|
Keynote Speech #2 :
The Contributions of the Citizen Musician to the Social Economy
Raymond Sealey, Executive DirectorCanadian Amateur Musicians (CAMMAC) Copyright © Raymond Sealey
Dr. Woodford : Thank you very much for both your invitation and your introduction. What a great idea this conference is! A conference on something that my organization actually does. I was delighted to be asked to be a keynote speaker – a role which I accepted because I figured it would allow me to get off topic. This will be a report from the trenches. I am not an economist but I do have to try to explain myself to funders. I’ll talk about how I do it. And I most assuredly am not an academic, so I hope you will forgive the second part of my presentation which will be quite free ranging and unstructured. I will be discussing both amateur and professional artists. I would also like to posit that the distinction may soon be obsolete. However, I do not mean that excellence is obsolete. I do not mean that the review by peers is obsolete. And I certainly do not mean that making an honourable living from being an artist is obsolete. I mean that the idea of who can call themselves an artist is obsolete. The citizen artist or practising non-professional is important to society. He or she is important to cultivating a sensitive and enlightened society. Professionals do the same, of course, and it is there I would like to start.
Peer review is important. It establishes the criteria of excellence; it provides the most skilled assessment of artistic achievement. Peer review in large institutions also is a counterbalance to the huge weight of private industry and popular opinion.
We need cultural heavyweights like the Canada Council, provincial arts councils, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Unesco and so on, to help us out. They act as investors in culture – a term I shall return to. They have financial power. They make investments in operations and equipment based on excellence and peer review. Even if these institutions are slow, cumbersome, incredibly annoying, capable of writing the most intimidating application forms known to man or woman, are often politicized, criticized, cannablized, and downsized – we need them and we in culture have to fight for the right to our fair share of our own money.
But what about the citizen artists, who have such a crucial role in the cultural life of a country but do not necessarily make a living from it? Here we have to take a different tack. These artists at large in society, although they may have other occupations to earn their living, are still taking part in an economy; they are still contributing to the economic, social, and artistic well being of culture. They are responding to personal needs yes, but also to community needs.
Strategic investments based on community needs are investments in the social economy. The state can also act as an investor in the arts through this model and, for example, support citizen music making – we’ll come back to this. But when we speak about investment, we also talk about returns and we also talk about the economy in general. Here’s an approach I take, especially when the investors are not major state institutions.
A couple of years ago I was invited to speak to the Chamber of Commerce in the region where CAMMAC has its main summer music centre. The idea was to explain why the arts are important to the economy and, not only that, to show that they can also be a motor for the economy. Needless to say, this was in my interest because I was going to have to do a major fundraising campaign and ask for money from the very people to whom I was speaking. I needed a way to describe the process of cultural investment. It's my job to say to investors, “I have this incredible project. It's a hotel and music centre where amateur musicians come to make music and work with some of North America's most respected professionals. We have programs for families and a wonderful and innovative program for kids. The atmosphere is magical; the setting is magnificent; the staff is dedicated. In short we have a very exciting product.” At this point, I would hope a potential investor is very excited. But the intelligent investor will probably want some numbers and the first question in business will likely be, “What returns can we expect?” It isn’t always said this way, but this is what it boils down to.
The models of the profit and nonprofit sectors start to diverge at one critical moment in the history of the enterprise. They diverge at the moment of investment, the moment of commitment. The private sector seeks private or institutional investors with a view to making a reasonable profit. Cultural organizations must seek grants and, especially, donations. I have to convince my Chamber of Commerce investors to be there at the critical moment. What are the kinds of things that can convince local businesses to invest in the arts? A few hard numbers can’t hurt:
1) The fastest growing occupation group since 1976, according to Statistics Canada, is a category called Artistic, Literary and Recreation. This is the closest I could find to a purely cultural sector. (We are thus dealing with a rapidly growing sector in terms of employment.)
2) According to Quebec-based studies, cultural activities account for 8% of the Gross National Product of Quebec. That places it just behind agriculture and just ahead of construction. (We know the kind of attention that is given to the two statistically neighbouring sectors.)
3) We are dealing with a highly educated workforce; 45% of workers in the cultural sector have a university degree in contrast to 17% of the total labour force in Canada. (This, too, is a good thing to point out to investors. If cultural industries develop in a region, we also invite a pool of well-educated citizens apt to support the local economy.)
4) Here’s a quote from the Crafts Report on tourism. “The travel industry association estimates that tourism will become the world’s leading industry within the next 10 years.” They state that the Brookfield Craft Centre in Connecticut contributes $3 million annually to the economy.
This last example is referred to now as cultural tourism and is now in the official lexicon of most governments. It certainly is in Quebec. That topic is for another day.
“Wouldn’t you want a cultural institution in your municipality?” Obviously, I tell my listeners. “And these statistics are with measurable funds only. But what about all that other energy that is invested? Do you think all those craft organizations, the music groups in the festivals (professional and otherwise), the studio circuits for visual artists, the local historical societies and so on, operate without volunteers?” Of course not, I tell my listeners. “These volunteers are going to be investing, just like you.” Until recently there was very little measurement of volunteer actions in terms of economic activity. It’s hard to find the work that Rotarians, CAMMAC volunteers, food bank volunteers and myriads of others as part of the GNP. It is part of the GNP, though, and it should be counted. New economic models and discussion papers at the World Bank, among other institutions, are indicating that economists are finally waking up to this fact and the challenge of measuring it.
So, for a while social institutions and business enterprises develop on separate tracks. There are similarities of course. In the arts, we can follow all the rules of good business practice, follow the procedures of good research and marketing and, heaven knows, we can maintain quality control. With adequate investment, development takes place and the social or business enterprise becomes established. What I must try and point out to business people is that there is convergence later on when nonprofit and for profit businesses once again travel on the same track. We talked about the moment of investment being one of divergence. At the moment of convergence, however, business and culture become players for the same team.
I provide an great example of convergence. A crazy little troop of street entertainers on stilts and doing acrobatics comes with an idea of starting a different kind of circus with artistic settings, original music, and choreographed movement. There aren’t too many governments, sponsors or donors, that would have invested at their critical point. But the government of Quebec did and we have the Cirque du Soleil. I don’t have to convince anyone of the viability of this enterprise, which is now a solid multinational employing thousands of artists and support staff world wide.
Convergence also happens through connected industries. A restaurant may open beside the new theatre. A printing company wins a contract to do all the publicity materials for the music festival. Towns attract new investors and residents by emphasizing what the town has to offer: a theatre, a library, an amateur orchestra, summer arts camp for kids along with a pool, a rink and the ubiquitous hockey rink, of course. The process of investing money and volunteer efforts into a cultural undertaking in the community must be seen as injecting capital into a much larger economy—the social economy. The resulting social investment, in this case cultural, becomes social capital. These definitions of social capital apply to culture but also to amateur sports, service organizations and so on, all of which help in a hundred different ways, adding to the culture, in its broadest terms, of a society. It is a holistic way of looking at the economy.
It is when investments in culture eventually converge with mainstream business that entrepreneurs start to draw on the social capital in which they (I hint strongly to my Chamber of Commerce audience) so courageously and with great vision invested several years before. But in the arts, obviously, we cannot count only on business donations We also need institutional resources at the critical point of investment. I’ll discuss the Quebec model. In Quebec there are different ministries and arms length agencies that make grants to professional artists and organizations. It is a good system, probably the best in Canada, and if I hadn’t changed my presentation, I would have told you about it.
At the local level, however, the picture changes, especially when it comes to citizen artists. Often, organizations like mine which work in this area fall between the cracks in both funding and arts policy. One of the ways to overcome this funding gap in the arts is to include this kind of community development in envelopes destined for the social economy. In Quebec, this is where local and regional development agencies govern funds with policy input from regional cultural councils which often sit at the table on the boards of the development councils – especially in regions where they have been aggressive and made sure that they are at the table. If there is a development agency in your region, get on it!
In some regions, there is still a debate as to whether culture can be included in the social economy envelope (along with rehabilitation centres and so on). For the culturally uninitiated members of the boards of these agencies, this can still be a stretch. I have to make all the arguments we know about. But then, what are the criteria? I’m on the board of our regional cultural council. We were asked what kind of cultural initiatives could be defined as being part of the social economy actions.There is no peer review here in terms of artistic standards. We are talking about community based programs – that is, they are generated by a genuine impetus from the population. I’ll give you an example. A group of musicians in the town starts playing regularly and forms a small community chamber orchestra. They want to get some help to rent their rehearsal space, pay for a professional conductor and make some trips to play local charity events or in hospitals and old age homes (now there’s a nice investment in social capital). They make a committee and apply for a grant.
Here’s another scenario. Jean Tremblay is a professional conductor, recently graduated, and he wants to get an amateur orchestra together and calls people up. He arranges some concerts and generally tries to get his career going. The first scenario is acceptable and the second is not. This is one way of looking at it. Social economy cultural actions are bottom up, not top down. They are community generated, not professionally generated.
This is how our local cultural council advised our local development agencies. This is for funds which, it is hoped, will have a permanent component earmarked for culture in the envelope. Nobody is necessarily demanding excellence here. There is review but it is a grass roots social action in culture validated by the community’s needs and desires. This is a bit simplistic at the moment but a real policy will be developed from these preliminary proposals over the coming years. Notice that the idea of the social economy is not in question. Now it’s a question of an allocation for culture. That’s what we are now fighting for.
So to conclude the first part of my presentation, cultural organizations in the modern era are usually efficiently run businesses. The difference, the point of divergence with the business sector, comes down to how investment is sought. There are moments, like in businesses, when funding is crucial and, unlike businesses, arts organizations must turn to government investors or donor investors. Later the activities engendered by these institutions reconverge with mainstream economic activities in a community. Some community-based organizations might be able to seek investment through social economy development programs. The problem is that results are not always easy to measure and do not necessarily show up on a balance sheet using standard accounting practices. We need lots more solid research in this area. Anyway, this is a descriptive method of talking about culture and the economy and it works for me when I have to convince people to become stakeholders in culture. It’s personal but it at least provides a framework for the discussion.
But, you know, there are convergences happening all over the place – not just in the economics of culture but also in culture itself. Let me freewheel a little. There is no thesis here, no conclusion really, just some observations, thoughts and readings, especially about this amateur-professional thing. Let’s start with a quote or two and a little story. We can play a game and ask ourselves what’s wrong with these pictures. The second edition of the Jerusalem Art Festival closed yesterday in the capital, The Jerusalem Post reported. The JAF was unique in that it only featured amateur artists and focused on all areas of the performing arts. The amateur criterion, the director said, is very important as “it gives amateurs access to more exposure than they can gain on their own.” I think I know what’s going on here.
This from a BBC report :
I think I know what is going on here too.
A personal observation. A couple of years ago, I saw Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand with the Montreal Symphony. There was a gigantic choir and it was full of Cammac members and other incredibly devoted amateurs. Indeed, the lines are blurred (and always have been in choral music) and in the coming decades they will become even more blurred, or converged. The examples I gave above show the ambiguities already present. We are perhaps going to start worrying about the exploitation of amateurs as opposed to the exploitation of artists period. Or … is it all one in the same problem?
The question is, can everyone be an artist? As Angela McRobbie from England pointed out in an article titled “Everyone is Creative,” the “post-industrial” economy is increasingly a “cultural” economy – with the very understanding of culture itself being appropriated by the enlarged provision of (and longing for) meaningful “experience.” We are, in fact, living in an age where anyone who is working has to be creative. Jobs change fast, CV’s are adjusted to the demand, multi-tasking and multi-careers are the order of the day. The city’s young and hip are in galleries, coffee shops, cinemas, hip-hop bars, symphony concerts and operas. I mean all of the above. The old barriers between the classical cultures and the pop are melting away. Cultural management has become hip too with free floating arrangements between companies and cultural institutions or even private individuals and artists.
All this to say the definition “artist” will become more and more interesting over the next decade. Instead of pinning down who the artists are, perhaps we should be more concerned with what is the role of artists? Technology is freeing artists to do wonderful things. But technology inundates with information and overwhelms us with delivery systems. Cable, satellite, blackberries, palm pilots, cell phones, video phones, hundreds of television channels, and I could go on.
We need artists to provide synthesis, scale and beauty in the face of this onslaught. This is an age where one role of the artist is to give technology meaning, to put it into context. Notice I said the role of the artist. I didn’t say professional artist or amateur artist. Artists are here to defrag our hard drives. Being an artist is to grasp big pictures or just notice the little ones. It is to bring space into the crowded air. To bring reflection and repose. If practising art is a process of personal revelation or a contribution to the community at large, does it matter if the practioner is an amateur or a professional?
Merging is also happening on the economic side, in funding between arts organziations and sponsors, for example. I suppose we could call sponsors donors who expect something in return. And indeed, this is becoming more and more the case. Anthony Davies, in an article published on the website of the Copenhagen Free University titled “The surge to merge culture with the economy,” says that :
He goes on to quote John Warwicker in The Guardian, 1997; “large companies and rich backers are buying into people they see as working on the cutting edge of culture ... because they need to be seen as part of that culture.” What we have developing are cross sectoral alliances. This is a merge that did not exist in a big way a decade ago.
I return to Angela McRobbie who observes that,
Academics: step to the fore!
Convergence is happening all over the place. And we better get used to it. We have to freshen our thinking. We have to do this in discussing the economics of the arts and the involvement of all our citizens. We also have to freshen our thinking about music itself because convergences are producing one of the most exciting times in music that I can remember.
As usual, our kids are way ahead of us. My guru on trends is my 15 year old son. Here are some meanderings. There was recently a festival in Montreal on electronic music and one of the guests was DJ JA-Track. This was one of the reasons my son wanted to go. There were also a lot of electroacoustic presentations from people with DR before their names. Well, I’ll tell you what I thought was the most exciting thing in the weekend. If you haven’t heard a good scratch DJ at work, you haven’t lived. Talk about improvized electro-acoustic! DJ’s and DR’s are rarely brought together. The Elektra Music Festival in Montreal did this. Convergence.
My son asks me why we can’t cover this new stuff at school too. Why are we always teaching the old stuff, he said. I guess we are so classicocentric. He told me that schools should recognize achievement in the arts even if it isn’t in the courses, he said. Maybe art isn’t dead in the schools, as we often hear. Maybe the courses are dead. Their content died half a century ago. Why are we teaching the old stuff ? Where are the new media ? Where is world music? We need a convergence of proven classical teaching practise with this new and exciting world of music.
The approach must be global he also said. Guess what he meant by that? We are not only classicocentric we are also ethnocentric. Here’s a guy who goes on to the internet and listens to Balinese Gamelan music, discovers the hard rock group Ramstein in Germany throught their remarkable on line social commentary clips, and listens to DJ competitions in Japan.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is if we are going to do music and lifelong learning, continuing the musical education of our citizens – I think we had better make sure we’re with the musicians we’ll continue with. Don’t get me wrong – I love classical music. And I do know that innovative programs exist.
Here’s a thought. Democratization of the arts is not making art available to everyone, it’s making art meaningful to everyone. Citizen musicians will also become very important in a trend which we can call Back to the Future. Some of these ideas were discussed recently at a Canadian Conference for the Arts symposium entitled When is Now? where these trends were debated by Hank Bull and others. We are seeing the return of microartistic production. In classical music, house concerts are making a come back. This is just like in the age of Schubert. And it’s usually practising amateur musicians who are hosting these events in their homes. No overhead. Brilliant. The professional artists gets the money instead of the owner of a hall.
In the Communist régime of Russia, samizdat were the primary way of communicating new and, as it was at the time, illegal writings. Today, underground and overground music makers are putting their music on the net in a sort of samizdat way. It’s just electronic instead of dog-eared photocopies. In the old days of the USSR it was raging against state controlled culture; today it is raging against the cultural hegemony of international corporate giants – like Sony.
Dudley Cocke in an article called “Coming through the Wire” in American Theatre Magazine believes that there is what he calls “cyber-compensation” taking place. He believes,
This, we have heard before in this presentation. I read this article and I thought yes! It’s not just me! Thank you Dudley Cocke whom I quoted at length here. It’s paradoxical. There is a world wide network yet there are cultural cottage industries. It’s sort of fractured convergence – fragmentation in the global village.
In completing this survey of ideas, I guess what I’m trying to point out is that we must be more encompassing in thinking about arts and the community. New economic models have to be put into practise. We must also be aware of new ways of participating in and creating the arts, staying in tune with new movements and trends. Above all, we must listen to our kids.
So I will finish up by talking about my own organization, CAMMAC, and show you a short film. We are celebrating our 50th anniversary this year. George Little, one of the co-founders of CAMMAC, said that making music is also a social act. I am continually reminded of this by the wonderful comments of our members. Cammac is a forum for understanding and personal growth through music. I am convinced that if more citizens practiced an art our planet would be a better place. To have brought a creative life full of beauty to our children, to have encouraged our fellow citizens to dare to practice an art and discover something about themselves in the process – this is the legacy that our little organization has tried to create.
|