The Search for a New Music Director
“Hi Kelly—this is Karen Parrott. I’m on the board of the Spartanburg Philharmonic and am heading up the search for our new Music Director, and I’d love to talk to you about joining the search committee!”
I could not have been more pleased to receive that voice mail from Karen Parrott back in July. I actually really enjoy being on search committees—at their best, searches become broad learning opportunities—and the group that Karen outlined seemed perfect: four Philharmonic musicians, four board members, and two staff members, to be joined by Arts Consultant Henry Fogel. It’s a diverse group of folks from different backgrounds and skills and different musical experiences, but all share a love of music and the Spartanburg Philharmonic. We had our first meeting on Zoom in late August to get to know each other and lay out some procedures, and then we were off and running.
Over the next couple of months, the Philharmonic office received over 150 applications! Kathryn Boucher proved to be a master Dropbox organizer, and Henry Fogel put his formidable musical management skills to use by winnowing that number down to a workable amount. Though the committee had access to all the applications, we quickly focused in on the 46 that Henry green-lighted. And thus the “big lift” of the search process began—we each had to got to look through 46 files of letters, resumes, video clips, and websites and rank them before the first big meeting in late September, where we’d winnow the list down to 10-15 semifinalists.
Music searches, in my experience, are usually more time-consuming than other sorts of searches, for the simple reason that music happens in time. You can figure out how to read through letters and resumes pretty quickly, but a video of the first movement of Brahms’ Symphony no. 1 is going to take as long as it takes—you can’t speed up the tempo. And each of those 46 applicants had sent us at least three different video links. Even if you don’t watch the entire Brahms symphony, that’s still about as many minutes of watching as the entire first season of Only Murders in the Building (but with less murder and more bassoons). To make the time line even more challenging for me, my September is always chock-full of college freshmen, and I kept putting off watching all those videos until the week before our September meeting. Truth be told, I finally just put up a mental “Do Not Disturb” sign and spent about four days binge-watching conductors for hours and hours and hours.
I was amazed at how many opinions I suddenly had about the art of conducting.
Our dinner meeting to go through the list of 46 was really quite fun, and it highlighted the advantages of a diverse search committee. Everyone had gone through the same material, but different members of the committee noticed different things—this conductor’s orchestra seemed to be enjoying themselves, that conductor had really creative outreach ideas, another conductor was a really engaging speaker, and yet another conductor had thought-provoking programs. By the end of the process, we’d found some real points of consensus: we had eleven candidates to interview via Zoom, in addition to the interviews we’d do with those candidates that are guest conductors for the current season.
Less than two weeks later, we were back at it, meeting downtown for a full day of Zoom interviews. It was so exciting to actually “meet” those eleven semi-finalists and hear not only about their own experiences, but also their visions for how the Spartanburg Philharmonic might develop and move into the future. What I found especially interesting is that almost every one of them had a story of how their current institution had dealt with the near-universal Covid-shutdown, and all of them were impressed with the growth of the Spartanburg Philharmonic offerings over the past several years.
After our Zooming (and a fair amount of chocolate) we narrowed our list down to the nine finalists that are conducting our orchestra both this and next season. But our work wasn’t done—oh no! Each of the finalists conducting next year was asked to send in three possible programs to conduct, and they were encouraged to think outside the standard repertoire with their programming. What interesting programs we received! The committee spent an evening going through the programs, selecting the ones they thought our audiences would enjoy the most, and making occasional substitutions. Special challenge: four of the five conductors included Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite on one of their programs, and, while Firebird is a beautifully exquisite piece, we didn’t think our audience would necessarily want to hear it four times in one season…
So we have our finalists, and finishing touches are being put on next year’s programs, which will be just as varied and brilliant as the conductors themselves. We’ve already had two of our finalists in to conduct the orchestra and interact with the Spartanburg community. It’s an exciting ride! I may, however, need some more chocolate to make it to the finish line.
The Search Committee is made up of individuals representing the Orchestra, the Board of Directors, the Staff, and the community of Spartanburg.
Committee Members (listed alphabetically): Kathryn Boucher, Ian Bracchitta, Alvoy Bryan, Jr., Ray Dunleavy, John Holloway, Peter B. Kay, Ohmar Land, Samantha Larkins, Karen Parrot, Helen Tipton, Kelly Vaneman, Henry Fogel, Consultant
Obois Kelly McElrath Vaneman is a longtime member of the Spartanburg Philharmonic and regularly shares her passion for the oboe, performing, and teaching with our audience. Kelly also works at Converse University as is Chair of Musicology and Composition and Music Freshman Mentor at the Carroll McDaniel Petrie School of Music.