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Entrepreneurial Thought: Career building an imperative	[Mar. 13th, 2012\|09:30 am]
Three articles to contemplate this week: • New York musicians finding work getting more scarce • Kim Boekbinder and the 1,000 True Fans Theory • Bringing creativity back to education These articles were chosen for my weekly newsletter at CU with a specific flow in mind: we start with more bad news about the state of the music business, this time from pit musicians and others in New York City, where the music union’s membership (one reasonable measure of the number of working musicians in a city) has seen a staggering decline in recent years: it would appear, in New York anyway, that many musicians have thrown in the towel and are doing something else. Bummer, yes? Then we spend some time visiting with Kim Boekbinder, an indie rock musician who speaks frankly about the fears and challenges of being a freelance artist – but who also has forged fearlessly ahead and developed a new way to both engage her fans and support herself – and her art. Hmmm… Lastly, we encounter a story that might seem like a non-sequitor: an article on how more states are looking for ways to bring creativity and creative expression back into a central role in public education. What do these three stories have in common? They’re all about the state of not just the arts in our society today, but about the state of creative activity generally. And how we view the state of things in this area has a lot to do with which lens one chooses to look through. If you look through the lens of professional musicians operating under a long-established model of gigging in a major metropolitan area, the picture is pretty bleak. But if you look through the lens of one determined artist you might see a different picture, one where an inventive mind has come up with an innovative way to continue to flourish artistically and create at least a modicum of financial stability. And lastly, we see that educational institutions across the country are beginning to see the value of creative thought, and its importance far beyond just the arts: looking through this last lens, you might even decide there is reason for outright Hope! No matter which lens you choose to look through, however, one thing is inescapably, unequivocally, clear: the idea that music students in 2012 can aspire to the same old career trajectory that has sustained generations of musicians before them, and ignore the realities of a changing marketplace, is no longer tenable. Living in the past and clinging to old models simply isn’t an option anymore – or at least, it’s not an option if you want to sustain yourself and your art over the long haul. Yes, there are still full-time orchestral positions and tenure-track teaching jobs out there, but they’re becoming increasingly scarce – and even those jobs are likely to require creative thinking and innovative approaches to be sustainable over time. And for everyone else, learning to think creatively about how to develop their careers – in other words, learning how to be entrepreneurial – is no longer an option. It’s an imperative.
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Entrepreneurial Thought: Not all who wander are lost...	[Feb. 22nd, 2012\|09:30 am]
As a kind of follow-up to last week's post... You’ve probably seen that phrase at some point on a bumper sticker. Aside from the (unintended?) irony of pasting that on the back of a mode of transportation, it makes a good point: sometimes just because one is not on a straight-and-narrow, no-diversions path doesn’t mean one isn’t still heading forward in a meaningful way. It just means that we all travel our own paths, and those paths are as unique and varied as our individual selves. I think this is particularly important in the arts. Our artistic education is, in one sense, a complete paradox: we strive to learn our craft and develop our creativity, and we do so within a highly-structured curriculum and a highly competitive atmosphere (both in school and certainly in the professional world beyond it). Yet craft and artistry are themselves very subtle, complex, and even delicate things: they often take years (decades!) to develop, and they can do so along an almost infinite variety of paths. Some musicians flower early and spectacularly, but fade quickly; others don’t really find their voice or their true creative purpose until well into their mid-life or beyond. In the meantime, their life experiences are shaping and influencing their art in a myriad of ways. So, as I often do in these columns, I once again ask: what has this got to do with entrepreneurship? And this week the answer has to do with the role that entrepreneurship can play in the way your professional and creative life unfolds. You see, entrepreneurship is much, much more than simply giving you tools to build a professional career in music. It can certainly be that, if that’s how you choose to apply it. But because entrepreneurial tools are universal tools, learning how to use them opens up options for you in whatever direction you might take – whether it be into professional music or somewhere else (closely related…or completely different!). There’s one more thing entrepreneurship can do, and it’s about creativity. See, entrepreneurs are creative people – whether they realize it or not. They’re able to look at situations and see them through a unique perspective, a perspective that in turn sees opportunities where others missed them. They find creative solutions to things, and they’re open-minded and flexible enough to drop what they thought was their Main Plan and go down a different avenue altogether in pursuit of an even better opportunity. In other words, they’re willing to allow their creativity to lead them wherever it might go – even if it’s down a path nobody else thinks is worth traveling. They might appear to be wanderers to the outside observer, but they’re simply on a different sort of path. Maybe you’re not sure where your musical path is leading, and you’d like to broaden your options. Or maybe you have a clear idea of the path you’d like to travel, but you’re not certain the best way to get there. Either way, entrepreneurial tools can help you with your navigation.
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Entrepreneurial Thought: The path to "success"	[Feb. 15th, 2012\|02:39 pm]
CU Theory Instructor Philip Chang sent me the above image, and I thought it would make a good topic for this week’s entrepreneurial thought. It’s also a great corollary to last week’s discussion of the role of failure in achieving success (entrepreneurial or otherwise). I’ve noticed that folks often think the road to success is a straight line. And by “folks” I mean humans in general, and artists in particular. And there are two problems with this. One is that the “straight line” view implies a single acceptable destination, when time and again we see careers that unfold in unexpected ways – ways that turn out to be far better than the original goal would have ever been. The second problem with the “straight line” approach is that it hardly ever works this way. Both our reading of history and the popular media reinforce this idea that the “greats” see greatness in their future, go for it, and perhaps after a period of struggle or hard work success shines its face on them and from there on out they’re on Easy Street. This is a fiction. There might be individual cases where this is the way things unfolded, but they are the exception, not the rule. Far more often we travel a twisty path of apparent defeats and hollow victories before we finally figure out what we want to be about. And that’s okay: our path helps shape us, helps us develop our skills (can sometimes force us to develop new ones), and enriches our personal and professional lives in ways we can’t possibly foresee. Those experiences make us better. What does this have to do with entrepreneurship? Well, folks who have made a life out of starting entrepreneurial ventures – so called “serial entrepreneurs” – all say the same thing: things never turn out as you expect them to, and that’s a good thing. Successful entrepreneurs have learned that obstacles and “failures” are often the most valuable learning experiences of them all, teaching critical lessons they would not have learned any other way. They learn to celebrate the twists and turns of the path, for those are often the points at which breakthroughs and innovations emerge that would have been missed otherwise. The same is true for student musicians, whether you be pursuing a career in performance, education, scholarship, composition, conducting, music business, or something else altogether: it’s in the curvy paths of our life that the most powerful skills are developed. Celebrate those twists and turns – and see where they lead you!
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Entrepreneurial Thought: Creative Failure...	[Feb. 7th, 2012\|09:00 am]
Let me start by quoting an interesting Blog by R. Keith Sawyer of the University of Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center: In 1949, the comedian Sid Caesar brought together a legendary group of comedy writers and created one of the biggest television hits of the 1950s, Your Show of Shows. Caesar's team included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon. It may have been the greatest writing staff in the history of television. Caesar created a fun and improvisational environment, where the team would riff on each other's ideas. The writers felt like they belonged to something greater than themselves. I call it "group flow." To understand the roots of group flow, it helps to understand a bit more about how individuals find flow. Famed psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that people are more likely to get into flow when their environment has four important characteristics: First, they're doing something where their skills match the challenge of the task. Second, flow occurs when the goal is clear. Third, when there's constant, immediate feedback about how close you are to that goal. Fourth, flow occurs when you're free to fully concentrate on the task. Jazz ensembles rarely experience flow during rehearsal; group flow seems to require an audience, and the accompanying risk of real, meaningful failure. Jazz musicians and improv theater ensembles never know how successful a performance will be, and they learn not to ignore the feeling of stage fright but to harness it, using it as a powerful force to push them toward flow. Research shows us over and over again that the twin sibling of innovation is frequent failure. There's no creativity without failure, and there's no group flow without the risk of failure. These two common research findings go hand in hand, because group flow is often what produces the most significant innovations. Let’s take a moment to ponder this statement: “Research shows us over and over again that the twin sibling of innovation is frequent failure.” That may be an uncomfortable thought to some of you. Our educational system does not train us to embrace failure, but rather to avoid it at all costs. This can be especially true in our musical education, where there is a fairly high degree of objective “right” vs. “wrong” (either you are playing the correct notes, rhythms, dynamics and articulations, or you’re not). But one of the core principles of entrepreneurship is the idea that failure is a necessary part of success. In fact, many of the entrepreneurs I’ve met since moving to Boulder practically brag about how many business ventures they’ve started – and how many have failed. You see, they realize that each of those failures is a precious opportunity to learn, to refine their idea, and to dramatically improve their chances of the success the next time around. So for those of us who haven’t studied Jazz or improvisational theatre, how do we learn to “flow”? How do we learn to “creatively fail”? I think we have to start with our dreams: what are the things you wish you could do, but your fear of failure (or a lack of clarity how to proceed) stood in the way? And then look at those four conditions that Csikszentmihalyi identified: are there others you can team with the requisite skills to accomplish the task? Can you clearly define the goal you’re seeking? How can you and your teammates gather and concentrate on the task? C’s work suggests that if you can satisfy these criteria, the creative environment needed to produce viable ideas will emerge. And that’s the most important step to attaining your goals. The rest is simply gathering the tools you need to execute your Plan.
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Entrepreneurship Pedagogy: a world of approaches	[Jan. 16th, 2012\|08:04 am]
There are interesting tensions in the realm of entrepreneurship education. As I return from my first trip to the US Association of Small Business & Entrepreneurship conference in New Orleans, I am struck anew by how divergent and interrelated these tensions are. For starters, there is the perennial debate about what, precisely, entrepreneurship is. Is it a set of behaviors? A methodology? Even an innate set of psychological characteristics that predispose certain individuals to be entrepreneurial? Then there are different schools of entrepreneurial practice. There's the traditional approach, which suggests that successful entrepreneurs study markets for unmet demand and create innovative solutions to meet that demand. Then there's the "effectuation" model, which suggests that many entrepreneurs start with the resources at hand -- their talent, their creativity, and whatever human and physical assets at their disposal -- and develop expressions of those resources that resonate with the sensibilities of a particular segment of the marketplace. This often leads to the creation of new markets altogether, as opposed to simply inventing a better mousetrap for an existing market. (Creatives mostly practice effectuation, it seems to me.) On top of that, there are tensions between the many different applications of entrepreneurial activity, from the traditional for-profit venture creation model to social and non-profit ventures -- not to mention the artistic realm, with its for-profit and non-profit variants and venture scales ranging from a large organization (a symphony orchestra) to a sole proprietor (an aspiring violinist or visual artist). And overarching all of these interwoven threads is the tension found within many disciplines: the tension between theory and practice. At an academic conference such as USASBE, there are no shortage of folks interested in things like models of consumption and how psychology can illuminate the nature of entrepreneurial behavior. But I'm happy to say that I also encountered also a healthy dose of appreciation for the fact that entrepreneurship, perhaps even more than many disciplines, is truly meaningful only when it results in concrete action. Just as a medicinal formula is not useful unless it can be made into a viable treatment for disease, entrepreneurship theory isn't worth much unless it helps aspiring entrepreneurs be more successful with their goals and aspirations. And that's where the biggest challenge of them all comes in: how does one teach entrepreneurship? At this conference I saw three very distinct pedagogies introduced for teaching arts entrepreneurship, each one fascinating and useful, each one limited in one way or the other, and all of them dramatically different in their approach. As momentum for teaching entrepreneurship to arts students builds steam nationwide, is there a standard which can be applied to create a codified, unified pedagogy for teaching arts entrepreneurship? Or is it perhaps more in keeping with the goals of the field itself for each school to develop its own unique approach that is tailored to the needs and sensibilities of its students and community? When does theory squelch the very free-thinking creativity that is essential for entrepreneurial innovation? It seems to me that the answer lies in entrepreneurship itself. What are the needs of the market I'm trying to reach (my students at my institution)? What resources do I have at my disposal to meet those needs? What products might I develop that would create new demand for what I have to offer? Though my students at University of Colorado may share many needs with students from the Manhattan School of Music or the Oberlin Conservatory, it's also true that the student culture at CU is its own unique animal, and the culture of the school is distinct as well: one-size-fits-all pedagogy is not likely to be the best approach to reaching them (particularly with something like entrepreneurship which is, at first glance, a completely foreign and irrelevant endeavor to them). I return to Colorado filled with ideas for how I might tweak or enhance my curriculum, but also reaffirmed that we've "doing it right" at CU. And while there are of course still challenges and the need for broader "purchase" of my "product," I'm approaching the problem as an entrepreneurial question in and of itself, confident that if I employ the same tactics I teach my students, things will continue to grow and flourish.
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(no subject)	[Dec. 31st, 2011\|07:56 pm]
What an eventful year it has been! But oh-so-productive, too. Here are some highlights: January A lovely performance of my choral cycle, "Love Speaks Its Name," by the OneVoice chorus of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Thank you, Bryce Hayes and OneVoice for a great evening! Presented my first paper at the Colorado Music Educators Conference at The Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs. Not knowing how spectacular The Broadmoor is, I turned down the offer to stay overnight on the University’s tab. I have another paper accepted for this year, and I won’t be making that mistake again! February At long last my song cycle, From the Soul of Silence, received a high-level performance at the Prism Projects concert in New York. Loving applause to Lindsey Goodman, Rob Frankenberry, and Eva Rainforth! It being Super Bowl Sunday, and all musicians (and composer) being Pittsburgh folks, we then departed the concert and found a bona-fide Steelers Bar in the heart of Manhattan. Our team lost, but we had a blast anyway! March Though I am fortunate to take in all manner of extraordinary concerts by my CU colleagues throughout the year, this month saw a recital that has truly stuck with me in the ensuing months. Alexandra Nguyen and Ed Dusinberre truly gave one of the most gorgeous recitals I’ve ever experienced! The Strauss Sonata still resonates. As I recall, I may have managed a nap or two over Spring Break. Otherwise, work continued unabated… April For some reason, April 17 is a charmed date for me. Over the years, I have had many performances and premieres on that date – and 2011 was no exception. This time it was the premiere of my Notturno by VERGE, the resident chamber ensemble at the Corcoran Gallery. In addition to a fine performance, we also received a great write-up in the Washington Post. My trip to D.C. also included some ravishing Spring weather, with blooms in full-force, and a talk at The Catholic University of America. Visited the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception that was…rather beyond words. As the semester wrapped up at school, I also enjoyed my first Live performance of Bernstein’s Mass (by CU students doing a special concert at the Boetcher Concert Hall in downtown Denver) and the conclusion of the New Venture Challenge, one of the Entrepreneurship Center’s main events for the year. A busy month! May May is the time to catch one’s breath. Which I suppose I did…sorta. June One of the year’s highlights took place this month: my trip to San Francisco for my first complete Ring Cycle. I was asked to blog about it at Taminophile.com, and thoroughly enjoyed my first official gig as opera critic. (If you missed my entries, scroll back on here or visit Taminophile.) It was an incredible experience to take in this monumental work within the space of a week, as it was originally intended. And though I did find a little time to enjoy San Francisco and connect with the many friends I have out there, the week was pretty much just the opera: it has an all-consuming effect on any who dare venture into its grip. An experience I will never forget, for sure. July There’s a reason they call those overnight trans-continental flights “red eyes”: because that’s the state you’re in when you’re done. But sometimes it’s worth it. I was headed to Pittsburgh after my San Francisco trip, and I wanted to make a much-cherished Fourth of July party our friends and former neighbors always throw. So Sunday, July 3, I went to the afternoon conclusion of the Ring, got some dinner, and hopped on a plane that got me to Pittsburgh the next morning in time for the party (I even got a nap in). I surprised a lot of people and reconnected with many old friends. I ended up staying most of the month in Pittsburgh, doing some site research for a paper I was writing and enjoying my dear friends at Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. The ensemble, under the direction of my good friend and Artistic Director Kevin Noe, gave a stunning performance of my Notturno, a work that was reviewed in the local paper as “desolate, sometimes hostile.” I decided that might just be the most awesome sound bit I’ve ever received: I had this image of putting that on my business card: Jeffrey Nytch, composer: desolate, sometimes hostile. August And suddenly it was August, and it was the usual mad scramble to get ready for school again, and before I knew it -- looks around Where did the summer go?!?? September A busy month, with two highlights that are hard to compare. One was being a featured workshop presenter at the GALA Choruses Leadership Conference at a wonderful resort in Palm Springs. This was my first trip to Palm Springs, and I can understand why it is such a sought-after destination. I confess to maximizing the amount of time I spent soaking up the sun by the pool… The other highlight was a performance of my Epilogue at CU, as part of the 9/11 Commemoration. The piece was originally written for 10 solo strings, but had never been performed that way before; a full string orchestra had always done it. So this was the first time to hear it as originally intended, and I have to say I fell in love with this version: still full and rich, but much more intimate. My deepest thanks to conductor Nick Carthy and the CU students who did such a magnificent job with this piece! October This month flew by, which is probably just as well: it gave me very little time to reflect on the fact that I was turning 47 years old! But this is as good a time as any to mention some of the terrific things that have developed with the Entrepreneurship Center for Music in 2011: record student enrollment in our classes, the successful return of our weekly workshop series “Entrepreneurship Wednesdays,” and solidifying our partnership with the Leeds School of Business through participation in their Cross-Campus Entrepreneurship Certificate. I’m extremely pleased that by the end of 2012 we’ll have the curriculum in place to offer what amounts to a Minor in Music Entrepreneurship, with a range of courses from both the College of Music and Deming Entrepreneurship Center at Leeds. November I’m not entirely sure what happened to this month. I know what I did, but somehow the time seems inordinately compressed! Highlights include a wonderful residency at Baylor University, with an entrepreneurship talk, a performance of my Three Songs of War (in a new version for string bass and countertenor), and individual lessons with composers. Thank you to my old friend and colleague Scott McAllister, the fabulous string bass maestro Sandor Ostlund, and the wonderful students of Baylor for giving me such a terrific visit! Truly one of the highlights of my year. I was literally home for 12 hours before turning around and heading off to New York for the workshop/pre-premiere of my Four Winds (for winds) with the Manhattan Saxophone Quartet. Thanks to the MSQ guys for a terrific performance: the revised version will receive its “official” World Premiere at the International Saxophone Symposium in Fairfax, Virginia, in just a few weeks! Thanks also to the folks at the Manhattan School of Music for inviting me to give my talk “Why Don’t We Riot Anymore? New concert paradigms for the 21st century.” As always, the talk inspired some spirited discussion! December At this point the year was simply racing by at light speed, and it was just a question of trying not to hit the Holidays with too much head-on blunt force. Still, I was blessed with four positively lovely performances of my Christmas anthem “Calm on the List’ning Ear of Night” by the Ars Nova Singers, as well as several performances of my “Hodie” at the Peachtree Road UMC in Atlanta. I was particularly pleased to be able to “attend” the Atlanta performance via a Live stream from Peachtree UMC, all the more so since this was the first “true” performance the piece has had: the piece requires a rather robust organ to bring it fully to life, and at the premiere in Pittsburgh two years ago the blower on the pipe organ blew out literally hours before the concert. The resulting performance on a piano (4 hands, thank you) was…less than forceful. How great to hear it on the mighty instrument at Peachtree! And so we have it. What a year it’s been – and those were merely the highlights! But I feel it was a year when much valuable groundwork was laid for what I believe will be many exciting and fruitful things to come in 2012. And with that, I wish all of you a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
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(no subject)	[Dec. 31st, 2011\|09:02 am]
A terrific article with which to wrap up 2011! Who -- and where -- are America's Composers? http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/who-and-where-are-americas-composers/
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(no subject)	[Nov. 21st, 2011\|12:11 pm]
It's been far too long since I've posted any career updates, mostly because of the amount of good stuff happening these days: various conferences, talks, residencies and performances, and of course the usual flurry of activities at The University of Colorado-Boulder. This past weekend I was in New York for the premiere of my saxophone quartet -- "Four Winds (for winds)," premiered by the Manhattan Saxophone Quartet -- preceded by a talk at Manhattan School of Music; then a career development workshop at Opera Manhattan. Here are some pics from my coaching session with MSQ, my talk, and a post-concert pic with my cousins Roger & Mary Lou West (who live in Jersey and came over for the concert). Enjoy: ( Pics behind the cut... )
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Entrepreneurial Thought of the Week: Orchestra woes hit close to home...	[Sep. 19th, 2011\|08:28 pm]
Sunday’s paper brings news of another orchestra in serious trouble – and this time it hits close to home with our own Colorado Symphony. While in many respects the CSO’s situation is not unlike many others – high fixed costs and dwindling revenues have created an unsustainable financial crunch – there’s one really critical difference in this case: their audience is growing. In fact, the CSO is doing the exact things that I and other advocates have been advising orchestras nationwide to do for some time: engage in a wider range of programming styles and venues as part of a larger strategy to connect with new audiences. And it’s working: CSO attendance numbers are up, and the percentage of earned income from ticket sales is among the highest in the country. So why is the group still struggling? I’m not going to try to solve the CSO’s problems in this little weekly column. I’m not privy to the particulars of the CSO’s finances, and I’m new enough to the Metro area that I don’t feel qualified to speculate on the broader issue of how the greater Denver community views the arts. But I can say this with confidence: somewhere in the mix there’s a disconnect between the product and the market. Part of that disconnect is apparent in higher numbers of people buying tickets to the orchestra but not enough of those individuals furthering their connection with the organization through their giving. Another is that we have an arts organization that is growing its community impact but corporate donors and large philanthropists are apparently not taking notice. I’ve seen a similar dynamic back with my Pittsburgh group, PNME: in the last eight years, season attendance has grown more than 600% -- while individual donations held more or less steady. The mistake we made at PNME – and a mistake I think many arts groups make – is to assume that higher audience numbers will automatically lead to higher individual gifts. Clearly this is not the case. While finding new audiences is critically important to an organization’s survival, it’s only part of the mix. The next step is recognizing that new audiences may not be aware of the importance of their individual gifts, or they may not value the culture of giving that arts organizations of all sizes and types rely on. What this means is that growing audiences is just the first step: the next step is building a relationship with them in which they come to value the important role they can play in the organization’s survival. Once that relationship is solidified, and they value the greater role they can play, the financial complexion of the organization should begin to change, too.
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Entrepreneurial Thought of the Week: Remembering...	[Sep. 12th, 2011\|12:42 pm]
This past Sunday the College of Music presented a 9/11 Memorial concert, and in our remembering of that tragic day I was reminded of something else we musicians must never forget. I was fortunate to have a composition of mine performed by a terrific ensemble of students, led by our opera conductor Nick Carthy. In addition to being part of a very special afternoon, the experience was meaningful to me personally because I don’t often to get to interact with students as composer-to-performer: we spend our time together talking about career goals and professional development, not making music. But this past weekend, we were co-creators of a musical experience. I mention this because I think as people who are constantly performing and writing music it’s easy for us to take that experience for granted. And yet it is absolutely at the heart of what we’re about: we are musicians, and the ability to bring the healing and transformative power of music to a community that has come together (in this case, to bear witness to an emotional historical milestone) is our highest calling. It is something that we should never forget to celebrate. There’s also an entrepreneurial lesson here, too. Entrepreneurs of all stripes must never lose sight of the fact that they are, at their core, about bringing their product to people. The most effective entrepreneurs value the product they offer and sincerely believe in its worth. The same is true for us. While it might make you uncomfortable to think about what we offered the packed Grusin Hall Sunday afternoon as a product, I argue that we should not shy away from that in the least. What we offered was a precious product of great value, and one that the enthusiastic audience clearly wanted. Let’s celebrate that! And let’s never lose sight of the fact that the artists who most effectively connect with their audience – and therefore, most effectively build a base of supporters necessary to fuel a successful career – are the artists who have an authentic love for what they offer, and a genuine passion to reach people with this very precious product we all have at our disposal: this thing called music.
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