Michael Drapkin
Executive Director, Brevard Conference on Music
Entrepreneurship
Posted 5.31.2007
Why did you start BCOME?
We needed a catalyst in the music world that could spark
interest, institutional change and some baseline
instruction in entrepreneurship. There was no existing
venue anywhere in America for achieving these goals, so we
decided to be entrepreneurial and start a conference on
entrepreneurship.
How many attendees did you have last year and how
many do you expect this year?
We sold-out at 65 attendees last year, which was at
capacity. With our new conference coordinator, Casey Levis,
we believe we can comfortably fit a few more this year.
Are there any new aspects or trajectories for this
year's conference?
The biggest was engaging Gary Beckman as our Director of
Academic Programs. Gary did the Kauffman funded study of
Arts Entrepreneurship in our institutions of higher
learning in the U.S., is a musicologist and ensconced in
the academy, so he was a natural fit. He advocated the need
for a venue in which music academicians could present
formal papers on entrepreneurship in music and felt BCOME
was the best venue. We concurred, and Gary took the ball
and ran with it. He developed a call for papers that
quickly received an enormous response. The result is three
sessions with educators presenting their academic papers
with a published proceedings to follow.
We also surveyed last year's attendees at the end of BCOME
2006, and as a result we made some changes to the "It's All
About You" section. Last year's attendees wanted to take
advantage of the individual mentoring we make available by
BCOME faculty but not miss the concurrent sessions, so we
made them sequential. We also pulled Angela Beeching from
the New England Conservatory into the mix as a session
leader in that section, who is simply wonderful both as a
person and what she does professionally.
Why did you choose Brevard as the host for the
conference?
David Effron, who is retiring this year as Artistic
Director of the Brevard Music Center, was my conductor at
Eastman, and he introduced me to BMC CEO John Candler, who
is a former executive from the business world. John
understood what I was looking to achieve right away, and
with some financial help from the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation, we were off.
What does the conference provide for educators,
professional musicians, industry professionals and most
importantly - music students?
Our conference offers specific track sessions geared for
each of these groups. Last year we were concerned that one
would be attended with the other two sparsely filled, but
to our surprise they were all fairly equally attended. In
our surveys, many folks wished they could have attended all
of them, which is a good sign.
This year you have Bill Ivey, the Director of the
Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at
Vanderbilt University and Former Chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts as a keynote speaker. What is the
impact of having him at this year's conference?
It is really terrific to have him. Aside from Bill being a
marvelous speaker and thinker for arts policy, it brings
the perspective of someone who has been at the national
center of the arts in America - just like having Bob
Freeman last year gave the perspective of someone who is
probably the nation's finest music school dean - under Bob,
Eastman got their number one ranking from US News.
You have a diverse cadre of sponsors for the
conference. Has this broad support helped to build national
recognition for BCOME?
It certainly brought us a lot of credibility from the
get-go, as well as helped us get the word out about what we
were achieving.
Entrepreneurship education in the Arts (and music
particularly) is a growing movement. How do you envision
BCOME's role in the effort?
As mentioned before, we see BCOME as a catalyst that is
helping to spark evolution in the academy with respect to
entrepreneurship. Aside from having the marvelous venue at
the Brevard Music Center, with the beauty of the Blue Ridge
Mountains and all the wonderful concerts going on, BCOME
exists outside the academy, which allows us more
flexibility to present venues and react more quickly than
most educational institutions. hat having been said, we had
many music school deans and faculty attend last year, so
there is clearly a thirst in mainstream music higher
education for information and understanding of the many
complex concepts associated with entrepreneurship. So while
we exist outside the academy, nonetheless I was recently
appointed to a two year term on the Committee on Career
Options and Entrepreneurship for the College Music Society,
and I have made presentations at their national conference
for the past three years, and indeed they are a vital
sponsor of BCOME - so there is no question that we have
gained total acceptance from an academic standpoint. I look
at it as a very tight partnership with the educational
world, and that is certainly apparent from many of our
speakers that are leading sessions, as they are all top
leaders in entrepreneurship higher education in America.
With Julliard's and the Manhattan School of Music's
recent efforts, it seems as if the larger conservatories
are viewing entrepreneurship education as a new and vital
part of their mission as music educators. What role do they
have in advancing entrepreneurship education in music
training?
When I worked on Wall Street, some people wanted to be on
the leading edge (or "bleeding edge", as some would call
it) while the firm I was at preferred to be a "fast
follower" when it came to new innovations, as we preferred
others to prove out new products and technology before we
adopted them for our own use. The risk with being "bleeding
edge" was that you can get "caught in front of the blade."
I think this metaphor holds true with leading schools of
music like Juilliard and Manhattan School, and rightly so
given their missions. Even so, I have to say that I am
still marveling at the pace of change going on in many of
our top music schools. I thought that Juilliard bring in
Derek Mitthaug as Director of Juilliard's Career Services
office was a brilliant hire, and Derek has certainly taken
the ball and run with it on a national level.
The larger question that could be asked is whether our top
schools are leaders or fast followers, but in the end I
don't really think it matters, since the ultimate arbiters
of this question will be the parents that pay the tuition
bills to send their kids to these schools. Aside from the
enormous financial commitment parents make in sending their
kids to college, there is no question that it is every
parent's desire that their children be successful in their
chosen field. Our view isn't one of entrepreneurship for
entrepreneurship's sake, but merely applying what is well
known in other sectors of the economy. When I worked in the
private sector with over 30 startup firms, nobody really
started out saying "I want to be an entrepreneur"; instead
they had the burning desire to achieve a goal involving
some product or service, so they went and started a
company. Our nation's academies of music graduate roughly
16,000 performance majors that each individually have
burning desires to share their chosen art with others, and
we are merely helping to give them a third career path that
is labeled "entrepreneurship." So while it is great what
Juilliard and Manhattan are doing, it is the market that
will ultimately determine what they offer their students,
not the other way around.
The question for us in starting BCOME was whether
entrepreneurship in music was (according to Bob Freeman)
"5am in the morning and still dark, or after sunrise."
Given the turnout we had last year, the sponsors we
partnered with and the phenomenal session leaders and
keynotes we have, I think we have clearly proven that the
sun is up and shining on this movement, and there is no
question that schools like Juilliard and Manhattan School
are also seeing the light and becoming "fast followers."
What is the future of entrepreneurship education
for music students?
I think over the next few years we are going to see more
actual degree programs associated with entrepreneurship
started in the academy, just like they have been for many
years in the non-music campuses. I am delighted to see
folks like John Richmond, who leads the music school at the
University of Nebraska, develop a graduate degree program
involving entrepreneurship, and there is no question that
many other "fast followers" will be following suit.
It is a great time to be a music school student right now.
Even though a lot of the traditional classical music
institutions, particularly symphony orchestras, have
suffered declines over the last number of years, there are
sea changes going on in our entrepreneurial society that
are allowing them unprecedented access to customers of
their music. With the emergence of entrepreneurship
curricula in the academy and the availability of national
and international access to niche audiences via web,
podcasts, MySpace, YouTube, etc., I can't wait to see what
wild stuff our music students will come up with, and that
undoubtedly will change the face of the music world in ways
that we can't even imagine right now.
...and when they do, we will be showcasing them at BCOME!
