Week of December 30, 2019
Dear Friend,
Since this Monday lands on my birthday, I’m handing the reigns of this email update over to my friend and colleague, Willa Walker, who was the subject of my update two weeks ago.
Thank you, Willa!
Steve
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Dear Friend,
And since today IS Steve’s 60
th
birthday, I thought I would return the favor and tell you a little about Steve! (Please help us celebrate by making a $60 birthday contribution to his favorite charity – the Chamber Music Society of Detroit
HERE
.)
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On the surface, Steve’s path to the Chamber Music Society of Detroit appeared traditional enough. He came here as the result of a national search – led by a firm focused upon the orchestra management field – which caught his attention while he was serving as the President & CEO of the Canton Symphony Orchestra in Ohio. His four years there were preceded by three years in the same role at the Allentown Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania, where he was recruited by the same search firm that brought him here.
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Beyond the typical orchestra management tasks in Allentown and Canton, Steve was involved in major building projects in both places. In Allentown, he wrapped up a $6.5 million renovation project in Allentown’s Symphony Hall (formerly the Lyric Theater of burlesque fame), with a total re-design of the hall’s stage that was inaugurated with a sell-out performance of the Mahler “Resurrection” Symphony.
In Canton, he conceptualized and launched another $6.5 million project to expand upon the existing Umstaddt Hall as a permanent performance and administrative home for the orchestra (on the same campus as the Pro Football Hall of Fame). In both places, Steve also played chamber music with the musicians of the orchestra, including multiple recitals with both orchestras’ concertmasters.
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The part of Steve’s professional background that’s most unusual, though, is the twenty years he spent before that as a musical entrepreneur.
Steve grew up in Washington D.C. where his father is a well-known theologian. After completing an undergraduate degree in piano performance at the Eastman School of Music, Steve ended up moving to Louisville, Kentucky for a Master’s degree at the University of Louisville. In the summer of 1984, he invited some Louisville musicians to join him in his first concert series at a YMCA conference center in Silver Bay, New York. This launched a regional concert management enterprise, focused upon finding concert opportunities for young artists like himself at smaller venues in the East and Midwest. In 1985, he began work on a doctoral degree at Indiana University (just 90 miles from Louisville), where he was lucky enough to land a place in the class of Menahem Pressler, who was his piano teacher there for 9 years.
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It took Steve 17 years to finish that doctorate – possibly an all-time record for the slowest successful doctoral completion in music at Indiana University. The reason for the delay, Steve explained, is that his entrepreneurial activities never stopped while he was in school.
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First, there was the Whitney Trio, which was founded in 1987 and concertized through the early 1990s, including a live radio broadcast concert at the National Gallery of Art. Over the next decade, the trio was active in Steve’s next big project.
By 1991, Steve had completed his doctoral coursework and was looking for a dissertation topic. Inspired in part by his father’s dissertation (A Strategy for the Racial Integration of the Methodist Church in the South), Steve decided to pursue a strategy to create new concert activities in rural communities across Kentucky. His theory was that the audiences were there, but the communities were not large enough to satisfy the financial requirements of for-profit artist managers who connect artists with concert presenters. Steve’s answer was “New Performing Arts, Inc.” – a combination non-profit concert manager and presenter.
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Starting with just three communities in Appalachian eastern Kentucky, Steve and his colleagues would arrive with a grand piano on the back of a U-Haul truck to make music in schools, churches, libraries, community centers, even the lobby of a bank. After his wife, Michele, joined and then helped lead the effort in the late 1990s, New Performing Arts grew into an arts education powerhouse, ultimately providing 80 of Kentucky’s 120 counties with a host of live arts programs in their schools, and reaching well over one million children. Even after Steve’s work transitioned into the orchestral field in Canton and Allentown, Michele continued to run New Performing Arts at long distance. It was not until 2011 when they moved their family to Metro Detroit that they finally let it go.
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That brings us up to the present. Next time you look at all of the things the Chamber Music Society of Detroit has been up to these past eight years, many of them truly transformational – new concert locations, expanded educational programs, a broad artistic palette and entrepreneurial approaches to just about everything – imagine a younger Steve driving his piano on a truck to engage a completely new audience somewhere in the hills of Kentucky.
Building new audiences is Steve’s lifelong passion, and we’re so glad he brought that passion here.
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On a more personal level, I feel lucky to have gotten to know and work with Steve during these years – as many of you have come to know, he’s a visionary, he’s a great communicator, and he’s mastered every aspect of non-profit arts management from artistic programming to fundraising to financial management and governance. Steve is also an inveterate optimist, and is passionate about bringing chamber music to the City of Detroit and to communities throughout the region.
So please help us celebrate Steve’s milestone by fueling the next chapter of that passion with a gift to the Chamber Music Society of Detroit.
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We’ll see you at the concerts!
Willa
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Willa Walker, Vice President
Chamber Music Society of Detroit
Tickets: 313-335-3300 or
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