Wednesday, June 11, 2008

I arrived in Denver yesterday afternoon, along with thousands of other delegates to the National Performing Arts Conference (NPAC). I flew from Boston, where I’d been visiting family, and wondered how many of the people on the completely full flight were coming for the conference. All the folks on the shuttle were attending. I had a lovely dinner catching up with Bob Wagner, Principal Bassoon in the New Jersey Symphony and a League Board member.

Unlike most years, where the League holds its conference alone, this year the League conference is happening along with the NPAC conference, as well as the annual Chorus America, Dance/USA, Opera America, and Theatre Communications Group conferences. Each group has its own conference hotel where morning and evening sessions are held. Everyone then attends the plenary NPAC sessions mid-day. Representatives from about 20 other arts organizations are also attending, such as American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, and Music Critics Assoc. of North America.

For example, this morning the League is holding its Orchestra Leadership Academy Seminars from 8 to 1. The NPAC opening session is at 2: “The Power of Community Building” hosted by Anna Deavere Smith, followed by the first of 3 caucus sessions about “Building a Performing Arts Community” and then the opening reception. I’ll tell you more about those sessions later today.

Tonight League delegates are attending a concert by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and Choir, featuring works by Bernstein, Corigliano, and Kancheli. The concert will include some of the events that normally occur during the League’s opening conference session, such as awarding the Gold Baton and Helen Thompson awards. The concert is followed by the traditional Tune Up party, back at the League’s conference hotel, hosted by the Colorado Symphony.

We’re fortunate — the League hotel (Hyatt Regency) is just across the street from the Convention Center, which is enormous and has a statue of a huge blue bear peering into the 2nd floor windows on one side. There must be a story there — I’ll try to find out. The program book has a map of the Convention Center with “Big Blue Bear” in a circle on the right – I thought it was a restaurant. We’re not in CT anymore!

Some of the other conference hotels are rather a far distance from the Convention Center. The conference program has an icon of footprints next to events that may take a while (up to 30 minutes, it says) to walk to (!)

One personal note — the cover of the League’s program book has photographs of the 2 Education Directors from CT orchestras, both of whom are also musicians in their orchestras and both of whom were at conference in Nashville last summer – Emery Tapley, Acting Principal Horn in the Hartford Symphony, and Steve Collins, Percussionist with the New Haven Symphony. What are the odds of this happening? (We all went out to a Texas-style dance hall in Nashville, along with Christine Doty of Hartford.) I happened to mention it to my colleagues as we were registering and the young woman handing out the program books admitted that she had selected the photos and had “gone for the cute guys.”

You can take a look at the League program schedule book here: http://www.americanorchestras.org/conference_and_meetings/conference_program_book.html