Letters to S.O.O.N.

Posted on November 17. 2009 by Diane L. Potter

The Herb Garden

Once upon a time in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire there was a beautiful herb garden. It had been started over thirty years ago by a caring family and a host of loyal friends. Over the years the herb garden grew into a place enjoyed by many, many people not just from the Lakes Region, but also visitors from other areas of this country and abroad. In addition, the garden itself was enriched by bringing in new plants from as far away as California, Texas, Washington State and the UK.

The garden grew and prospered for many years under the watchful eye of herbalists Mr. Nee and later Mr. Polivnick. During their tenure as herbalists, some of the very special herbs were taken into the local schools so that students could learn more about herbs and the many benefits that herbs provide for continued growth and development of the human body.

Alas, however, a few years ago changes started to be made to the herb garden. A major proposed change was to actually move the herb garden to another location. The proposed changes were slow to develop at first, but this past year some monumental changes were attempted and, in some cases, made. First, at the beginning of the past growing season, herbalist Polivnick departed, leaving many to wonder why.

It appears that the heads of the family, Mr. Graham and Ms. Weatherbie who have assumed major control of the herb garden, had a vision of a new and different way to grow herbs. A few backyard gardens had been successful with this new method, but it had never been successfully accomplished with as large a garden as the one we have in the Lakes Region. To carry out their experiment, or new vision, Mr Graham and Ms. Weatherbie convinced the family to bring in a new “gardener”, Mr Fogel. Problems arose immediately when the new gardener (who was not an herbalist) and Mr. Graham and Ms Weatherbie (who are not herbalists either!) convinced the rest of the family that it was necessary to eliminate many of the well established herbs and replace them with seedlings and herbs from a different region.

Now, anyone who has had an herb garden knows that a lot of herbs and weeds look alike. Therefore an uninformed gardener “weeding out” an herb garden is in grave danger of destroying the entire garden. Unfortunately, many members of the family and most of the loyal supporters of the herb garden over the years are not only being left out, but are being denied any input to the decision making process relative to the “new herb garden.”

This old Yankee farmer thinks it is time to take back the garden. Hire an herbalist with the stature of a Nee or Polivnick. Dismiss the “gardener” or put him in charge of marketing and publicizing the herb garden instead of weeding it. Demand the Overseers of this garden assume the responsibility that is theirs to ensure the herb garden gets everything it needs to remain healthy instead of letting the gardeners Graham, Weatherbie and Fogel continue to weed the garden indiscriminately. And finally, the Overseers need to speak out and do something about experiments being done to a once fragrant and thriving herb garden.

Diane L. Potter

Center Harbor, NH

Commentary from Seat A109

(The New Hampshire Music Festival Controversy
Commentary From A109 (Cheapest Seat in the House)

Editor’s note: This article was written by Stephen Tessler, retired English teacher and department chair at Winnisquam Regional High School. Mr.Tessler lives in Sanbornton and has been attending the Festival’s concerts for 30 years.

Since the beginning of the summer, the New Hampshire Music Festival has written some well-crafted explanations for its planned overhaul of the summer concert series. The explanations are based on three principles, all valid:
The Festival needs to improve its overall financial situation.
The Festival needs to maintain and expand its audience.
The Festival needs “to take a good organization and make it better” because “you are improving and growing or slowly dying.” (Letter addressed to the NHMF family, October 14, 2009)

How could anyone (especially those concert-goers who love the Festival) disagree with those principles?
And yet, a majority of concert-goers have expressed their displeasure with the Board’s plans by wearing purple ribbons, by writing angry letters, and by organizing themselves into an opposition group.
The audience applauds the Board’s principles, yet condemns the Board’s actions.
Here’s why.

Tortured Logic
“Change is essential for the financial stability of the Festival.”
- David Graham, President and C.E.O., New Hampshire Music Festival

Mr. Graham is right.
He claims that “Word-of-mouth, or community buzz, has always been our best advertising and it has been missing for several years.”
Right again.
But Graham’s next sentence is confusing:
“This is why we are transitioning to a more engaging model.”
Where did that come from? The reader expected some kind of reasonable follow-up to the word-of-mouth problem, something like, “This is why we are resuming the marketing campaign we had abandoned several years ago.”
OR, “Several years ago, we discontinued the promos on NHPR, stopped placing posters in local store fronts, and eliminated the Friends of The Festival (a volunteer group). Clearly those actions affected the community buzz essential for the Festival’s financial security. This is why we are resuming all those promotional activities.”
OR, “Our classical music concerts generate the kind of enthusiasm seldom seen even at more famous venues like Tanglewood. Our New Hampshire audiences jump to their feet, shout ‘Bravo!’ and applaud until their hands hurt. If ticket sales are going down, we are doing something wrong. Therefore, we are embarking on a public relations campaign to tell the whole state about the world-class music festival in their back yard.”
But Graham proposes NONE of those reasonable solutions.
Incredibly, “Transitioning to a more engaging model” is not only Graham’s best solution; it’s his only solution.

Here’s his argument:

We discontinued our marketing and public relations strategies several years ago.
Word of mouth, “community buzzes” declined.
Ticket sales declined.
“This is why we are transitioning to a more engaging model.”

Even if the logic were less tortured, “transitioning to a more engaging model” wouldn’t make sense under ANY circumstance.

First, if audiences are jumping and shouting and applauding at the end of every concert, they are already “engaged.” Their emotional response to the orchestra (and the present “model”) is too powerful, too explosive, to be constrained within their seated bodies. How much more engaged can they be?

Second, the new model is an experiment in collaborative music making where smaller orchestras (like the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra) rehearse and perform without a conductor. However, the new model has never been tried with large, seasonal orchestras. The Festival management has admitted more than once that the new model will have a rocky start. For example, in a letter to subscribers (July 1, 2009), Graham cautions that for several years, “We will not have the complete dramatic impact that [we] believe is eventually possible.” Here’s Management’s awkward position:

It is asking the audience to be patient while the experimental collaborative model fulfills its potential.

It is charging the audience top-dollar ticket prices for an incomplete, work-in-progress that will not (for several years) have the same dramatic impact they have come to expect.

Shifting the Blame (A: To the Orchestra)

At the beginning of the season the musicians learned that, for the first time in the Festival’s history, all of them would be dismissed at the end of the season unless they successfully completed an entry-level re-application procedure. The process provided for no evaluation of their skills as musicians in the Festival orchestra; instead, the process required each musician to submit recordings and to write three essays demonstrating the musician’s allegiance to management’s new artistic model.
Responding to outraged subscribers, Festival management soon dropped the re-application requirement. However, for the rest of the season, the musicians were strangers in a strange land.
According to one musician, the Festival had always been “without a doubt, the most refreshing musical experience of my lifetime . . . During six weeks every summer, a conductor, orchestra, and audience come together in a perfect kismet of artistic unity . . . Such mutual appreciation, and on such a deeply personal level, is amazing.”
Last summer, mutual appreciation and even mutual respect disappeared. Letters from the Festival office continued to address the Festival community as the “New Hampshire Music Festival Family,” but the most beloved members of the family, the musicians, were being thrown out of the house. A year ago (and for years before that), Management and the Board of Directors praised the orchestra’s performances as “exciting,” “brilliant,” or “mesmerizing” This year (in an August meeting with representatives from SOON), the Board called those very same performances pedestrian.
Worst of all, management issued public statements implying that the musicians, not management, were responsible for the Festival’s financial problems. According to a letter signed by the Board co-chairs, “Declining financials drive the decision to address the artistic product.” By criticizing the “artistic product” instead of evaluating its own management, the Board was blaming the orchestra for problems the orchestra had nothing to do with.
The musicians, not Festival management, would take the fall for mismanaged Festival finances and marketing strategies.

Shifting the Blame (B: To the Audience)

Early rumors that the orchestra might be disbanded at the end of the summer gained credibility during the first concert: the audience learned that all of the musicians’ contracts would be non-renewed at the end of the season.
Management’s attempts to allay audience anxiety backfired. Statements like, “We will continue to have a resident orchestra at the New Hampshire Music Festival” were especially unsettling: The audience was not interested in “a resident orchestra”; it wanted its own orchestra. (After hearing rumors that the Red Sox were planning a move to Sacramento, would any New Englander be reassured by a similar statement: “We will continue to have a resident ball-club at Fenway Park”?)
To show their solidarity with the Festival orchestra, a few members of the audience showed up at the second concert wearing the same purple ribbons of protest worn by the musicians. As a way of mobilizing other similarly minded subscribers, that initial group formed an organization it called Save Our Orchestra Now (SOON). As more people heard about the organization, SOON grew and attendance at its weekly meetings filled the Episcopal church across the street from the Silver Arts Center.
In a few weeks, most people in the audience were wearing purple ribbons.
SOON tried to convince Festival management how strongly the audience objected to the new proposal, pointing out that the “collaborative model” would not solve the financial problems we all agreed needed to be solved, and that sacrificing the orchestra for such a risky adventure might destroy the Festival.
Instead of responding to the audience’s specific objections, Festival management made SOON another scapegoat for the Festival’s problems.
On October 13, Mr. Graham, the Festival’s president and CEO, issued a warning to the musicians. In a cover letter attached to the Festival’s Personnel Policy, he cautioned them to stay away from SOON, saying “if musicians continued to support SOON’s efforts to undermine the Festival’s development efforts, we could fall short in raising the money that would be necessary to fund the positions we outlined in the Personnel Policy.”
Once again, the Festival president was refusing to accept the consequences of his decisions. Contributors are re-evaluating their yearly donations because they strongly object to the planned overhaul of an organization they’ve always supported. They do not need SOON’s intervention (or anyone else’s) to think twice before contributing money to an organization that seems recklessly mismanaged.
Any responsible business manager should have foreseen how donors might hesitate before contributing to an untried and risky venture. If the Festival didn’t acknowledge that likely possibility, then its management was shortsighted.
Towards the end of his cover letter to the musicians, Mr. Graham turns his warning into a threat: “We are aware that some incumbent musicians continue to work to support SOON and the objectives it stands for and continue to criticize the new direction the Festival has chosen to take. As we proceed to implement the Personnel Policy, we reserve the right to fairly evaluate whether those musicians seeking employment in the summer 2010 season can be expected to support the Festival and the new direction it is taking based on all the circumstances.”
In other words, if you continue to support SOON, a group whose sole reason for existence is to support the orchestra and the Festival, you might lose your job.

Conclusion

The Festival is facing a financial crisis because its management has made catastrophic financial, artistic, and marketing decisions. The Festival Board needs to reexamine its budget priorities (e.g., administrative expenses that are twice as high as the national norm, an exciting but ever-expanding building project that may be impossible to fund over the long run) and it needs to resume a marketing and public relations strategy that lets the secret out: the New Hampshire Music Festival is more thrilling, more magical, and just a little less sophisticated than national music festivals in Tanglewood, New York, or Aspen.
And our festival is just a short, beautiful drive up the road.
Yes, the Festival can be improved. A few of the musicians may need to be replaced. The string section needs to be expanded. Some of the programming has become repetitious. Most of the Pops concerts are not selling well.
However, the New Hampshire Music Festival audience (80% of whom were wearing purple ribbons at last season’s final concert) is begging the Festival to reject the complete overhaul proposed by an administration trying to escape the disastrous consequences of its mismanagement. Instead of addressing the source of each of the Festival’s problems, management’s plan blames the Festival orchestra as the source of all its problems. Change the orchestra and its “model,” and the financial problems will solve themselves.
That argument is absurd, dishonest, and just plain dumb.

Stephen Tessler, Sanbornton

Marian and members of the SOON Executive Committee.

I would like to share some thoughts and information with you. I applaud your efforts in the organizational steps you have taken to work for a resolution to the NHMF crisis. It is my opinion that the board has made some very poor decisions such as: trying to build a new facility that will constantly need financial support; and thinking they need to retool an exceptionally talented and community-loved orchestra. Along a five year continuum, the board and management have lost many of us by the arrogant decisions they have made. Having read several of the press releases by the DuPont firm, I am very impressed with the accuracy and strength in delivery. They (Dupont) have a good reputation, and I hope this step will demonstrate SOON's serious intentions rather than its being viewed as a group of Two years ago, I met personally with Rusty McLear to express my dismay with the plans for the new NHMF performance space. I prefaced my conversation with the following: although I have been an independent fundraising development consultant since 1990, I was not wearing my professional hat hoping to be retained for advice. Rather, I asked for a meeting as a loyal audience member who saw some red flags as to how this project was unfolding. This was well before the turmoil with the musicians. I asked about project costs, collaboration with PSU, and whether a traffic study had been conducted relative to anticipated audience transportation to and from the planned new facility. I expressed my concern as a professional that nonprofits need to work together. As a permanent resident here, I wondered, if built, how NHMF would sustain a year round program with such a small population base? Capital Campaigns build facilities, but then the real work starts. From the beginning, they have done things backwards. Instead of polling the community to see what was realistic and needed, they designed an amazing facility! Instead of quietly beginning with a nucleus fund, they announced they were doing a capital campaign! To my knowledge, NHMF never conducted a fundraising feasibility study for the new facility. Such a study is an important first step, because it takes the pulse of the donors and subscribers, and it may include community focus groups to react to the dream. A study garners valuable information, potential volunteers, finds out where the money is, and it asks for advice before asking for money! Perhaps they did this process with just the board members. I do not know. I told Rusty, and I have told several board members, that our family will not support this capital campaign. We love the Plymouth venue. We see the many year round needs in our community: United Way, Caregivers, Circle and Mayhew, Friends of the Arts (which brings to NH schools far more youth programs) and many others all figure into the mix. If NHMF is going to build, they will need to rely heavily on the wealth of the seasonal people. Confidentially, I believe Rusty inherited this project. He was courteous, listened, and assured me that NHMF was financially sound. He said they had downsized the project and were going forward and that it would be good for the Lakes Region. In addition, I expressed my doubts that David Graham had either the persona or the leadership qualities to spearhead this effort! We are still on the NHMF mailing list, but we have not made a contribution since 2007.Several times Deborah Graham and/or someone else called to solicit, but I told them we did not have confidence in the management or what the board was doing. The late Dr. David Underwood, a former NHMF board member who brought along support from Chubb and later Jefferson Pilot and Lincoln Financial, told us he got off the board because he did not endorse this new facility. As I said earlier, my husband and I support SOON and the hard work all the volunteers are doing. Thanks for your commitment on this effort.
Kathleen K. Barger, Meredith New Hampshire

Dear SOON friends, I find it impossible to fill out this questionnaire. The lack of information concerning your plans for next season leaves all of us completely at a loss. Our questions are never answered, and we fear that your desire for radical change will leave us no alternative but to sever our association with the NHMF. For sixteen years, and until we realized the folly of your Red Hill project, we were donors in addition to being subscribers. This question needs to be addressed before we make any decisions. How much of our subscription ticket price is siphoned off to support and compensate your Red Hill project? And who makes this decision? In the latest debacle, you informed the musicians that there may be a necessity to terminate some positions should you have financial problems. We need to be assured (and doubtless I speak for all subscribers) that if we subscribe to the 2010 season our money will be used to support the orchestra and the concerts as we knew and loved them. Are you in fact telling us that should we renege on our prior commitment to subscribe each year this will ultimately mean the demise of the orchestra for lack of funds? I’m sure you are aware that for the majority of us, and especially those of us who are musicians, the 2009 season was a disaster. The beautiful and essential bond that should form between an orchestra, its conductor, and the audience no longer existed. Indeed, this bond is the catalyst that is imperative to excellent music making and enjoyable listening, and this is what we had before your intervention. What are your plans for securing a resident conductor and establishing a full orchestra for the coming season? You must realize, surely, that a confused, unhappy orchestra cannot perform at the top of its ability, especially when the players are fearful of being terminated. Having our questions answered and our doubts abated is of paramount importance. We trust that in order to secure a better relationship and more understanding between us you will address these concerns and give us honest, truthful answers. Only then, and when the concerts as we have known and enjoyed them are reestablished, will we be able to contemplate our plans for the next season.

Rosemary and Clive Perry