I've written a bit here about the downsides of our highly professionalized cultural sector (the lack of passion, personality, and sense of community). Is it my imagination, or is the non-professional side of the arts becoming bigger and healthier while the professional institutions continue to struggle? 

Okay, that’s a little black-and-white. The two can coexist, of course, and they’re even necessary to each other (which I'll come back to in a moment). But there's more evidence every day that non-professional approaches are succeeding in new ways, and in new corners. Consider what caught my eye when I came back after the July 4th weekend and leafed through a few days’ worth of the New York Times:
 

• An article about a cool place in Brooklyn called the 3rd Ward, which appears to be a blend of arts collective, small-business incubator, design and craft workshop, DIY school, and party venue. Which spawned a restaurant. “True to their mission, they created a real community,” says someone from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce in the article, and it sure sounds that way: the people who use the space are all members, and they range from amateurs taking a woodworking class to established designers, craftsmen, artists, and entrepreneurs. 
  
  So the hobbyists and the pros work side by side in an atmosphere where that distinction isn’t particularly relevant. Which may be why the 4-year-old experiment is such a success. “Demand was so great that last year 3rd Ward opened its overflow space in Williamsburg, across from where its Goods restaurant now sits.” This will be my first stop next time I’m in New York.

• An interview with Gareth Malone, host of “The Choir,” a BBC reality show in which Malone struggles to create top-tier choirs and opera singers of kids from the most unlikely, hardscrabble schools. Like the meteorically popular American show, Glee, Malone’s show presents music as something everyday people do, not just highly-paid virtuosos in tuxedos. There’s music in all of us, it seems to say: we don’t have to farm it out to professionals.
  
  And like the much-discussed Venezuelan model of music education, el Sistema, The Choir has a deep social agenda. The lives of a few young participants on the show have apparently been transformed, not by eat-your-vegetables exposure to classical music’s greatness but by the hard work and sheer heart involved. “[R]eally, it’s about getting people to aspire to come together to learn something,” says Malone.

• A roundup of big issues in the design field today, in which the biggest of them all is how to “empower” people to contribute to the design of the things they use: in other words, “co-designing, customization, design democracy, participation, individualization and whatever else it is called.” Some museums have begun thinking about their exhibitions in just that way, thanks largely to Nina Simon’s work on participatory cultural experiences. (Her blog and new book will be of interest to all kinds of people in the arts and culture, not just museum professionals). ...

I was in Seattle last week for meetings with a few of our arts clients and attended a terrific brainstorming session about developing teen and young-adult audiences. I came in — and left — with a big question about the limits of marketing to meet the challenge.

The session was set up for us to generate ideas about how to attract more young people to the organization’s performances. At the outset, those performances were treated as a given; the question was how to enhance the desire to have those arts experiences among the target age groups.

But, tellingly, the ideas that began zinging around the room were about changing the nature of those experiences — about new approaches to programming and the artistic “product” onstage, but also about venue, format, before-and-after events, audience behavior, overall vibe, and many other aspects outside the control of the organization’s marketing department.

A few people in the room made the point explicit: No matter how clever your marketing communications are, no matter how technologically and socially networked your message is, if the experience you’re offering isn’t perceived as enjoyable by young people, they won’t come...or won’t come back. Marketing alone can’t do the trick. It’s the programming, stupid.

To quote my newfound Seattle colleague Holly Arsenault, who runs Seattle Center Teen Tix and wrote me an email after the brainstorming session:

If you were to look at our show-by-show numbers, you’d see that there’s no amount of packaging I can do that’s as impactful on our ticket sales as a show simply being compelling to teenagers. Of course, I see a difference in our numbers when I’ve done a good job of illuminating for our [teen] members why a particular show is relevant to them in a way that might not have been apparent . . . but I can’t make something that’s clearly irrelevant seem like it is — nor would I want to. ...

Arts researcher Alan Brown invited a small posse of international arts consultants to Chicago for a three-day meeting about how we can help the field. Friday featured a whirlwind seminar on “emerging practices,” with ten presentations and lots of Q&A with the funders, arts leaders, academics, and students around the table. Here’s what Cheryl and I tossed into the ring.

I’m eager to tell you more about Culturelab and our newfound colleagues in this experiment, which will be based at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center. But for now, I’ll recap my presentation with Cheryl at the Friday session.

Maybe because we’d just hosted a conversation with Greg Sandow here the previous week, we chose to talk about how classical music is changing and how the "institutional" side of the classical business can learn from what’s going on on the “grassroots” side. As many of you know, my thinking on this subject is deeply influenced by Greg’s, and some of his suggestions were instrumental (pardon the pun) as we put this together last week.

Mostly, we showed pictures, starting with these two. Neither depicts your grandmother’s classical concert, but they depart from the old norms in two very different directions, one staying “uptown,” one heading “downtown.”

That’s Sigourney Weaver in the foreground, helping narrate a concert of flight-themed works by the Little Orchestra Society at Lincoln Center last week, with projections on a screen behind the musicians.

And that's Hilary Hahn playing with singer-songwriter Josh Ritter at a CD-release party at a club on the Lower East Side two years ago. (The CD in question, by the way, was Sibelius and Schoenberg, not crossover.)

Then, building this diagram from left to right, I showed examples of five different ways in which the presentation of classical music is shifting: ...

I’ll join in the applause for Alex Ross’s eloquent call to loosen concert conventions. But there’s one way in which he’s still looking backward.

Blogger and composer Greg Sandow has been saying it. A scattered but growing chorus of historians, critics, and consultants have been saying it. And I’ve been trying to add my two cents (for example, here).

But now that Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker and author of an authoritative history of twentieth-century music, has said it — and to the Royal Philharmonic Society in London, no less — maybe it’s finally time to sound the death knell for classical music’s snobbiest holdover from the days of high Modernism: the no-applause-between-movements rule.

Ross’s lecture, given earlier this month and excerpted in a Guardian article — and widely commented on since then — is that rare specimen, a nuanced polemic. He argues that the Rule (his capitalization), along with the other conventions of classical concerts, sends a message that the general public has picked up all too well:

"Curb your enthusiasm. Don't get too excited." Should we be surprised that people aren't as excited about classical music as they used to be? This question of etiquette is only part of the complicated social dilemma in which classical music finds itself. But I do wonder about the long-term effect of the No Applause Rule, as I wonder about other oddities of concert life: the vaguely Edwardian costumes, the convention-centre lighting schemes, the aggressive affectlessness of many professional musicians.

Ross wants to replace the Rule with “a more flexible approach, so that the nature of the work dictates the...nature of the response.” Where the music rouses us to applause, we applaud, whether or not the piece is over. Heck, whether or not the movement is over: Mozart’s audiences used to applaud well-done solos, the way people at jazz clubs do today. ...