Entrepreneurship in the Conservatory

More harmony than discord
During an Oberlin College entrepreneurship forum in early 2008, one student musician raised her hand to ask a question on the minds of many in the audience: Why should music students have to learn about entrepreneurship?

The answer is quite simple: In today's world, conservatory students must also tune in to business opportunities.

Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory Director Peter Landgren puts it this way: "It's just not good enough anymore to ask: 'Does Johnny play the cello well?'"

Rather, he says, "We have to give our students the tools - besides the musical skills they already have - so they don't have to shuffle burgers."

Entrepreneurship began spreading into liberal arts colleges in Northeast Ohio in 2006 when The Burton D. Morgan Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., collaborated to fund the Northeast Ohio Collegiate Entrepreneurship Program (NEOCEP). Five colleges were chosen for funding as part of the Kauffman Campuses Initiative.

Of the five NEOCEP schools, two - Oberlin and Baldwin-Wallace - have conservatories. Between them, more than 700 students are pursuing degrees in music.

To some, telling a student who wants to study trombone and music history that he must also learn to prepare a business plan and market himself - toot his own horn, perhaps - might be considered a hard sell. But now, in the third year of the program, conservatory officials at both colleges say it is going well. Here is a look at the programs.

Baldwin-Wallace College
When Peter Landgren was studying French horn at the University of Cincinnati in the 1970s, he saw three options for performing fine-arts musicians: Make it with a major symphony, freelance in New York or Los Angeles, or move to Germany, where orchestras were hiring American musicians.

His talent landed him with Option A - a job with the Baltimore Symphony, a position he kept for almost three decades.

Now, as an educator, he wants to make sure his students at B-W have more options than he did. And he sees entrepreneurship as the way to do that.

Landgren was hired to head B-W's Conservatory of Music about the same time the college began receiving NEOCEP funding. He saw the grant as a "tremendous opportunity."

But he had a challenge. The conservatory curriculum is already overloaded. The average B-W undergraduate needs about 120 hours to graduate; the average conservatory student needs 137. So the challenge was not only to create an entrepreneurship class but to carve out time for students to be able to take it.

The result was a year-long process of revamping the curriculum.

"In essence," Landgren says, "we teach music in a silo manner. We teach history, harmony, ear training, rhythm, motion." So over the last year, faculty members have worked to combine some of those disciplines that can be taught together. They have reduced redundancies and "connected the dots."

As a result, they were able to carve out time for an entrepreneurship class, which will be offered for the first time on an elective basis in the spring of 2010. Steven Wogaman, president and CEO of the Canton Symphony Orchestra, will teach the class in an adjunct role.

It will include concert presentation, fundraising, budgeting, accounting and QuickBooks instruction. It will culminate with a music/business competition, with classmates acting as potential funders. The winner will get $1,000 to move his or her project forward.

According to Landgren, all of the students will be winners because of what they will have learned.

Too often in the past, he says, musicians have simply shown up for a concert. The hall is booked. The heat is on. The programs are made. The audience is there.

The class, he says, will teach them to "realize all of the things that go into a concert."

There is a second aspect to the infusion of entrepreneurship for conservatory students at B-W, and it is learning outside the classroom - the learning that comes with extracurricular activities.

In class, percussion major Dane Palmer has perfected his art. (He says the study of percussion is not just drums. It is "anything you can hit, strike, shake or rub to make a sound.) But it is outside of class that he is really learning.

He is part of a student-run ensemble, which involves renting scores, paying artists, auditioning musicians (learning to tell a friend they didn't make the cut is hard but necessary, he says). He is in a separate band and also free-lances to help pay his room and board. It adds up to counting money as well as beats.

Landgren has concluded that no college can teach everything in four years, but what it can do, he says, is give students what they will need to go forth after four years.

Oberlin College
Andrea Kalyn remembers well when the word started to spread at the Oberlin College conservatory about a program to infuse an atmosphere of entrepreneurship. "You SO get us," vocal student Alex Birnie told her when he heard about the initiative.

To Kalyn, who is now acting dean of the conservatory, there is a natural harmony between entrepreneurship and music education.

Conservatory students put on recitals, she says, and to do so, they must ask the same questions as entrepreneurs: Who is your audience? Who will buy tickets? How do I market myself? How do I make this a reality? Whether that reality is the creation of an ensemble or programming a concert, "it's parallel to what entrepreneurs do all the time," she said.

Oberlin has used part of the NEOCEP funding to create at least four new courses for conservatory students. Two in particular - Touring for Musicians and Entrepreneurship 100 - were quite popular this fall. There is no textbook to teach touring, says instructor Gloria Kim, who relies on her own experiences to teach students what she learned the hard way. For instance, students recently learned to write a press release and put together a budget.

"It's getting the students to see beyond the instrument," says Kim, who also serves as the Conservatory's assistant dean for artistic programming and operations.

Both the touring class and Entrepreneurship 100 were combined for a recent session to hear Steven Roth, an Oberlin grad who is now a Boston area consultant in marketing strategy and measurement.

"Why is it so necessary to market yourself?" one student asked Roth at the beginning of the class. Added another: "Marketing seems so self promoting."

Roth explained that musicians must ask themselves what they have of value to offer the consumer. He talked to them about pricing - people will pay more for a Saturday night performance. Finally he told them: "If you aren't comfortable with marketing strategies, find someone who is."

Lectures from experts like Roth and studying in an entrepreneurial atmosphere have caused students to rethink their futures.

For instance, violin major Addison Teng knows seats in paying orchestras are limited. So he began asking himself how to make himself unique, how to create a market for himself. He is now thinking of perhaps setting up a small group to entertain in nursing homes and intimate venues.

The umbrella organization for Oberlin's entrepreneurial thrust is called the Center for Creativity & Leadership (C&L). Not only have new classes been added through C&L, but grants have been made available to help students with internships and to allow them to refine fledgling ideas.

Alex Birnie used one of those initial grants to do some marketing work for the Vienna Boys Choir, for whom he once sang, and to work on a new venture with the choir's artistic director. That venture involved a project with musician Ravi Shankar in which 45 children from India traveled to Austria as part of what was known as the Children's Choir for Peace.

"For an Obie, there is no more exciting or better way to learn than jumping in (for most of us on a fairly consistent basis WAY over our heads) and swimming like mad," says Birnie, who has now switched to a double major in theater and economics. "To have someone there willing to say go for it and be there to support you is beyond invaluable.

"C&L intimately understands the unique nature of an Oberlin student," he said, "which is a testament not only to the leadership of the program itself but that THEY SO GET US."