On Being an Arts Administrator in December
There’s a meme that usually arrives in my various social media feeds at approximately lunchtime on December 1 each year, and will never get old for those in my profession!
For me it started even in my high school years, with the usual winter band concert. Then in college, it was the annual Wheaton College Christmas Festival (my very last performance as an undergraduate was that concert my senior year) and I think most years I also played trombone at a church concert or service.
Then entering my post-college years, I spent all the Decembers in my twenties heavily involved in the special Christmas concert at my church, Calvary Memorial of Oak Park (often doubling as a chorister in addition to conducting the choir and orchestra on some parts of the program) and in some kind of production role for that same Wheaton College Christmas Festival. My very last event to staff before I concluded my employment at the College was one of those concerts and it was a very bittersweet moment to sign off over the radio at the end of the final show.
In January 2019, I moved to Miami to join the staff of the professional vocal ensemble Seraphic Fire and as I approached my one-year employment anniversary, I finally got around to staffing my first run of A Seraphic Fire Christmas. I had such a fun two weeks driving all over South Florida with my coworkers who had become friends, presenting beautiful sounds of the season for several sold-out audiences. (I also found time to sing in the choir for my church in Miami that Christmas Eve.) As we wrapped the final show on December 22, 2019, I couldn’t wait for A Seraphic Fire Christmas 2020!
It was never to be. COVID-19 made choral concerts among the most dangerous activities one could think of in the second half of 2020. Seraphic Fire made do with a one-off video production of our favorite works from our usual repertoire, recorded by our singers in their homes and professionally pieced together, but it was far from what we all wanted that Christmas. Even though by that point we had the immensely heartening news from the Phase III trials of several vaccines and prospects for 2021 were promising, I was feeling quite pessimistic about the future of the live performing arts.
Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I’m not normally a pessimistic person. I am generally optimistic, often to a fault. But 2020 chipped away at that a bit, what with the pandemic and everything else that year. I had a hard time envisioning the arts world emerging from it all after what we’d gone through. So when Naomi and I decided toward the end of 2020 that Miami wasn’t where we wanted to be any longer, I broadened the filters on my job searches beyond just “arts” institutions.
And then in May 2021 we moved to Arlington, Virginia, across the river from my new job as finance manager for a mentoring nonprofit in Washington, DC. I’m very grateful for that job giving Naomi and me the means to move to the DC area and for the friends and professional experience I gained through that job.
It didn’t take long at all for me to start missing the arts world. It was particularly acute for me when in October 2021 I was back in Chicago for a long weekend and attended a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, the first time I had been to a major professional classical music concert since the start of the pandemic. I attended other concerts in my new home in the DC area in the winter/spring of 2022 and it was somewhere in that timeframe that I set a goal to be back in the arts world within the next couple of years. In the meantime, I had found a bit of a musical outlet through choir at my church in Arlington as well as occasional service on the church’s tech crew.
You can read the full version of what happened here, but in April 2022, I was essentially head-hunted for a role that would not only bring me back to the arts world but also be an upward move in the nonprofit finance space. I began that job with The Washington Chorus in June 2022, just over 13 months since I had signed out of all my network accounts at Seraphic Fire.
As I publish this reflection, I’m just a few weeks shy of 18 months on the Chorus staff and halfway through an exceptionally thrilling run of A Candlelight Christmas. I wrote the first draft of this essay on Sunday afternoon following two sold out shows over the previous two days, and three more to come later this week that are also all but sold out. It feels so good to once again watch hundreds of people smiling as they exit the concert hall and have had a small part in making it happen. I’m grateful for the vaccines that make live music safe again. I’m grateful for my team that I get to do this work with. I’m grateful for the eleven thousand people who chose to spend their discretionary income on our concerts and the millions more who are spending on other live concerts this month.
That’s not to say the arts world hasn’t changed in the decade I’ve been doing this, to say nothing of the accelerated changes in the last two years since vaccines allowed us to slowly get back to live concerts. These changes cover everything from how we fund our institutions, to how we curate programs and market them, to who we invite to be on our stages and in our audiences, and more. I personally have spent countless moments reflecting on those changes individually (with hopes to eventually put coherent words together about it), as well as in board meetings, staff meetings, grant panels, networking conversations, and other forums. In 2024 I’ll start a two-year professional development program for arts administrators that I’m sure will provoke further thoughts and help me synthesize the thoughts I’ve had already.
Change can be hard, and I know I’ve definitely felt pushed to the point of discomfort in my career in this field. But I am confident that this is the field where God has called me to spend my work years, and my prayer is for the wisdom to know what changes need to be made, and for the courage to lead or the grace to follow as each change requires.
Nothing will ever replace live music, as Seraphic Fire Artistic Director Patrick Quigley was fond of saying in 2021 when the ensemble began presenting live concerts again. I agree with him 100%. People will often ask me this time of year if work is super busy and my response is always something along the lines of “yes, and I love it!” It should be busy and I should be working hard when my organization is creating something meaningful like live music. Concert weeks are not incidental, they are inherent to why performing arts organizations exist and the relentless, adrenaline-fueled drive to calling “house to half” is the defining feature of my work.
Even so, the live performance isn’t the end of fulfilling our institutional missions in and of itself. It’s the primary tool through which we fulfill our missions as performing arts organizations to bring people together to explore and celebrate our shared humanity through the arts. It’s a mission I believe in so deeply, in December and in the other eleven months of the year as well.
