CMS ARTS ENTREPRENEURSHIP LECTURE SERIES

Presented to the Joint Professional Doctoral Study Programme
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music
Art Academy of Latvia
Latvian Academy of Culture

Spring 2023 Schedule:

February 1, 2023
Presenter: Mark Rabideau
President, College Music Society
Associate Dean for Faculty and Student Affairs, University of Colorado Denver
[email protected] 

Lecture: The Art of Hope

“It has always been my belief that creativity resides at the thin line between hope and despair. And as you move through your life’s journey and face the inevitable challenges that will come your way, it is my hope that you will turn to the creativity within yourself to write your path, forge new ways forward, invent a more hopeful future.” – Mark Rabideau

What if we were to think of our life’s work as our masterpiece? And the life of an artist-entrepreneur as an agent for positive change? The Art of Hope re-examines an artist's curiosity, creativity, and collaborative-nature as essential attributes for identifying the problems we are best equipped to solve, creating innovative solutions for positive change, and building a life of means, meaning, and the chance to give back. 

Workshop: Designing Human-Centered Solutions for Inventing a Better Arts Profession

Workshop Description: The world and the profession are changing. And so must we, if we are to carry forward our most beloved traditions of the past and create audiences for our best future. Driven by a belief that arts training’s principal role is to prepares artists as one-of-a-kind artists-to-the-world, equipped with the requisite knowledge, skills, and understandings to create a lifetime of artistic moments, one after the next, together we are curious:

Challenge Statement #1: How might we create a profession that is decidedly antiracist? 

Challenge Statement #2: What might be possible if we were to reposition creativity at the center of all that we do?

Challenge Statement #3: How might individuals and communities become more joyful, hopeful, connected, and healthy through musical experience?

Using the lens of design-thinking, students will put on their six thinking hats to explore solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing our beloved profession.

February 8, 2023
Presenter: Mary Javian
Chair of Career Studies, Curtis Institute
[email protected] 

Workshop Title: Social Entrepreneurship

Workshop Description: How can creatives pursue innovative solutions to social problems? Social entrepreneurs adopt a mission to create and sustain social value. In this 90-minute session Mary Javian, from the Curtis Institute of Music, will unpack projects she and her students have led around the world that demonstrate big-picture creativity and artistry. How to find collaborators, design and fund a project will all be explored through the lens of participants' areas of interest. 

February 15, 2023
Presenter: Rachel Roberts
Director, Institute for Music Leadership, Eastman School of Music
[email protected] 

Workshop Title: Eastman Case Studies: Examining Issues and Challenges that Face Today’s Musical Leaders

Workshop Description: This workshop will introduce students to case studies, placing learners in the role of a consultant and charged with assessing business problems and recommendations for how to resolve them. The majority of the time will be spent working through the case “Stress, Science, Saliva, and a Symphony”, then will conclude with a discussion of how to utilize cases, including various teaching methodologies, writing and research of cases, and curricular and developmental implications of cases utilizations.

February 22, 2023

Presenter: David Cutler
Dean, DePauw School of Music, Author, The Savvy Musician
[email protected]

Workshop Title: A Life in the Arts: BIG Ideas on Career and Financial Success

Workshop Description: In a cutthroat world where disruptive technological change has rewritten all the rules, success requires much more than talent and hard work. This powerhouse presentation by arts entrepreneurship guru David Cutler unveils big ideas that help artists of all stripes thrive.

March 1, 2023

Presenter: Michael W. Millar
Lecturer Emeritus in Music Industry Studies, California State Polytechnic University – Pomona
[email protected]

Workshop: A Universal Language: Using “The Five Most Important Questions” for Artistic Growth and Professional Development

Workshop Description: Today’s artists and cultural leaders must constantly redefine themselves, their missions, and their futures in the face of adversity and challenges. Tools for comprehensive, organized thinking are therefore valuable. In this interactive workshop, the facilitator will present “The Five Most Important Questions,” developed by the late Peter F. Drucker in The Drucker Foundation Self- Assessment Tool. The facilitator has adapted the process for individual professional artists, students, arts nonprofits, and artistic projects.

The Five Questions are:

1) What is my (our) mission? (answers will include the “why” of the artistic endeavor’s purpose)
2) Who is my customer? (customer is defined here as those whom we serve, e.g., audiences, communities, colleagues, cultures, and our own artistic vision)
3) What does my customer value?
4) What are my results?
5) What is my plan? 

Workshop participants will engage in discussions and breakout groups aided by outlines and discussion prompts provided by the facilitator. Resources for future work with the tool will be provided. 

Drucker’s colleague Frances Hesselbein stated, “The Tool is an adventure in organizational self- discovery, a means for assessing how to BE – how to develop quality, character, mind-set, values, and courage. It begins with questions and ends in action.” 

Participants in this workshop will leave with a concise, effective, and powerful tool for individual and community cultural strength. 

March 8, 2023

Presenter: Jonathan Kuuskoski
Chair of Entrepreneurship & Leadership, University of Michigan
[email protected]

Workshop Title: Shooting for the Moon: Challenging Assumptions to Achieve the Impossible 

Workshop Description: You’ve claimed your big idea, but now reality has hit home. How are you supposed to figure out whether your vision is viable? It’s easy to balk at your audacious Plan A goal at this moment. While resorting to your Plan B may be comfortable, abandoning ship preemptively is a disempowering process that undermines many artists’ potential. What if tackling big, seemingly impossible ideas is actually the foundation upon which they will demystify the limitations of their careers and positively disrupt the status quo in their professions? In order to learn how to pursue such audacious goals, though, we have to learn to claim, articulate, and challenge the assumptions we hold around our arts projects. Like any creative work, rarely is our first draft the one that will fulfill our boldest, most compelling ideas. Through an interactive brainstorming exercise, we’ll experiment with reversing core assumptions and imagine how those reversals could unlock viable, innovative solutions to the pressing obstacles in our way.

Outcome: Students will learn how to articulate the biases and assumptions that come with defining impact-driven projects, interrogate those assumptions, and reverse those assumptions to unlock innovative solutions. This is core to the Design Thinking methodology (especially the Ideate phase); practicing the reversal of assumptions has the power to destabilize our students’ thinking patterns about the parameters of their work, and, through iteration, illuminate core competencies that can drive new types of artistic output. Students will build confidence around how they can reject status quo thinking, while also debunking the commonly-held myth that only select people can be innovative in the arts. 

Shooting for the Moon Lesson Plan:

• Claiming your BHAG

• Defining the impossible

• Claiming assumptions

• Reversing those assumptions 

March 15, 2023

Presenter: Nate Zeisler
Dean of Community Initiatives, Colburn School
[email protected] 

Workshop Title: Arts Entrepreneurship as a Path to a Sustainable Career

Workshop Description: Career opportunities for artists have long lagged behind the number of graduates who leave institutions of higher education with a degree. There are very few promising prospects for sustainable work within the artistic fields they hope to pursue, and those who do find work are often frustrated by the low pay, lack of meaning with the work, and the long hours they have to work to get by. This often forces artists into a different career path, altogether. Statistics support this premise: In 2021, the Federal Reserve of New York found that “only 27% of college graduates work in a field related to their major.”  The result is that artists feel directionless because they don’t have clarity on the life and career path they would like to take. 

This lecture will focus on an actionable plan that arts entrepreneurs can use to bring their ideas to life. The goal of this lecture isn’t just to motivate, it is to help participants gain clarity on the big life and career decisions they need to make in order to live a fulfilling life as an Arts Entrepreneur. 
 

March 22, 2023

Presenter: Jeffrey Nytch
Director, Entrepreneurship Center for Music, University of Colorado Boulder
[email protected] 

Workshop Title: Six Traits of Entrepreneurial Thinking and Action

Workshop Description: Entrepreneurship is both a mindset (a way of viewing the world around you) and a practice (an approach to realizing your entrepreneurial ideas in that world). Drawing on his groundbreaking book, The Entrepreneurial Muse: Inspiring your career in classical music (Oxford), professor Nytch will discuss core characteristics of an entrepreneurial mindset (Opportunity Recognition, Customer Focus, Flexibility/Adaptability) and entrepreneurial thinking (Risk Assessment, Resourcefulness, Storytelling). In addition to looking at real-world examples of each of these traits, Nytch will discuss exercises for developing an entrepreneurial mindset and guidelines for effective entrepreneurial action.

March 29, 2023

Presenter: Hannah Pearson
Director of Operations, College Music Society
[email protected] 

Workshop Title: These Strange and Unprecedented Times: Launching Your Music Leadership Career in the Face of Adversity

Workshop Description: As creative institutions respond to the economic and social challenges presented by wide societal changes in 2020 and beyond, today's graduates pursuing careers in music leadership face unique circumstances that make the transition from school to career more challenging than ever. Following the establishment of conversational group norms, this workshop will invite participants to share their own stories of overcoming adverse circumstances in both their personal and professional lives to determine how we might meet these challenges head-on and use our experiences overcoming adversity to better understand ourselves and how we show up at work.

April 5, 2023

Presenter: Leila Ramagopal Pertl
Instructor in Music Education and Harp, Lawrence University
Chair, Committee on Cultural Inclusion, College Music Society
[email protected]

Lecture/Workshop Title: Making Communities of Belonging: Keeping Creativity at the Heart of Inclusion

Workshop Framing: The entrepreneurial musician must develop the transformative mindset and skill sets needed to hold and navigate a constantly changing space for motivating positive social change. When working as an entrepreneurial team, the beautiful part is that we don’t all have to have the same lived experience to work together to create change. In fact, most of the time we do better work when diverse voices come together to create that change. But how do we allow all the voices in the room to find their way together, particularly as we work as a team to prepare to collaborate with community organizations?  Finding a common vision comes from intentionally building a community of belonging in which diverse ideas flow and weave together to find responsive and innovative solutions. 

Communities of belonging begin with us-each one of us. In order to create a community of belonging, we must allow for the creative soul to come forth. Our creativity can help foster communities which then spark even more creativity. When every team member feels they belong, when every voice is truly heard, when every idea is valued, then collaboration and creativity flourish and magic is unleashed.

One pathway into creating powerful communities of belonging comes from Deep Listening, a practice championed by the great composer, philosopher, and improviser, Pauline Oliveros. In an interactive, creative, collaborative, playful dream space of our own making, we will engage with Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice to embody ideas of belonging, connection, and creativity as fundamental components of building our entrepreneurial dream teams. 

Workshop Description: Through Deep Listening engagement, including discussion, work with text scores, personal and group journaling, and Zoom breakout group creations, we will explore the power of listening, creativity, collaboration, and play to build vibrant communities of belonging. This is a highly interactive workshop that welcomes discovery, encourages moving out of our comfort zones and, invites questions to emerge from embodied practice.