I’ve been reading a lot about Kickstarter.com lately. The wildly successful online fundraising platform has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and everywhere in between. Just this morning I read a great article by my old friend Dan Bolles, the Music Editor at Seven Days, my hometown of Burlington, VT’s excellent alternative weekly. He likens a Kickstarter campaign to an NPR pledge drive, which I think is a useful if imprecise analogy and I’ll explain why later. The article goes on to describe other innovative ways of raising money online, from simply putting a PayPal donation button on your web site to organizing weekly live, streaming concerts.

Also among recent Kickstarter coverage is an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune claiming the site channels more than $1 million every week to creative projects. This made me wonder, is that a lot? Here are some points of reference: 1) A 2003 study by The Urban Institute (full disclosure, I worked on this) found that there is more than $91 million available in cash grants to artists every year—these are “traditional” grant programs administered by state and local arts agencies, and private foundations. If you averaged that out over the course of a year it’d come to about $1.75 million every week. 2) In 2009, the BSO’s annual budget was about $85 million (see guidestar.org). Averaged out over the course of a year that comes to $1.65 million per week. 3) The iTunes store is the world’s largest music retailer. Between January 2009 and February 2010 the iTunes store sold 4 billion songs. With most songs priced at $1/song that works out to an average of roughly $70 million per week. Bottom line: the iTunes store is huge, but when it comes to funding creative projects, Kickstarter is no slouch!

A lot of students come into the Career Services Center needing to raise a small amount of money for a specific project. Say for example, you received a scholarship to attend a great summer festival, but need money to cover your airfare. Or, you have a bunch of tunes already recorded but need money to pay for mixing and mastering. Perhaps your first question is: what grants can I apply for? And unfortunately, I have to tell you there aren’t a lot of grants to support these types of expenses. There’s the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International program, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music’s Recording Program, both of which are highly competitive, national programs. Local funding sources are also certainly worth exploring. NEC alum Rosalind Buda, for example, received a mini-grant from the Iowa Arts Council to attend a summer festival as an undergrad. But in most cases, my suggestion is to reach out to friends, family, and supporters to raise the money in small donations, and that a Kickstarter campaign is a great way to do this.

Some folks are receptive to this advice, but many are skeptical. There’s a perception that Kickstarter is just a high-tech way to beg money from our equally poor friends. Well, maybe there’s some truth to this. But even our poorest friends might have $1 or 5 to donate to a creative project. Plus, it’s all about your network. What about your rich aunt? Your parents’ friends? That guy that randomly came to your show and liked what you were doing so you exchanged contact info? Or your friend from high school who was great with computers and now makes a bunch of money?

Here’s where the NPR analogy comes in. I’ve listened to NPR for years. For most of those years, I didn’t have much disposable income, and whenever a pledge drive came around I thought, “not a chance.” But now I’m at a point in my life where I have a steady job that I enjoy and I actually want to give NPR my money. The point is, there are people out there that want to give you money too! And all you have to do is ask.

Here’s where the NPR analogy breaks down. Their incentives aren’t usually very appealing. A tote bag? No thanks. Dragon speech recognition software? No again. Being entered into a lottery to possibly win a vacation in France? Sure, I guess. On Kickstarter you set the pledge levels and you choose the incentives. You could give away handwritten thank you letters, the donor’s name on your web site, copies of your new album, a limited edition t-shirt, dinner and a movie, the possibilities are endless. Last fall my friend Ed used Kickstarter to raise money to record a Christmas album and I got a CD, t-shirt, and a screen-printed poster, all for a mere $50!

Check out these examples of NEC-related Kickstarter projects:

• NEC alums Brian Kaufman and Michael Reichman used Kickstarter to raise money for their project Musical Diplomacy: A Concert and Discussion on Race and Culture in the Age of Obama.
• Traditional folk band Long Time Courting, featuring NEC student Ari Friedman, used Kickstarter to raise money for the mixing, mastering, and manufacturing of their debut CD.
• NEC doctoral candidates, composers Osnat Netzer and Derek David are currently in the midst of a campaign to raise money to stage scenes from each of their recent operas.

What other cool Kickstarter projects are out there?

Contributed by: Dan Swenson, Career Services Coordinator and Manager of Bridge

ColinThurmond, AcousticaElectronica Producer

Fall grant recipient Colin Thurmond is hard at work building an incredible event, AcousticaElectronica, which will be included in Boston’s 2011 Together Festival (April 18-24).  We asked Colin to share a little about the evolution of his project, which we have published below.  Pencil this in on your calendar folks!

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This project has evolved in so many exciting ways since the idea first came up in September of last year.  It began as a conversation between friends.  My colleagues and I were discussing the frustrations of young classical musicians trying to reconcile their popular music sensibilities in a conservatory setting.

In a way this project had to happen. Between the members of the group it felt like a moral imperative.  The right people seemed to fall into place almost without thinking.  We wanted to create something new, fresh, relevant. Something that brought a new vision to tradition, at once respectful to our roots but progressive and modern.

“Me” by Josh Wisdumb

The vision is to create a form of immersive performance experience in which classical music, electronic music, live performance, dance, videography and visual arts blend to reject the passive obedience usually expected of audiences.

Our show contains two parts: Soundpainting and The WIG spinning the music of Athena. Soundpainting is a sign language for creating live composition from structured improvisation. This is a community music-making event for any number of participants, with or without musical experience.  There are no mistakes.  You are encouraged to color outside the lines. The Boston Soundpainting Orchestra will lead the audience in creating live compositions blended with pre-recorded music that the audience will hear later in the main act of the performance. This way the audience will participate in the music they will later hear, breaking down the space between the performer and audience.  Visual artist Josh Wisdumb will improvise on canvas to the music shaped by the Boston Soundpainting Orchestra. Dancers from The Boston Conservatory will improvise movement to the sound.

The show is entitled AcousticaElectronica. This show brings together young talent from the New England Conservatory, The Boston Conservatory and beyond to express their diverse musical realities, which include both classical and non-classical influences. Classical music has been reinterpreted/reinvented/remixed with electronic music giving a fresh new voice to a beautiful tradition.  The WIG will spin with live string quartet, guitar, vocals and piano.

We have paired with the Boston Together Festival, the region’s largest electronic music festival sponsored by the Weekly Dig.

Excited to experience what the Together Festival calls, “a bind bending classical/electronic performance”? We are too.  Below are all of the important nuts and bolts:

Date: Friday, April 22, 2011

Time: Doors @ 7pm, Curfew @ 11:00pm. Opening act from 8-9:10pm. Main act from 9:10-10:30pm

Location: The Center for Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, MA

Tickets: Free to Together Festival Pass Holders. $10 Advance via Brown Paper Tickets / $13 Door

As promised, below are short teaser videos from our spring Entrepreneurial Grant recipients! Their excitement is palpable, and so is ours!

Michael Dahlberg, Parlor Night

John Elliott, Prism Project

Elizabeth Erenberg, Sounding the Stories

Lauren Hunt, Corno Colombia

Cecilia Huerta and Andres Lopera, Boston Latin-American Orchestra

Peter Negroponte, Improvisers Anonymous Series

Vanessa Wheeler, NEC Composers Lab Ensemble

We’ve had a dizzying start to the semester, but couldn’t be more pleased to announce the spring Entrepreneurial Student Grant recipients.  Friday marked the completion of the grant review process, and we have funded eight new creative projects:

Parlor Night is a bi-monthly chamber music series at the LilyPad in Cambridge.  A collaboration between Michael Dahlberg, his LilyPad String Quartet and venue owner Gil Aharon, Parlor Night aims to transform the perception and conventional presentation of live classical music performance in Greater Boston.  The mission is three fold: to find new performance formats that attract audiences, to make classical music a social convener, and to cultivate deeper relationships between professional musicians and the communities that they are part of.

John Elliott is curating a Prism concert, a unique type of performance that blends different styles of music and plays with time and space to create an interactive and welcoming atmosphere.  The music is continuous and ensembles are set up in different locations throughout the venue to envelop the audience.  The set-up is informal, allowing audience members to interact socially and engage with the performances.  

Elizabeth Erenberg is creating a unique program that combines music and Greek mythology.  The final concert, which will take place in Erenberng’s native Los Angeles, will include flute repertoire based on Greek myths as well as a newly commissioned work for orator, tambourine and flute by DMA student Derek David. This production will enable students studying Ancient Greek History and Mythology to engage with their curriculum through the arts.

This March, Lauren Hunt will travel to Bogota, Colombia for ten days to work with a wide variety of horn students.  Lauren will be working with three organizations that serve different communities in the city: Tocar Y Luchar (the El-Sistema style program in Colombia), Sabana Centro, a music preparatory school and the conservatory affiliated with the National University of Colombia. 

Andres Lopera and Cecilia Huerta have teamed with Villa Victoria to launch the Boston Latin-American Orchestra (BLO). This chamber orchestra is comprised of twenty-two current and former NEC students as well as musicians from the Greater Boston area.  BLO aims to present Latin-American orchestral music and in so doing, create a space where Latino culture can be celebrated and shared.

Improvisers Anonymous Series, curated by Peter Negroponte, is a new performance initiative that will promote improvised music and allow young improvisers to collaborate and share bills will more experienced players.   Each concert will reflect the many sub-genres of improvised music, from improvised music based on pre-composed material to free jazz, and electro-acoustic music, among others.  Concerts will take place at the Piano Factory and will create an accessible space for students and young musicians to perform and showcase their talents as improvisers.

The Chiron Competition, directed by Albert Oppenheimer, is a New England composition competition that provides the opportunity for young composers (High School and College) to have their works premiered at the New England Conservatory by world-class musicians.  Winners of the competition will also be paired a mentor who will help provide guidance and support to the student as he/she pursues further composition education. 

The New England Conservatory Composers Lab Ensemble (NEC CLE)is a pilot program that seeks to cultivate an environment of guided exploration for young composers in a two-day intensive forum.  Selected composers will work with a Visiting Composer, an NEC Composition or Theory Faculty member, and a flexible ensemble of experienced musicians to develop new techniques and workshop their works-in-progress. NEC CLE will serve as a sounding board for composers, a space where composers can receive direct feedback from the ensemble.  The workshop will culminate in a public performance of the pieces that are selected for the NEC CLE workshop.

Quite the line-up, wouldn’t you agree? These students have worked tirelessly over the last few weeks to prepare their applications and pitch their projects to our review panel (comprised of staff, faculty and former grant recipients). They have labored over project visions, timelines, marketing plans, and yes, most difficult of all – budgets.  Aside from the enormous benefit of having a pot of money to work with, these students have also learned a great deal in the application process itself. Articulating a vision, creating a work plan, identifying target audiences, crafting a marketing strategy, and figuring out how to balance a budget are all skills that we want our entrepreneurial musicians to develop while they are at NEC. And although these skills certainly need to be practiced and honed over years, not weeks, our students have the advantage of getting a head start. Most importantly, they are getting their head start in an environment that is supportive, collaborative, and at the end of the day, safe. We are less concerned with whether or not these projects become wildly successful ventures, though they may. Our greatest hope is that the experience of executing these projects will help our students build skills and networks so that the next time they have a great idea (and there certainly will be a next time) they will also have the toolkit to realize it.  In the coming days, we will be posting short teaser videos so that you too can get to know each of our grant recipients and their creative visions. 

Contributed by: Eva Heinstein, Program Manager of Entrepreneurial Musicianship