The Art of Leadership

I have a curiosity to explore the best practices that complement the artistic WHAT with a professional and contemporary approach to the artistic HOW.
What kind of art is waiting for us when we create an environment of real trust, consciousness and mindfulness? What is waiting for us beyond ego?

 

This is how I see leadership.

 

Inspired by my collaboration with the conductor-less orchestra Stegreif Orchester Berlin (and other Ensembles with a similar approach), I am constantly developing potential new forms of artistic co-creation between conductors and orchestras. More and more freelance orchestras want »a few days of hierarchy«, whether that is help for a structured rehearsal process or simply an ear from the outside. Fundamentally, these orchestras are looking for new conductor-less concert forms, as a complement to the traditional relation between conductor and orchestra. There are wonderful  sides to this traditional relationship,  but what if hierarchy could be just used as one of many tools? A temporary possibility to be utilized when necessary and helpful rather than an unshakeable requirement to create art. What if we start to make other smart alternatives visible? Many artists feel that the hierarchical system is outdated and old-fashioned, and yet we don't yet dare to change it.

 

There are very successful leadership teams everywhere, such as in science, business and politics. Why not in orchestras?
Conductors are conditioned by traditional hierarchy to see themselves as lone warriors set apart from their colleagues. Is this really necessary? It does not suit conductors to have too much power beyond their concrete artistic responsibility, just as it does not suit musicians to have their own say and artistic identity completely absorbed into the collective of the orchestra. Does it really serve the art’s best possible outcome for the diverse abilities of an orchestra’s musicians to be ignored? Beyond playing an instrument, many orchestra musicians have much to offer that in the current system would never be discovered.

 

I am not calling for an abolishment of competence-based hierarchy and to then let everyone conduct, stage, or manage. Oftentimes singers appreciate a director who takes matters into their own hands, just as orchestra musicians are happy to have a clearly worked-out, inspiring concept for a Mahler symphony. Everyone is happy to go along with competence-based hierarchy for one or more weeks. But developing annual programs, creating and implementing education programs, finding soloists, discovering new composers, signing holiday passes, settling disputes between the horn and the clarinet player… all of these processes could certainly be managed through a more conscious and shared responsibility. This could mean initiating more bottom-up processes in the orchestra instead of all matters being dealt with through top-down instructions.

I experienced a production of Mozarts »Entführung«, where it is common knowledge that the libretto teaches us how humanity triumphs over tyranny. This message was clear on stage. Back stage it was the complete opposite! Tyranny ruled 100 %. People in dispute refused to speak to each other, others were scared of being fired after the season. In the artistic team there was no trust, much competition, no honesty…Where was the value of the evening?
Will the time come when the audience notices that what they see on
stage is just a show, some sort of fake news? That the highest values of art are not lived, not even believed or valued in either practice or theory by the performers?