Ray, I found your account of what you have tried to do with the Magic City
Opera very moving. It seems that you have both succeeded and failed.
You succeeded because the idea was a great one. You failed not through any
fault of your own, but because the audience was unreachable.
In the 1970s I had the privilege of attending many celebrations in the
small Native communities of the Mackenzie Valley and western Arctic in northern
Canada. A great deal of music was played ranging from traditional skin
drums to Scottish reals and jigs played by extremely good fiddlers. Here,
the audience was immediately reachable. The music was part of their
being. (The Scottish reels and jigs came from early Hudson Bay traders and
had been adapted by the people to make it their own. One of their favorite
jigs was the "Rabbit Dance" -- very complicated!)
What kind of music is reachable to us? Not opera surely. Sirens
wailing several streets over? Jets taking off overhead? The cash
register whirring while a single mother works her way through a minimum wage
day?
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 1:37
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Do I enjoy
work?
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 -----
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]
>
________________________________________________________________________
>
_______________________________________________
> Futurework mailing
list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
