Simon Hewitt Jones - The Violin Blog

Oct

2

Creating Community Cultures

Filed Under Future of Music | 

peter sulski viola Whilst in Boston, I’m staying with my Artistic Director from Al Kamandjati Camerata, Peter Sulski. He’s an ex-London Symphony violist (now a collaborative chamber musician) who is engaged in creating new community-based models for bringing international-quality music performances to specific areas. In his case, that’s three places: chamber societies here in Worcester MA, and in Sussex (in the UK) where we took the Kamandjati Camerata a few weeks ago, and of course for the Al Kamandjati Festivals in Palestine).

I like to think of Sulski – and people like him in other places – as custodian-advocates of musical life for the communities in which they operate. But what’s interesting about his model is that it works in a way that’s massively beneficial for the community, yet is entirely sustainable. Sustainable, because it creates enough paid performance opportunities for seriously good musicians to commit to regular performances and education work in a single community. Which means that rather than rely soley on the fly-in-fly-out visitations of artists from further afield (which is no doubt important, but shouldn’t be the whole picture), a loose collective of artists create a growing bond with and between members of the local community, at a much higher level (in every respect) than traditionally has been the case.

[The UK has always had a large number of outstanding musicians in all areas of the country, and perhaps it’s a much more competitive environment as a result, even in regional areas. But in the USA, the standard of artistic work outside of major metropolitan areas has not always been so consistent. This can have a detrimental effect on musical life in an area, because when musicians become uninspired, so do audiences…]

This also provides considerable new possibilities for the employment of musicians in a sustainable way that maximises their creativity and performance skills (not even a job in a top orchestra can do that). Deployed widely, this kind of setup could really do wonders for the development of cultural and educational possibilities at a community level.

Additionally to this, and from the performer’s perspective, I believe that if this happened more consistently throughout the world of classical music promotion, the possibilities for touring of concerts would be far easier, more artist-led, and decisions would be informed more by the art itself, rather than commercial allegiances and obligations.

I’ll blog more on how this model actually works sometime soon, but in the meantime I’d be very pleased to hear from anyone who has created similar structures in their own communities.

A key part of what I’m going to be doing imminently with this tech startup I’m involved in is identifying what’s lacking at community levels in terms of the infrastructure and resources that are needed. Then, the challenge will be to try and find a way to build an international infrastructure to help create the solutions that will solve those problems. Hopefully I can try and find a performer’s perspective on that, anyway.

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