model that the average conservatory performer would have ever begun.    They would rather join the crap shoot of the opera free lance opera companies in hopes of "striking it rich" and becoming one of the 300 in the International Operatic Ensemble that  free lances in companies all over the world.   Not only that but the conservatory trained individuals have already invested $150,000 in their five year education and usually are beset with loans coming due.  

 

The only repertory companies in the world that are a success come up from another place and that is the place not of personal investment but of hired labor. e.g. the 80 repertory companies sponsored by government in (West) Germany as well as the companies in France and Italy.   I'm not familiar with the structure in the UK.  

 

But our idea was to develop an International level ensemble and to make money for the development of a repertory ensemble.    I bet my entire voice studio on it, in that they joined the company.    At the end when they chose to graduate rather than go on and develop the professional company, I ended up with two students.   That made it tough for a while until I was able to build that up again.    If my Mother hadn't left me a small inheritance when she died, I could never have done it.   

 

But it came down to this.   Imagine that your eight workers were all investing in Handlo in order to make money and that they didn't have the flexibility that you obviously have with your retirement.    Imagine that there was a four year learning curve on Handlo and that all eight decided to go out join your regular publishing houses instead.     That you would have to start over teaching that four year curve to a new group.     Your original idea was five years but now you have the flexibility for a couple more in your current situation.    I did not.   

 

So I took the next eight years to study the Arts and most of all the culture of economics both in private research and on the internet with folks like yourself and Arthur.     During that time I rebuilt my practice by teaching exceptional students on scholarship to once more get the attention of the establishment since I stopped teaching in schools in 1986.    Now they are doing well and my income is going into the opera company to keep it and this new festival afloat.   

 

Harry is funny in his description of what he thinks I do.    Unlike you, he hasn't tried his Georgist principles on the Arts to see if they work.  

 

Meanwhile I have been studying, teaching, working with the families in our Cherokee community with the issues of cross-cultural translation and thinking about why all of this doesn't work.   It wasn't quality.    I can develop quality as easy as sneezing.    I have two generations of exceptional educators in my background and I've worked and developed amateurs to professional standards since I first started conducting choirs to the lead besotted miners in the First Baptist Church on the reservation at age 14.     Churches and amateur groups are volunteers.    They will go a lot of places with you that professionals will not since the pros have to eat off of their time that they put in.   Such things made Charles Ives advocate doing away with professional musicians in favor of bright inventive amateurs.   On the other hand, such talk made Richard Strauss join the Nazi Party since he knew that amateurs would never be able to perform what he heard and Hitler promised a full employment for all German musicians (after he got rid of the Jewish ones.) 

 

In these eight years I have become convinced that the capital for complex musical art will not come on a regular enough basis from the private sector to 1. develop the professional expertise necessary for complex contemporary musical art and 2. to develop the minds of the audience enough for them to know what the hell they are hearing even though it may seem vaguely familiar.    The usual response is that they go to concerts to relax and be entertained, not for the purpose of any of the great themes that developed Chromatic music to its high level of complexity in the 19th century.   

 

Culture is a language and learning it is the same as learning any language.    The tempo of French or any of the Latin languages is not compatible with the tempos of English and German.    You have to give up something in time in order to live outside your own structure.    Didn't your William Shakespeare put it this way:    "My tongue hath become my enemy."   

 

New music for most American English audiences has not had that time of "growing into"   that is required of all languages and creates the same attitudes amongst the ill-prepared as does my reading Russell's Principia.    I could blame it on Russell but the real problem lies within me.   I might not ever understand Russell's Mathematics but that is not Russell's fault since there are those who do and use it in life.    That is mine.    Most contemporary audiences get very annoyed at complex artistic products, as if the artist was an idiot.    Whether Serra's "Tilted Arc"  or Chris Ofili's Elephant Dung pictures there is not a lot of intelligent discussion going on around the audiences.   It doesn't really matter what these things mean in the lives of the audience.    What matters is what they meant in the life of the Artist.    Audiences who come to only see through their own rules are looking for entertainment not Art.  

 

So we had a complex product.   Plenty of re-enforcement from the press and many sold out performances.    Why didn't they make any money?    It would be better to ask how we were able to do it in the first place?     We paid for our own concerts and the specialized training necessary to do Chamber Opera performances.    Our ticket sales even when sold out, barely took care of the cost of the orchestra.    Better to look at every single Opera Company in America.   

 

 

With tickets from $45 dollar minimum to $250 maximum no opera company in America makes over 60% of its income with sales even when sold out.    Almost all of the money is put into the Art.    There is no serious advertising and without private donors coming up with 40% of the costs there is no Art.     Private donors are not interested at all in the American Identity.    They are collectors who see themselves as International Personas and the Opera is one with Milan, Paris and London.    The Metropolitan Opera is a European Opera Museum and it is a subsidiary of La Scala.    It has no serious connection with what the Germans consider the purpose of Art and it must regularly give small educational concerts for the development of its moneyed class or even this tepid repertory will be too hard.  

 

In short, we ran up against the problem of artistic complexity and a work-fatigued audiences' needs for simplicity and entertainment.      Even the established groups like the NY Chamber Symphony have caved in.    They tried developing their audience, which didn't work and got booted out of their Hall at the 92nd Street Y with $25,000 a concert shortfalls, at which point they tried going for a more general repertoire approach and moved to Lincoln Center.   Now they have quietly folded their wings as has the other chamber orchestras around the city.  

 

Citizens have to know what the purpose of complex art is in society and make sure that it is developed or it simply goes away.     

 

 Amateur groups are wonderful in that they develop the taste of their members.    I congratulate you on the wonderful work that you have done in bringing out the music of the complete Traditional Western Choral Canon.     There is so much richness and without people like yourself giving of themselves tirelessly, this whole field would disappear.    I have a friend who is a graduate mathematician from Harvard and a retired NYCity Public School Teacher.    He uses his retirement to live and has done seminal work in String Figure Math bringing together the traditional Western Math with the hands on Geometry of traditional indigenous string figures.    Like your connections to the orient, some of his most profound dialogues are with the Japanese who have done wonderful work in it.   

 

But without yours and Jim Murphy's passion, this stuff would never happen.     Professional musicians are too busy making a living.    There  are not many like us who will give 80 to 90 % of our income just to keep the Art alive and to be allowed the freedom to follow it wherever it leads.    That is the reason that we are Private Entrepreneurs and not "hired hands" working for a big organization whether company or government.    We escape the simplicities of "scale" in favor of the power of personal expression.    We are constantly looking for more efficient and practical models that will allow us to fund the real work of Art that rarely gets done these days.    The Art that is embodied in the Truth of the mirror and the exceptionalism of the ideal of Beauty.    Either way it ain't simple. 

 

Best

 

Ray Evans Harrell

 

P.S. Here is a little story that might have some relevance to the brusqueness that hurt your feelings.

 

This Mohawk band hosted a sporting tournament to which they invited a group of James Bay Cree. The Mohawk, who were an agricultural people long before contact with Europeans, had developed a custom of always setting out considerably more food than their guests could consume. In this way they demonstrated both their wealth and their generosity. The Cree, however, had a different custom. A hunter people for whom scarcity was a daily fact, their custom involved always eating everything that was set before them. In this way they demonstrated their respect for the successful hunter and for his generosity.

 

Needless to say, a problem arose when these two sets of rules came into collision. The Cree, anxious to show respect, ate and ate until they were more than a little uncomfortable. They considered the Mohawk something akin to gastro-intestinal sadists intent on poisoning them. The Mohawk, for their part, thought the Cree ill- mannered people intent on insulting Mohawk generosity.   From Dancing with a Ghost by Rupert Ross

 

 

cheers   REH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

To: "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 3:57 AM

Subject: [Futurework] Do I enjoy work?

> Harry,
>
> I much enjoyed the description of your working life ("Doom isn't necessary").
>
> In the course of it, you assumed that I enjoy my work.  I'm not sure
> whether I do or not. I don't have to work because I get a good income from
> my architectural business but, having started Handlo five years ago,
> several people's jobs now hang on its future so I've got to see it through
> to full viability. This means working anything from between 8 to14 hours a
> day, depending on what's on my plate at any one time. Like Amazon, we're
> growing at about 25% p.a. and, like Amazon, we'll be fully viable in about
> two years. Unlike Bezos, however, I didn't have hundreds of millions of
> investors' dollars to start with, just a couple of thousand of my own.
>
> Strangely enough, I started Handlo because of FW list. One FWer over your
> side of the water (who will remain nameless) was complaining about the
> unemployment in his part of the world -- seeming to think that it was the
> government's responsibility to do something about it (even if it knew
> how!). However, I offered to spend a few days free of charge in his part of
> the world and carry out some brain-storming sessions to develop ideas for
> jobs and businesses. I'd done this 20 years ago at Lanchester College of
> Technology in Coventry (now Coventry University) in brainstorming sessions
> with redundant car workers and managers and stimulated some of them to
> start a few new businesses (one, incidentally, which I'm proud about, was
> the first medieval banqueting business in England -- and perhaps the world.
> It wasn't my idea but I encouraged it into existence.).
>
> My offer was declined (somewhat brusquely, I thought!) so, being rebuffed,
> I thought I'd start a new business over here as a sort of test of what I
> was writing about on FW list. I made several provisos, however. One was
> that it had to be an Internet-based business, so I could stay at home and
> avoid commuting. The other was that it had to be a "pure" information
> business. It took me several weeks of thought to develop the idea of
> Handlo, a house-design business for self-builders, and a new sort of
> encyclopaedia. However, the first came out on top because choral music has
> given me so much pleasure since I'd experienced it late in life and,
> although I knew absolutely nothing about sheet music publishing and am in
> no way formally qualified in music, I learned how to computer-engrave music
> and I started it. (I'm a great believer in the principle that the best way
> to learn a new skill is to start practising it.)
>
> We sell music to over 1500 choirs all over the world, from the best choral
> societies in major cities to a little village choir in Indonesia which
> doesn't even possess a credit card and offers to pay us in bags of rice.
> There is also a little church choir in India which now has a repertoire of
> music which would be the envy of any cathedral in the world. Without
> advertising, we're just breaking into central Europe now and also China.
> Every day I receive e-mails from choirs which can't get hold of music, or
> can't afford normal publishers' prices, thanking us for our service. Handlo
> will be a very big business in about 15-20 years' time, long after I'm
> pushing up the daisies. But its existence is really owed to the whinger on
> FW who thought that the answer to unemployment was to apply for government
> grants, form academic committees and so on and so on -- that is, with no
> idea of how the real world actually works.
>
> So, do I enjoy work? I don't know. I just find it fascinating. If some
> people are clever enough to be bored by their jobs, then surely they're
> clever enough to find themselves a more interesting one.
>
> Keith
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com
> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
> Tel: +44 1225 312622;  Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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