BONUS: A Continuation, Not a Phase

Christopher Williams: Hi everyone, it’s Christopher Williams. The arts world is driven by passion and purpose, and many of us are dedicated to addressing injustice and inequity in all that we do, whether through programming, marketing, or behind the scenes. But even with our best intentions, our industry faces real challenges in achieving lasting change. We strive to be more inclusive to open doors to new voices, but the path isn’t always easy. Boards and longtime patrons can resist programming or messaging that feels unfamiliar, and progress can be frustratingly slow when an organization lacks the community connections or resources to support these efforts. In today’s episode, you’ll hear how one symphony is holding itself accountable to its mission and values around representation, access, and equity. We’re sharing never-before-aired insights from a conversation recorded earlier this year between myself and Rachel Hagemeier from the Canton Symphony Orchestra. Rachel discusses the Symphony’s podcast, Orchestrating Change, and the shifts it has sparked within the organization. She also shares how the Canton Symphony is building a new model for community connection and accountability in the arts. Let’s take a listen.

Rachel Hagemeier, welcome to CI to Eye.

Rachel Hagemeier: Thank you. Very excited to be here today.

Christopher Williams: I’m so eager to talk to you, and I also come from a similar part of the world. I’m from southwest Missouri, kind of in your neighborhood.

Rachel Hagemeier: Yeah.

Christopher Williams: I think we also have being a high school drum major in common.

Rachel Hagemeier: Oh yeah. High school drum majoring. It never leaves you.

Christopher Williams: Very important formative roles in our leadership.

Rachel Hagemeier: Yes. Oh, for sure.

Christopher Williams: So you host your own organization’s podcast called Orchestrating Change to address issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the industry. Tell me more about what you’re trying to achieve with that, because it’s work that so needs to happen.

Rachel Hagemeier: The idea for the podcast came from our director of marketing and development, Nathan Maslyk, back in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd took place, and we saw tons of orchestras make beautiful statements and we said, great. We could do a statement. Is there something though that we could do to hold ourselves accountable? And so publicly talking about it and publicly giving limelight and airtime to people who represent minority backgrounds and are doing the work successfully in the field already, who are already doing way above and beyond what most orchestras in America are doing—if we can talk to those people, they’re going to fuel our ideas. And maybe there’s some stuff that we can’t implement in Canton, but it’s going to keep it top of mind for us. We wanted to keep this conversation as a throughline so that our DEI committee on the board could have things to think about. And we talk about race, gender expression, socioeconomic status, gender, all sorts of stuff, but also physical disability and deafness, blindness, all these different things.

There’s so much in the DEI world that needs our attention, and so doing that podcast—we’re in season five now. It’s just a joy to talk to these people. I mean, we’ve gotten to have Dashon Burton on the podcast. Grammy Award-winning Dashon Burton. Jeff Scott, also Grammy Award-winning. And so many other people, like Sara Davis Buechner, a transgender pianist who played with Canton pre-transition and post-transition. Our former music director, Gerhardt, was one of the few conductors who programmed her after her transition. Now she gets programmed a lot more, but in the early days. Listening to her story and the way that she navigated that whole experience. And it has led to a lot of different things at the symphony. Our involvement in the Sphinx Organization and their SOPA auditions that they do, and trying to bring musicians of color onto the stage. We still have a long way to go with that. We’re not a very diverse orchestra, but we’re better than we used to be. We talk a lot about equity of music access in the community, so we started a free strings training program in Southeast Canton through Lighthouse Ministries. Southeast Canton is considered a food desert. There’s no gas stations. Victim of redlining. Very poor area. The history of Southeast Canton is devastating to read. It was all blighted for an industrial park that was going to go in that never opened.

So how can we bring access? Well, we have a ton of violins hanging around and we’ll just give them free lessons. It’s only 12 students, but now they’re joining our Youth Symphony program. It’s been so wonderful to have that podcast and to do it, and I’ve learned so much, and I never want to stop doing it. Now, whenever I’m having a bad day and I’m like, “I’m too busy, we have to record a podcast episode, I’m too busy”—afterwards I’m always like, “That was the greatest. I feel so refreshed now.”

Christopher Williams: I know. Yeah.

Rachel Hagemeier: It’s really, really nice.

Christopher Williams: Oh, that’s great. I can imagine that there are so many people that love the podcast and love what you’re talking about on the podcast, but did you face any challenges in some of the discussions that you were having?

Rachel Hagemeier: The board understood it. We kind of decided as an organization, okay, what are the things we need to do to make sure that we’re actually doing this work? So we decided every MasterWorks concert has to have a composer of color or a female composer. All of ’em. We have to. And that’s not just to check a box, that’s to hold ourselves accountable to make sure we’re programming it. We can program more, and we try to, and we do, but if we don’t do that, we’re not doing our jobs. And so the board was on board and the staff gets it, and our guests are amazing, and we’ve been challenged in conversations with assumptions that we have and identified a lot of gaps in our own knowledge and biases we didn’t think we had. We did get some pushback from our community. We got a letter about how we were being racist to white people, which was… You just look at it and go, okay. And you just toss it away. Because you don’t need to have that conversation.

But the thing that is hard for us is there’s so much we want to do that we can’t. We don’t have access to the materials that we would need. We don’t have the money that we need. We don’t have the space or the connections in the community because Canton’s pretty small. There’s lots of stuff that we want to do right now, but it takes a lot of planning and time. And so the amount of change I would like to see happen is not happening at the rate at which I would like it to happen, and it’s just about patience and working hard and being uncomfortable and continuing on and doing that cycle forever and ever. Because we were having a conversation with one of our guests in the first season where he said, “I remember back in the 1980s when I was on a panel about diversifying orchestras.

And then I remember in the early two thousands when I was on a panel about diversifying orchestras. And then here we are again.” And he said, “It’s been a fad. It’s been a cycle. It’s been something that pops up every once in a while.” What do we need to do to make sure that this has staying power and that it’s not just a phase. And it’s a little concerning. A study came out about the number of composers of color that were programmed went from like 0.4% to 9.4%. That’s a big change. It’s still only 9.4%, but when looking at the seasons upcoming, it went down. And so how do we keep reminding orchestras that there’s room for Beethoven and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor? You can do both. Jessie Montgomery is alive and well, and she’s maybe available to come to your concert if you play her music. There’s a lot of reminding that this is not a phase. This is continuation. And that’s I think maybe the hardest thing.

Christopher Williams: I think you’re doing the Lord’s work by talking about these kinds of issues on your podcast, and I think it can be challenging to talk about some of these things when you’re in any part of the country. For example, I’m sitting in the very progressive eastern part of the country, and I know where you are sitting. And so I’m wondering, does the geographical environment that you find your organization in, does it make it harder to address some of this? Or do you feel like it’s not a problem?

Rachel Hagemeier: In certain ways. I think that… We just did a Gospel joint symphony concert, and it was so fun. And our audience was the most diverse audience we’ve ever had. I’ve only been there for five years, but oh my gosh. I was like, well, this is like I’m in a Baptist church on Sunday. This is a very different experience than we’ve ever had at the symphony, and it was super fun. And doing concerts specifically for demographics of people that have been left out of the concert hall is a part of what we want to do. We did a concert last fall with The Labra Brothers for Dia de los Muertos that was all Hispanic punk fusion music with orchestra, and our audience was mostly Spanish-speaking. So I introduced the concert and then one of our board members, Joanna, introduced it in Spanish because most of the audience didn’t speak English. Now, those two concerts sold a lot less tickets than almost everything else we did. Is that because the demographics of people that those concerts were for don’t see our marketing in the traditional ways?

Is that because we need to shift the way that we think about ticketing and getting the word out to those people? Or… why wasn’t our traditional audience there? I’m not doing a Gospel joint symphony just for the Black community. It was a little sad that a lot of our traditional audience wasn’t there. So what can we do to do content that, yes, maybe it’s focused on the Black Gospel experience, but our whole community is curious and interested about it. And in the same token, what can we do to make our, it’s not targeted to the black community. It’s just a MasterWorks concert. There happens to be a Black composer on it, but that’s not the focus. The focus is the music.

How can we make our orchestra a space that the Black community would want to come to that concert? And so I think that is a really interesting challenge for us. Canton is pretty siloed when it comes to different communities, and there’s still a racial tension. We had a really hard incident with the police and a Black man dying recently in Canton. Very, very George Floyd-esque to the exact words that he was saying, George Floyd-esque. And so there’s a lot of really difficult things like that happening. And so as a symphony, where’s our place in that conversation? And by having this podcast and talking about these issues when it comes to racial issues and diversity and lack of diversity, that I think we get a lot less pushback from. People just say, it doesn’t apply to them. I don’t need to go to the Gospel concert. It’s not for me. I don’t need to engage in that thing. It’s not for me.

Christopher Williams: I see.

Rachel Hagemeier: I don’t have any conversation. We do get some pushback when we talk about gender expression and LGBTQ+ issues. Our music director is gay, and he didn’t come out publicly until… Well, he was out publicly, but to our community, his bio didn’t mention his fiance. He didn’t tell the Youth Symphony students. Because when he did say it, we had Youth Symphony students quit because their parents were scared of the fact that he was gay. So, but in the same token, we went to Pride. We go to Pride. We have our Pride, we do a petting zoo, and we’re at Pride and we have a great time. We have violins out and people can, like a petting zoo, but an instrument. And we’re there with Youth Symphony materials and Matthew’s there. And we had kids join Youth Symphony because they saw us at Pride, and we have a transgender student in Youth Symphony who now is going off to college for music because he was able to feel comfortable at Youth Symphony.

So in the same token though, then we have those beautiful moments. So the pushback is minimal. I think what it is is just the community that we’re in, where is our place in this conversation in the community? We’re an arts organization. Do we even have any place? And I think the answer is yes, but in a very different way than our prosecutor is going to talk about things, than our legal system is going to talk about things. But we do have a place at that table, and how do we make sure that we’re there in a way that is authentic to who we are and how we can impact is kind of the difficult thing now.

Christopher Williams: I don’t know if you ever saw this piece of research from Colleen Dilenschneider, who—essentially it was to say that our audiences actually do look to us for a point of view on these kinds of issues, which is interesting. I think for a long time, perhaps your Gen X or Boomer peers, Rachel, would’ve said, “Well, we absolutely cannot participate in a conversation of this nature,” which… it’s not true anymore. And I think people like you are absolutely… It’s probably a deal breaker for you to not participate in these kinds of conversations. Though you might do it in your own way, you’re going to be there.

Rachel Hagemeier: Yeah, I mean, I do still think—and this is where I find I get scared, and it’s like, okay, if we say this thing, how is it going to impact my donations?

Christopher Williams: Of course.

Rachel Hagemeier: Which is like, that’s a bad thing to think.

Christopher Williams: I understand.

Rachel Hagemeier: But when I’m person looking at the budget and realizing I have a $274,000 deficit that I need to fix, if I lose my big old conservative donor, what do I do then? But then I remember too, I worked for the Oklahoma City Ballet for a summer, and I remember the artistic director at one time remembering a donor conversation he had where the donor was like, I’m going to give my amount a year, however much it was. And then he said, but I would give more if the tutu’s were a little shorter. There are certain things that you have a duty to stand up for. You have to stand up for your dancers because that’s inappropriate and you don’t get to boss us around in that way, and your donors should not dictate the organization. They should support what the organization is doing. Anytime we do need to get vocal about something and say what we believe, because I want the musicians who play on stage to feel comfortable being a part of this organization. I want everyone in the audience to feel comfortable being here. So what can we do to make more perspectives feel like they have a voice?

Christopher Williams: Yeah. I think one of the things I try to do for myself and even for our clients [is], when you stand up for the disenfranchised and you perhaps risk losing a donor, who else is inspired by that action and is going to come to the table for the very first time? They see your bravery and they say that.

Rachel Hagemeier: Absolutely. And we show up at Pride. And now suddenly now we have a huge supporter from Mr. Craig Covey who is a gay man who supports. And he was like, this is amazing. I love what you’re doing. And now is a huge supporter of the symphony because we started engaging. So we’re not going to necessarily… we might — maybe we lose someone, but we’ll maybe gain a huge amount of people that we didn’t even, that didn’t feel comfortable before. And now they do.

Christopher Williams: Yeah. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. Well, Rachel, this has been such an enjoyable time spent for me. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Rachel Hagemeier: Thank you. This was wonderful. I am so happy to talk about this topic, and yeah, it’s been a really fun little afternoon here with you guys.

Dan Titmuss: Hello, everyone. Dan here, back with more CI-lebrity Sightings. Here’s our roundup of CI clients making the headlines this month. First up, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art is closing its physical doors only to open some new ones. The museum is kicking off a fresh chapter as a global institution with touring exhibitions and an expanded online presence. To commemorate the occasion, Gothamist profiled a longtime docent as he bid a bittersweet farewell to his home away from home. Next, the Times of San Diego reported that after two years of renovations, the San Diego Symphony has finally reopened its Jacob’s Music Center. They celebrated with a full day of musical performances and of course, a brand new look. And finally, BroadwayWorld published the nominees and winners of the 2024 Joseph Jefferson Equity Awards honoring the best in Chicago theater. We couldn’t be prouder to see so many CI clients on the list. Major applause to Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Mercury Theater Chicago, and the Guthrie for being celebrated. Congrats to all these organizations for keeping the arts fresh, exciting, and tuned into what communities need right now. Got a story that deserves a shout out? Well, tag us on social and let us know.

Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CI to Eye’s designers and video editors, and all work together to create CI’s digital content. Our music is by whoisuzo. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover CI to Eye and hear from experts in the arts and beyond. If you didn’t enjoy today’s episode, pass it on to all of your enemies. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for our newsletter at capacityinteractive.com so you never miss an update. And if you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, stay nerdy.