A Toe Tapping….

This morning, I heard an amusing “joke” from the music world that involves conductors.  The Philadelphia Orchestra is currently looking for a new music director.  While the search committee searches, conductor Charles Dutoit is acting as artistic director for them.  The musicians apparently have been talking among themselves about how the choices for conductor have been winnowed down to one: “God.”  The questions are, of course, who is God’s manager and how do they get God to come to Philly? 

For any orchestra, the search for a new music director can be daunting.  The American Symphony Orchestra League has guidelines (http://www.symphony.org) for the traits and skills expected in a music director as well as resources for search committees.  The search process is no less daunting for a conductor who may or may not know that he/she is being considered.  Here’s a general outline of my understanding of how it works:

– The music director gives his notice to the orchestra’s board of directors and executive director

– The orchestra’s board forms a search committee that includes board members and orchestra musicians.  I imagine that as soon as the news hits about the music director leaving, artist managers that represent conductors may or may not be reminding the orchestra of their conductors.

– The search process is usually kept secret, at least until the finalists are agreed upon, and sometimes even then. 

– The search committee proceeds to observe conductors who are available (although they observe conductors who have not indicated they’re available, too).  They travel as well as attend the concerts of guest conductors at their orchestra.  Sometimes they have a shortlist of conductors to start, but most of the time they are completely open.  And depending on the orchestra, they might be looking for someone who’s been an associate conductor or someone who’s served as a music director of major orchestras.  The Philly band, I suspect, is looking for someone experienced and not someone just starting out.  But also, there is a general atmosphere out there among orchestra boards that they want the next big conductor, someone who’s charismatic, who will draw concert-goers and donors to them, someone who will generate a lot of excitement and publicity.  Unfortunately, there are no guarantees.  Someone who may appear to be the next big conductor could end up crashing and burning after a year or two, while someone who doesn’t appear to be that special one just might be after all…. 

– Ideally, the candidates conduct the orchestra at least once during the search process.

– Eventually, the search committee will present its recommendation(s) to the full board and the orchestra musicians and ask for feedback.  Or, at this point, the committee nominates a single candidate and the board makes a decision about hiring or not.  Different orchestras do this in different ways.  Sometimes this part of the process can be contentious, and it’s important that the orchestra musicians approve the choice although they do not make the final decision (except, apparently, in Berlin where they have more influence). 

– Finally, once the board of directors has chosen the candidate they want to hire, they offer him/her the job.  Or they decide to abolish the music director position and establish a policy of hiring guest conductors throughout the season, as the Vienna Philharmonic has done for years. 

For conductors, every time they step onto the podium to conduct, it is an audition.  Someone at any time could be watching them to see if they would be an orchestra’s next music director.  If a conductor knows that he’s being considered, then it’s the waiting, waiting, waiting for the final decision. 

Evan Quinn in Perceval works as a guest conductor and does not have his own orchestra.  However, he is very much in the public eye and I think eventually he will be offered a music directorship.  In the meantime, he’s not thinking too much about it, although like any conductor he’d like his own orchestra, and he just keeps working. 

Not unlike a writer waiting to hear from an editor or agent.

On Waiting: A Brief Meditation

Civilization has produced an inordinate amount of waiting.  Has anyone ever figured out how many hours a human being waits in a year?  “A watch pot never boils,” my grandmother used to say with a wicked smile.  Few people are immune. 

Conductors have their share of waiting.  They wait to board planes, to be served meals in restaurants, in line to check in, in traffic to get to an airport, for an orchestra search committee to decide which conductor they’ll hire, and so on.  Evan Quinn is not the most patient person in the future but he has learned to use time spent waiting for thinking.  Most often, his thoughts concern a music score he’s working on or a program he needs to create or if he’ll agree to perform in a string quartet.  Or he reads a music score or book.  If he waits with someone else, a friend, it’s different.  They converse or not (two people waiting in silence can reveal something about character in how they do it) or they react to the environment or the situation. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about waiting because I’ve done a lot of it recently.  Writers must learn how to wait with calm patience.  Or to forget that they’re actually waiting for something by immersing themselves in something else.  For example, the best way to wait for a response to a submission is to have several writing projects to work on.  Work distracts the mind.  It’s more fun to work than wait anyway.  I try to carry something to do with me at all times: a small notebook and pens, PW or The Atlantic or some other magazine or a literary journal I’m reading.  I want my waiting time to be productive. 

But sometimes (and recently, quite often), I’ve preferred to do nothing.  It occurred to me that time waiting may be the only time we now get to think.  And I’ve noticed in the past few weeks that more and more people are wearing earbuds or headsets or watching video on their cell phones to distract themselves while waiting instead of being lost in thought, although I’ve been quite pleased to also see many people reading books (real books, not e-readers).  In the late 1960’s, a slogan encouraged people to drop out and turn on.  The slogan now could be “turn off the tech and open your mind….”

I think about Evan Quinn a lot while I’m waiting for whatever it is I’m waiting for.  In the last two weeks, ideas to resolve issues in the series have found me while I’ve been waiting.  I’ve also written the first paragraph of a short story in my mind while waiting for an hour in a doctor’s office.  An idea for another short story bubbled into my mind from my imagination on another occasion of waiting.  And I’ve thought a lot about Dennis Potter.

Dennis Potter wrote The Singing Detective.  The first time I saw the original mini-series (available on DVD) I found it amazing that someone could respond to a hospitalization the way the main character does in this story, i.e. he focuses totally on imagining a complex detective story, immersing himself completely in it to the point of not being aware of his environment.  He does this in order to block out the pain from a severe form of psoriasis that he endures, the same disease that Potter himself had, and that imprisons him in his bed, unable to move.  But his mind also searches out the recesses of his memory and scenes from his past feed the creation of his detective story.  It is a brilliant illustration of the creative process.  Potter’s main character is waiting…for his disease flare to subside and his skin to heal so he can go home and write down his story.  He has hours upon hours to think. 

Now, I understand how that character could focus his mind in that way.  I practice it myself everyday…while I’m waiting for the bus, an appointment, an agent to call….   Waiting time is thinking time.

Musing on Hybrids

Hybrid cars are hot right now.  I’ve been thinking that car manufacturers have had no problem with marketing them, either, despite their hybrid status.  But then, they have a compelling primary consumer benefit: save money on gas and get incredible mileage while helping the environment.  As a result, the market has embraced hybrid cars with, if not passion, then enthusiasm.

As I prepare to research more literary agents to send out more queries, I am revisiting the question of what kind of novel I’ve written.  The Perceval novels blend genres: with their strength in character development, they are literary but I am more concerned about story than language; the future setting and focus on social issues place them in the social science fiction category; and they have other genre elements such as thriller (the secret of Perceval), crime (murders are committed), psychological suspense (who is Evan and what will he do?), international espionage (a rogue CIA agent and other “spies”), a dash of political intrigue (how Perceval will change the geopolitical situation), laced with mystery much as real life is.

During previous research into agents and publishers, reading Publishers Weekly religiously, attending workshops led by agents and/or writers, and digging through other market reference books, I learned that to categorize a novel as a “blend of genres” is the kiss of death.  Why? 

Marketing.  Publishers and booksellers want to be able to categorize books so that customers can find them easily and buy them, hence, the sections in bookstores.  It makes sense.  Customers who prefer literary fiction to popular have their own section, and the genres under popular fiction have theirs, nonfiction has its own section with subsections.  I’ve wondered on occasion, when I’ve been in a bookstore, what would happen if only two categories existed: fiction and nonfiction.  In each section, booksellers would shelve books alphabetically by author last name.  Then genre novels would mix in with literary novels and maybe people would read more of both.

I’ve also wondered, as I’ve browsed in bookstores, if it would really be such a hardship to create another category called “hybrid fiction.”  (Or even “hybrid nonfiction” — an article in the Foreword section of the March 24, 2008 Publishers Weekly  discussed the blending of fiction and nonfiction as a new phenomenon in writing.)  A hybrid fiction section might be small at the beginning, but once writers understood that this category existed, more would produce hybrids, expanding the consumers’ reading choices.  Is the reading public ready for a “new” genre?  Why not?  As long as the story is strong, the characters fascinating and real, and the subject interesting, does it really matter what category the novel is in?  Really, only for sales and marketing purposes….

If life were a novel, in what category would a bookseller shelve it?

Creative Capitalism?

In the August 11, 2008 issue of Time, Bill Gates wrote an article entitled “How to Fix Capitalism.”  This article was not about eliminating money, of course, but how companies can make more money.  Gates writes: “Creative capitalism isn’t some big new economic theory….It is a way to answer a vital question: How can we most effectively spread the benefits of capitalism and the huge improvements in quality of life it can provide to people who have been left out?”

His target is developing countries, not the widening gap between the haves and have-nots in America.  And the method is corporate philanthropy, supported by governments and non-profits.  As a result of this philanthropy, whether teaching or providing goods or services or providing economic assistance, the companies would be entering a new market, impressing new customers, offering their products, etc. and trying to make more money for themselves in the long run.  Gates also suggests providing PR regarding the corporate philanthropy as an incentive for companies to do good.  On paper, it looks rather good.  But I wonder if Gates has taken into account human nature?  And I don’t mean that of the people in the companies, but rather that of the governments of the countries he sees as the recipients of corporate largesse.

Actually, maybe I do mean the people in the corporations.  After all, American tobacco companies took their products overseas when the American market began to wither, although I don’t know if they included corporate philanthropy in their marketing plans.

Just as my idea to eliminate money would take a profound change in thinking and in beliefs, I think that governments of developing countries would need to change some of their behavior, beliefs and thinking.  Especially where corruption is a way of life, where humanitarian aid has historically never made it to the people who needed it.  I think Bill Gates means well, but it looks like his idealism and a certain naivete is showing a bit.  People are capable of great changes, great accomplishments, as well as great corruption and greed.  How would he guarantee that these efforts of corporate philanthropy would reach the people it is meant to reach? 

Having written that, I applaud him for taking the plunge and putting his ideas on paper.  They are serious ideas and worthy of attention and implementation.  And I suspect if he read my posts here about eliminating money, he’d probably have a good chuckle….