TAG: Yale School of Music

Today’s Audience For Classical Music: How to Make Classical Music Relevant and Accessible

Every fall, I have the privilege of teaching a project-based seminar to a group of budding music entrepreneurs at the Yale School of Music. The class, Creating Value Through Innovative Collaborative Projects (Music 621a), addresses the problem of how to keep classical music alive and vital in our culture.  My goal is to equip my students with leadership and innovation …

Tap into Passion and Purpose: How to Ignite Your Creative Career

This past week, I had the privilege of speaking on Creative Success Now: How to Ignite Your Passion and Purpose for Successful Creative Careers” to students at Yale University. My talk attracted a variety of students who were intrigued about creativity and turning their passion and purpose into a successful career.  These included singers, composers, performers, an aspiring novelist, several …

Innovation for Music Entrepreneurs: Get Creative with Implementation

One of the hallmarks of my class at the Yale School of Music, Creating Value Through Innovative Projects, is that students learn by taking action.  My seminar’s focus is how to generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems in classical music today. Over the course of the past semester, my students worked collaboratively on four different creative projects. Three …

Ideation and Incubation: How Music Entrepreneurs Expand and Improve Their Creative Ideas

When we last left the students in my Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music, they identified the key problems of their audiences.  The next order of business was to come up with some creative ideas for solving these problems. We entered the phase of creative problem solving known as “ideation” where students have brainstormed using a variety of …

Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: What’s the Problem?

It’s exciting to observe the process of creative problem solving! Innovation can occur when you provide a solution to a problem that meets the deeper needs of your intended target audience. To do so, you need a good problem statement. In my Innovation and Collaboration Class at the Yale School of Music, my students have now coalesced around 4 project …

Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: Defining the Problems of Classical Music

My class at Yale on Creating Value Through Innovative Projects is off to a great start! The focus of my seminar is how musicians can generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems facing classical music today and to work in collaborative groups to solve these problems. My goal is to make my students better thinkers so that they can lead …

Bang on a Can: Inspiring Innovation for Today’s Music Entrepreneurs

Last week, I had the privilege of participating on a panel examining the music powerhouse, Bang on a Can,  as a case study in successful arts entrepreneurship. The panel, a Career Development session for composers and other musicians, was sponsored by the American Composers Orchestra as part  of the Underwood New Music Readings, a program that discovers today’s brightest orchestral composers and …

Leadership For Arts Entrepreneurs: 4 Key Elements of Your Leadership Style

In my last post, I dissected the lessons of leadership from Itay Talgam’s TED Talk on conducting and leadership and Marin Alsop’s interview at Yale, and highlighted 4 key elements of a leadership style: Be Yourself Find a Mentor Learn from Failure Create a Relationship of Mutual Respect These lessons  provided the backdrop for a call that I recently led with …

Conducting and Leadership: Lessons for Today’s Arts Entrepreneurs

What lessons can today’s arts leaders glean from conducting and leadership? Conducting is a terrific metaphor for leadership since you have a large number of highly-trained and gifted people (the musicians) who must come together to produce a great product (music) which they can only do with skilled leadership Conducting and leadership provided the backdrop for a call that I …

Cultivating Optimism for Music Entrepreneurs: 5 Questions to Help You Manage Uncertainty

My coaching groups at Yale are off to a great start this semester!  Students meet with me on a bi-weekly basis to share their successes and challenges in creating successful careers as musicians and artists.  Through honest, trusting and confidential sharing, they open up about their vulnerabilities and we explore how to manage the many challenges associated with a music …