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Just wanted to clarify some of my thoughts on Claire Chase (and related things). After this I'll be happy to let the thread die for good.
I'm not faulting Claire Chase because of her success. Far from it. I think she's an awesome artist. (One of my most recent purchases is George Lewis' "The Recombinant Trilogy," which she plays on.) However, I don't think what Chase hopes - that entrepreneurship and other new endeavors will produce material wealth for their founders, performers, or both - is likely to happen.
It's not my intention at all to take away from Chase's incredible accomplishment. It's clear that she did pretty much anything that had to be done to raise money and get ICE off the ground. And financial stability continued to be a huge issue: according to Chase, "[t]he first year I wrote 13 grants and was rejected for 13.... My second year I wrote 15 grants and was rejected for 15. My third year I wrote 17 grants and was rejected for 16.... I felt like the sky was raining gold. I think I wrote 19 grants the next year and 11 were funded. Getting that first one is the hardest." So even with Chase's superhuman efforts, securing those initial grants was probably crucial to keeping ICE afloat. In 2006 the organization landed residencies at Columbia College and New York University, and to this day ICE earns the vast majority of its income through these educational programs. The group currently serves as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center for the Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a 5-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Still, I've read that it took around 13 years for ICE's principals to start making a proper living. That's undeniably rough, and I'm sure that a lot of ICE's eventual success lies with Chase' ability to see opportunities where others don't. But another, important part of ICE's success lies with the organization's ability to establish relationships with arts-funding and traditional new and classical music institutions. I don't think pointing this out diminishes Chase's many accomplishments, but it helps put them into perspective.
About 1/3 of eighth blackbird's and Third Coast Percussion's respective incomes come from grants and donations, with the remaining 2/3 coming from gigs. I assume ICE's percentages are similar. But unlike orchestras - who rely at least somewhat on ticket sales - these ensembles usually earn fees regardless of audience size. In general, they secure fees guaranteed by the venue presenter. The venues in which the ensembles perform are usually themselves part of a subsidized musical institution (either a school of music or the concert series of a university). It's more accurate, then, to understand the ensembles' financial standing as reliant on a specialized market controlled by venue presenters, a market with at least some autonomy from the broader US financial market. Thus, one could view all of these ensembles' income as being "contributed" in some way or another.
My question is: what happens when the infrastructure that allowed these ensembles to gain prestige and institutional support crumbles? Presumably this will take place fairly soon, and I think it's dangerous to assume that ICE's success will be easily replicable.
I'm not faulting Claire Chase because of her success. Far from it. I think she's an awesome artist. (One of my most recent purchases is George Lewis' "The Recombinant Trilogy," which she plays on.) However, I don't think what Chase hopes - that entrepreneurship and other new endeavors will produce material wealth for their founders, performers, or both - is likely to happen.
It's not my intention at all to take away from Chase's incredible accomplishment. It's clear that she did pretty much anything that had to be done to raise money and get ICE off the ground. And financial stability continued to be a huge issue: according to Chase, "[t]he first year I wrote 13 grants and was rejected for 13.... My second year I wrote 15 grants and was rejected for 15. My third year I wrote 17 grants and was rejected for 16.... I felt like the sky was raining gold. I think I wrote 19 grants the next year and 11 were funded. Getting that first one is the hardest." So even with Chase's superhuman efforts, securing those initial grants was probably crucial to keeping ICE afloat. In 2006 the organization landed residencies at Columbia College and New York University, and to this day ICE earns the vast majority of its income through these educational programs. The group currently serves as artists-in-residence at Lincoln Center for the Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a 5-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Still, I've read that it took around 13 years for ICE's principals to start making a proper living. That's undeniably rough, and I'm sure that a lot of ICE's eventual success lies with Chase' ability to see opportunities where others don't. But another, important part of ICE's success lies with the organization's ability to establish relationships with arts-funding and traditional new and classical music institutions. I don't think pointing this out diminishes Chase's many accomplishments, but it helps put them into perspective.
About 1/3 of eighth blackbird's and Third Coast Percussion's respective incomes come from grants and donations, with the remaining 2/3 coming from gigs. I assume ICE's percentages are similar. But unlike orchestras - who rely at least somewhat on ticket sales - these ensembles usually earn fees regardless of audience size. In general, they secure fees guaranteed by the venue presenter. The venues in which the ensembles perform are usually themselves part of a subsidized musical institution (either a school of music or the concert series of a university). It's more accurate, then, to understand the ensembles' financial standing as reliant on a specialized market controlled by venue presenters, a market with at least some autonomy from the broader US financial market. Thus, one could view all of these ensembles' income as being "contributed" in some way or another.
My question is: what happens when the infrastructure that allowed these ensembles to gain prestige and institutional support crumbles? Presumably this will take place fairly soon, and I think it's dangerous to assume that ICE's success will be easily replicable.