Innovation Summit

​Last week I was lucky enough to be asked by Samuel Hsieh to come along on a trip to the Yale Innovation Summit. East Zodiac, the new music commissioning organization I work on with Sam and Vanna Tsiknias, was slated to give a presentation through the University of Michigan EXCELerator program. In the presentation, we discussed our goal of better representation for AAPI composers in the classical concert space, and introduced our new initiative to bring our program to music students in early education. If you’d like to support this venture, you can find our website here. Everything went well, but this presentation which had been at the top of mind for Sam and I leading up to the Summit, ended up being only a small part of our trip. I wanted to make this post as a sort of recap of what happened, and to share some exciting new resources I’ve been inspired to create.
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Inspiration

Left to right: Gala Flagello (Connecticut Summerfest), Alexis Lamb (Refugia Festival), Samuel Hsieh and I (East Zodiac), Allyson Cohen (CMOC), Sasha Gusikhin (NeuroArts Productions), Jonathan Kuuskoski and Gabrielle Piazza (SMTD EXCEL Program)

To anyone granted the opportunity to attend this summit, I can’t stress how much I encourage it. It’s a place filled with people with a passion and drive for their work that is infectious. Before attending, I’d found myself in a place where I felt quite defeated about the state of the arts, and the world in general for that matter. As much as I was finding examples of clear problems in the arts, I was having trouble understanding what solutions might be, and what exactly I could do to help push for them. While many of the discussions at the summit did touch on these problems, they also began to present potential solutions. There were organizations raising money to support artists – similar to East Zodiac, some worked to create performance spaces in places where they didn’t exist before – bringing the arts to the people who need them most, some found the connections between music, health, and the environment – healing people and the earth with art! In talking with these wonderful minds, and learning more about their projects, I realized that I was staring at the solution. It was dependent on the success of all of these ventures. After many of my recent formal music experiences, this was a breath of fresh air. People valuing this craft we all spend so much time on, but in a way that is not elitist, in a way that is practical in its belief that the arts are a human right.

One of the briefest conversations I had at the summit ended up being the most valuable. It happened shortly after a panel on Art Pharmacy – an organization which allows doctors to prescribe arts consumption and participation… and have insurance cover it! (I KNOW! – I’ll do a post focused on this at some point too!) After the panel ended, I went up to talk with Michael J. Bobbitt, one of the speakers, and asked him for specific avenues that artists could take towards pushing for the progressive changes that artists need from their government. In addition to being a playwright, Michael is executive director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and has recently been advocating for the implementation of Art Pharmacy. His response was to get in communication with representatives, an option which I was already aware of, but then he added a little tidbit that was new to me. Apparently, there is a threshold that can be reached in the number of communications received on a specific issue. Once that threshold is reached, the representative must act on the request from their constituents. This means that if enough people can push for a given issue, they can not be ignored. When he pointed out that this threshold can be as low as four communications on a given issue, alarm bells went off in my head.
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The Plan Going Forward

What if there was a way to provide people with all the tools they need to press issues they care about? Emails drafted and ready to go, the exact names and contacts of recipients they need to go to, and research into proposed policy in support of progressive change done and presented in a way that is easily accessible? Suddenly each person's capacity for political influence would be supercharged. This is my new plan with Musician Coop. I’ll continue my bi-weekly posts, but included in a few of these posts will be coverage of tangible political policy. I’ll summarize the points of the policy and discuss potential benefits, find contact information for representatives that could use a little pushing on the issue, and provide a drafted email you can copy and send to them as desired. My goal will be to make every artist's voice amplified in a call for a better world. To make it easy to push for the changes we could all benefit from. Now, I realize the readership here is not that significant, but four communications?! We could do that. 

Stay tuned for future posts exploring some wonderful music-related ventures and initiatives. Until then, thank you for reading, and happy jamming!