Thank you, Jesse. 

I’ve been to this magnificent hall before but I never dreamed I’d be on stage at Orchestra Hall as a “performer!”

When I was a young man, a junior at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, I went down to the chapel one evening to hear a concert.  It was 1965 and the program was something new…something called electronic music by a man named John Cage. 

It was one of the luckiest nights of my life.

The concert was in an old New England brownstone chapel.  Cage had arranged metal sheets in descending order, thrusting toward the audience, with microphones placed along the sides.  Cage stood at the back, a small man, barely visible behind the metal sheets, not much more showing than his jet black hair, rolling ball bearings down the metal, making plink/plank, plink/plank sounds.

And I had an epiphany: if that was music and that was a concert, then there were no rules except for those that acted as blinders and that each of us put, or allowed to be put, on our minds. 

Now, anyone who has heard a John Cage piece knows that you don’t walk out of his concert humming that tune.  But that evening has served me well in life, in careers in law and media.  It helped make me open to change and to embrace it.  It helped prepare me for living in the greatest era of change history has ever known.  It shaped me and helped me understand the power of art and music and ideas and is, in many ways, why I’m here this afternoon.

I want to caution you at the outset that my degree in music is from the University of Pennsylvania law school. So, while I love Mahler and Mozart – and Piazzolla and Copeland and Dvorak, I won’t presume to lecture you, of all audiences, about music. 

But I am an enthusiast and, over the years, I have had the opportunity to support music in the towns where I’ve lived: in Hartford as vice chair of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, in New York as a member of the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and in Miami as chairman of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of a conductor I deeply admire, my friend, James Judd. 

And I have been enormously privileged at Knight Foundation to have led our support for the building of a world-class concert hall as part of the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. The Knight Concert Hall is one of the last works of the great acoustician Russell Johnson.  It is now the Florida home of the Cleveland Orchestra, thanks to the vision and generosity of Dan Lewis, who is here this evening.  Knight Hall is also where a year or so ago we welcomed the Chicago Symphony in a concert people still talk about in Miami, and where we look forward to welcoming the Detroit Symphony next season. 

At Knight Foundation, we have been long-time supporters of Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony.  Most recently we gave a $5 million endowment grant to support their new media efforts, including fellowships, distance performances and experimentation at their new Frank Gehry building on Miami Beach.

Yet, as much as I am a lover of the kind of music you produce, as much as my heart and my soul have been lifted and enriched, as much as I believe I am a better man because of music and as much as I admire what you do, I’m not qualified to tell this room of professionals how to run their orchestras, or to speak with certainty about the future of the American orchestra or symphonic music. 

But I do know something about newspapers. 

Now, that may sound to you like the ads that feature someone giving medical advice because they stayed at a Holiday Inn last night (!), but, seriously, here’s how it happened:  I was talking with Howard Herring from New World Symphony one day, and we began drawing parallels between newsrooms and orchestras.  Later, he and Jesse Rosen thought that it might be useful for you to think about what has happened in the newspaper business as you think creatively about orchestras in a time of change and stress.   

My goal today is to help you see your own challenges through journalism’s lens. My hope is that this perspective may give you some ideas for your organization.

The people behind newspapers, like those in orchestras, have an intense love for their profession. They are not drawn by the money. In fact, I’ll rephrase that. Like you, they are definitely not drawn by the money! They are smart, often quirky – almost always responding to a profound calling.

Like orchestras, newspapers only present themselves to the public after thousands of judgments are made on matters of art and craft. When it’s done right and they are finally published, the words arranged in just the right order, they help build the collective reservoir of experience that binds and builds great communities. Like music, they tell our story. They give us a sense of who we are and where we’ve been. At their best, they give us a window into our collective potential.

But, for a group that regularly presents itself to the public, newsrooms, perhaps like orchestras, are ironically insular. I’m reminded of a New York University professor Clay Shirkey observation that, “In any profession, particularly one that has existed long enough that no one can remember a time when it didn’t exist, members have a tendency to equate provisional solutions to particular problems with deep truths about the world.”

Sound familiar?

There is a fierce debate within the newsroom about the authority and authenticity of the new…of citizen journalists, information aggregators and bloggers, upstarts that challenge the established order of the full, accurate, contextual search for truth that mainstream journalists cling to with justified pride in their accomplishments.  What can the inclusion of community or audience bring to the craft, they ask?

The music analogy for this is reported by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise.  He writes that, “The debate over the merits of engagement and withdrawal has gone on for centuries.” But, in his view, “Composition only gains power from failing to decide the eternal dispute.  In a decentered culture, it has a chance to play a kind of godfather role, able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything in the past.” 

What better describes our society’s communication culture than “decentered?”  And what better way to think about this than as nothing but opportunity to perform a critical service?  Our foundation’s founder, Jack Knight understood this for his time and viewed the role of great newspapers as bringing together all sorts of information in a way that made sense so as to inform and inspire their readers and help the people to determine their own, “true interests.”

That created a devoted newspaper audience over many years.  The faithful still live for the ritual of the doorstep delivery: fingering the pages over a cup of coffee, turning to a breakfast companion to ask, “Did you read that, did you see that?” or even, “did you feel that?” But that audience is now shrinking and aging.

You know the headlines. Whoever would have thought that the Christian Science Monitor would publish only online or the Detroit Free Press would deliver to the home only some days per week or that the Chicago Tribune Company would be in bankruptcy or that the Boston Globe might fail?  The old business models are faltering.  They began to slide years before the current recession – and those troubles have been exacerbated by the economic downturn of the last year.

I admire many of the efforts that were made years ago to put newspapers on the web. Still, I wish we had been smart enough to figure out that we had to become of the web, that is, that we needed to embrace not merely the new technology itself as a different distribution system but as a different way to think about news…to let the consumer own the news and use the news and act on the news, rather than merely passively hearing or reading the news.

In music, you might consider the same: what is the impact of new media not on you or on your organizations but on your consumer’s preferences and desires … on the way they think and feel about music?  Is new media merely another way of transmitting music? Or is the digital experience so different from the concert hall or the Victrola that it is creating an entirely different consumer mind-set.

I wish we had listened more carefully, in the news business, to the voices of disruptive change.  I wish we had better understood what our audiences wanted in their newspaper experience.  And I wish we had been less insular…that we had been clever enough to have brought in more variety of backgrounds into the newsroom, perhaps more artists and designers, more and younger decision-makers not afraid to let go, not afraid to engage, not afraid to explore the possibilities of the new technologies, less afraid of what it might mean to our established, conservative names. 

You can draw your own parallels to orchestral music. 

All of this does not mean that the appetite for news has diminished, or that news is any less important to a functioning democracy now than it was 50 or 100 years ago. Communities need, and in a democracy, will always need full, accurate information, in context, just as people need, and will always need, music.

But we live in a time analogous to those years just after Gutenberg invented the press.  Before Gutenberg, monks were in control of information and there was order.  Long after Gutenberg, we had assimilated the impact: literacy was general and books and pamphlets helped make the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But, in those crazy, in-between years, it must have seemed like chaos.  Those are the years we’re living now, just post the World Wide Web and Internet and all things digital.  And at a time of change and uncertainty, it is even more critical to focus on the core.

So, the question we should ask, the question we ask at Knight Foundation, is not, how can we save newspapers, but rather, how can we save journalism and communication in the digital age so we can continue to function as an open democracy?

The corollary for everyone in this room may be heretical.  Instead of asking how to save orchestras, the question to ask might be how can our music thrive in an MP3 world?

When you focus on the core question, the set of initiatives you choose might be different, more inventive and inspiring.

I don’t have a lightning bolt solution, the next business model for news or music this afternoon. Nobody has all the answers.  But I believe that the changes in how we communicate, and in how we define community, have opened opportunities for journalism – and for orchestras – to connect to people and engage them in ways that will define our future.

Let me share with you a couple of stories that might shed some light on where we can go from here.

The first involves my wife, Susana.

On the night of Barack Obama’s election, she and I were watching on television the gathering at Grant Park in Chicago, not far from here, waiting for the president-elect to speak.  Just then, her BlackBerry buzzed. She read the message and smiled, saying something like, “Oh, look, isn’t this nice. Barack sent me an email on his way to Grant Park. Wasn’t that thoughtful?”

Now, I assure you that Susana didn’t think the president-elect had typed that up in the limo, just for her. But the sense she had was of connectedness, of belonging to a community. Over the course of dozens of emails announcing policy initiatives, candidate visits – and even the choice for vice president before she saw it in the newspaper or on television or radio – she felt included.

The Obama campaign used text messages, emails and web sites to speak directly to the people and solicit their input. He built community. 

Study the Obama campaign because it brilliantly capitalized on the changed communication expectations of Americans. Consider www.change.gov, as it existed in the time between the election and the White House.

When you went to change.gov, the opening screen was split in two.  One half asked “What should Barack do?”  The other half said, “Tell us your story.”  Only on the next screen did they detail what the president-elect was actually up to. 

Brilliant!

That was building community.  That was engaging the base.  That was responsive to the current appetite, the need to be included, to be part of a community. To be engaged.

For generations, newspaper editors had a “we-know-best” attitude. They believed only they had the expertise to determine what was news, what was good writing, what belonged on the front page, and what wasn’t fit to print. 

When the public wanted in, it wasn’t embraced and so the public walked or found other ways to be informed and ended the era of “I write/you read.”  This reflects the shift in social attitudes toward information, the change that makes the formerly passive consumer into the active owner of the information, the user of information, with different demands and expectations. 

I wonder if something similar is happening in music.  In a participatory world, success is unlikely to come from just filling seats, talking with a few trustees and major donors, then sitting back to watch the budget balance.  I suspect your survival depends on taking a more aggressive, but still authentic, give-and-take with the public, a commitment to create community.

Think about it. Some 35 years ago, nobody handed Jose Antonio Abreu a community from which to draw an orchestra and an audience.  He willed it.  He created El Sistema and he forged the community necessary to support it.  He willed it. 

We should heed his lesson.

We might also find a lesson in a project we’ve funded called Spot.us.  The founder, David Cohn is a few years out of college, a 27-year-old skilled journalist and entrepreneur.

His idea was simple: create a web site where the public can suggest stories, and contribute in small amounts to have freelance journalists report and write them. In essence, he wanted to give the public its own freelance budget and editorial control. 

David’s site, www.spot.us, launched in October in San Francisco, and since then, the site’s writers have reported on close to two dozen stories on topics like truth in campaign ads and the water quality in San Francisco Bay. Local newspapers and radio stations have picked up the stories, giving them wider distribution.  The idea is about to be copied in Tokyo and Minnesota, and we’re helping him take it to Los Angeles next.  

It is a way to build community and do what formerly only experts did.  Let me repeat that: it is a way to build community and do what formerly only experts did.  It engages the audience, a community that wasn’t there until he, basically, created it…or maybe induced it. 

Think, along these lines, about the community created by the YouTube orchestra.  No apparent symphony orchestra community existed on there before Michael Tilson Thomas and others offered to audition players on YouTube for an orchestra that would play Tan Dun’s composition at Carnegie Hall.

A mashup of thousands of video submissions from dozens of countries drew an audience of more than a million on YouTube. And what a moment it must have been at Carnegie Hall! A friend who attended was struck by the number of young people filming the performance on their iPhones to send virtually live to friends, or Tweeting about the event and the music from small laptops they’d brought with them.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Some of you may remember that Knight Foundation launched The Magic of Music Symphony Orchestra Initiative in 1994, which, over 10 years, studied the systemic problems facing American orchestras. Even then, the initiative found that the death of classical music, and its audience, was greatly exaggerated. They identified problems stemming from the delivery systems that symphonies employed and, importantly, the study also found that whatever solutions orchestras chose, they had to be tailored and relevant to the target community.

How to determine the right mix of tactic and content is tricky in any field. In ours at Knight Foundation, we’ve found it enormously instructive and even liberating to open up our grant-making processes.  Instead of issuing RFPs seeking ways to implement our ideas, we’re developing something of a track record in the news business for running open-ended contests that have produced ideas we would never, on our own, have imagined.

We essentially open-sourced innovation and were so delighted with our success in finding new ways to think about news that we applied it to arts, as well.  Our Knight Arts Challenge in Miami has very simple rules: we want ideas about art in South Florida, expressed in about 250 words.  If we like the idea, we’ll ask for a full proposal and require applicants to find some portion of matching money.  Period.

We’ve received thousands of applications.  As a result, next year South Florida will have a network of children’s choirs modeled after El Sistema’s in Venezuela, and a newly created film institute to support the growing filmmaking scene, among many other projects.  The Cleveland Orchestra has played live with the Miami City Ballet and a miniature golf course will be converted into a sculpture garden, featuring the work of local artists. 

Certainly there is a risk in challenges like these. Some of our winners’ projects will have great success, and spread, virally. Others will fail.  And we’ll learn from those, too.

The lesson is here is that in times of great change, we all need to find fresh thinking, fresh sets of eyes and ideas to help frame new solutions.

And not all of the fresh sets of eyes have to be new.  When looking for partners to both collaborate and to challenge your thinking, one often overlooked or underutilized group are the musicians in the orchestra.  I realize there are often union issues involved but I believe it’s essential that they be engaged, as they are each individuals with a huge stake in the success of your enterprise.

I mentioned earlier Knight Foundation’s Magic of Music Initiative.  After it ended, Tony Woodcock, who participated in the initiative during his tenure as president of the Oregon Symphony, said the greatest value of the program was that it insisted that the musicians be involved in the thinking. I agree.  

The cautionary tale of newspapers is only that.  There are, of course, many ways in which orchestras and newspapers are different.  But I hope I’ve suggested some ways in which you might think about community and I hope that you’ll seize the challenge to build communities and the opportunity to use new technology to build them, even where none exist today.

Music helped shape each of us in this room.  Music brought us here.  Music deserves that you have the courage to be open to change. 

Thank you very much.

June 10, 2009