Tech, Philanthropy, Composing
My friends who mastermind the arts salon/dinner party series With Interesting People were kind enough to let me run an experiment on their guests last night. (Btw, the photo is of dates stuffed with goat cheese and almonds, alongside some mango & persimmon, all drizzled with honey. The chef, Phil Lacey, is pretty darn good.) …
Continue reading "User Testing, Play Testing, and Composing Music"
I'm the board chair for the Live Music Project. It's a fantastic organization doing excellent work to serve the classical music community. We help people find just the right concert for them, and build meaningful connections between organizations and audience members. Seriously. They send each other love notes because of us. This year we went …
Continue reading "Engineering Management at the Board Level"
The Seattle new music community is amazing. I got here in February, and the composers, musicians, and fans here have blown me away with their welcoming attitude, their commitment, and their straight up talent. This January, I and a bunch of really smart talented committed folks are organizing a one-day new music festival: NUMUS Northwest. …
Continue reading "NUMUS Northwest and a call for submissions"
Musochat is awesome. It's a weekly twitter chat for the new music crowd, discussing issues that matter to us. Sometimes they're straight up artistic issues, and sometimes they're more about business-y how-to-survive-while-doing-this-stuff kind of things. Tomorrow night I've finally caved and am hosting Musochat (the hosts rotate every week). I'm going to be asking questions …
Really, just go buy it. No, I haven't bought it myself yet, or played with it at all. I'm planning to take care of that this weekend. I'm not telling you to buy it because it's awesome. I'm telling you to buy it because I want it to be awesome. We haven't had a really …
I've been working with the MAP Fund for almost two years, and this week the MAP Fund opened its annual funding round. It's been a privilege to work with such a talented and dedicated staff on designing a simpler application system and streamlined process. We chose Submittable as a grantmaking platform. The product came out …
I've been thinking a lot about frames for arts advocacy, and there's one that I can't stop thinking about. I wonder if you think it's as useful and compelling as I do: sustainably produced art. But first, some clarification. The terms can mean different things. Wikipedia, for instance, has an article about sustainable art that …
It's June 30, and you know what that means: another round of project grants awarded on newmusicusa.org. It's great to see the platform continuing to grow, and to connect another cohort of awardees with each other and with their fans. I still don't know any other grantmaking system that gives artists a practical and direct …
This week I gave my fourth annual half-hour talk on crowdfunding to the Fresh Inc Festival, run by Melissa Snoza and the Fifth House Ensemble in Chicago. After all these years Melissa and I have still never been in the same place; one day we'll have to fix that. I like to post something about …
Today at New Music USA we announced a new round of grants in a new program, The NYC New Music Impact Fund. There are a lot of things I love about this program, but my favorite is the level of commitment that New Music USA is making to the success of our grantees. It's common …
News recently broke that a new, non-profit alternative to Uber and Lyft is launching in Austin. The city kicked the companies out for a variety of reasons, including low pay, labor practices, the usual. Instead of rejecting technological advances, or trying to turn back the clock to a past taxi industry (as some try to …
Continue reading "Non-Profit Software Platforms: The Time Has Come"
I've been eagerly awaiting Dorico for years. When Avid orphaned Sibelius, the team, led by Daniel Spreadbury, decamped for Steinberg (of Cubase fame), and started building a brand new scoring application from scratch. I got the chance to interview Daniel for NewMusicBox, and he wrote us some very, very detailed answers, which our composer-readers will …
Continue reading "Daniel Spreadbury interview for NewMusicBox"
