In this episode, Victoria and Liz are joined by Karina Bharne, Executive Director of Symphony Tacoma and MAM alum. The trio discuss the shift, both short-term and long-term, of the orchestral landscape due to Covid-19, DEAI, and the permanence of technology in the concert hall.

Victoria Sprowls 0:02

Hello Tech in the Arts listeners. My name is Victoria Sprowls the new Podcast Producer,

Elizabeth Forrey 0:08

and I'm Liz Forrey the new Chief Editor of Research.

Victoria Sprowls 0:10

This week we both sat down with Karina Bharne, executive director of the Tacoma Symphony, and talked about leading an arts organization through tumultuous times, theater innovation in the orchestral landscape, integrating technology into performances, and how these advances help or hurt the concert hall experience.

Elizabeth Forrey 0:36

Karina, thank you so much for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell the listeners a little bit about your history with Symphony Tacoma and what brought you there?

Karina Bharne 0:44

Sure. Well, my name is Karina Bharne. I'm currently the executive director with Symphony Tacoma. Prior to this, I served in a variety of positions at the San Antonio Symphony for about a decade. And prior to that I was working as the assistant personnel manager with the Pittsburgh Symphony, just after I received my Masters of Arts Management degree from Carnegie Mellon University. I moved to Tacoma in October of 2018. My husband had recently got a position with the Vancouver BC Symphony. And because of that, I was looking for jobs in the Pacific Northwest that were of level and of caliber that would excite me and that was appropriate for my previous position. So Symphony Tacoma had a job opening, I applied and I am loving, loving living in the Pacific Northwest. And other than that, I love cooking baking, and I have two very beautiful cats, Peach and Lola.

Elizabeth Forrey 1:45

Awesome. Thank you so much. And we love cats here at AMT-Lab. So coming out of the pandemic, there seems to be two points of view on how to move forward. The first is that everything will go back to normal, which I think is becoming harder and harder to picture. And the second is that kind of that the floodgates have opened. And it would be kind of against the tide to go back to exactly the way things were beforehand. From my experience working with you and Symphony Tacoma, I know that it shifted similarly to other orchestras and beginning to provide virtual performances, once we realized that COVID it has kind of become a long term change. And now that we're working in a vaccinated environment, how is the experience of the pandemic affected the future of in-person performances and your plans for the digital future? And kind of as a subsequent question, have you seen different trends in single ticket and subscription sales for the upcoming season, that may be different from past years?

Karina Bharne 2:43

Well, I will say that I'm definitely in the latter category where I don't think things are going to go back to normal or whatever we considered was normal, you know, 18 plus months ago, I think there will have to be changes. And the reason that I think that is one, we were in a different place. So we just spent, you know, the past 18 or so months, in our homes, watching a lot of entertainment on YouTube, and Netflix and Hulu and all the other streaming websites. So there is a certain level of we're now used to doing things online. And we also had online offerings, which helped our audiences at least, you know, be able to stay connected with us during the pandemic. And as well, we had new people connecting with us during the pandemic, you know, because at least from my opinion, because the virus is still out there, we will definitely still have audience members that are not able to join us in person in large groups. So because of that, we made the decision to do some online content. But the majority of our programming will certainly be live. We are expecting. So far a subscription renewal campaign has gone extraordinarily well it has exceeded my expectations. And I'm really thrilled that our audiences want to come back. I can't really talk about single tickets because they went on sale I think three days ago for us. We held off a little bit because I wasn't sure if we would have to do distancing in the hall, and I wanted to make sure that we were safe before going on sale. But I know that we have sold some, I just don't know how many. But I do know probably for the first couple of concerts, our audiences will probably be lighter than usual. I'm expecting that not only from feedback that we received from patrons but also just knowing it's going to take people some time to feel comfortable coming back into the hall. And so you know, as we move forward as we have our concerts, the more that we can do to post images of our patrons, you know, in the hall distanced, you know, when possible, wearing masks and staying as safe as possible, and promoting that out to others that may want to join us and seeing that this is a relatively safe environment. I think that will help us in the future.

Elizabeth Forrey 4:51

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Victoria Sprowls 4:52

Yeah, so as you said, 18 months of majority digital performances and watching entertainment online has definitely changed the approach to the arts. On the surface technology and the classical music experience are completely different arenas. How do you see tech as an enhancement in this industry? If not, why? And if so how can we leverage it to maximize the concert experience?

Karina Bharne 5:22

Well, I think if you had asked me this question before the pandemic, I would say, Oh, I would much much rather record something, than play it live, because then you have the opportunity to go back and fix any of your mistakes. However, having lived through this now it’s actually very difficult to have something recorded because you can go back and, you know, any of us that are musicians, or any type of artists are perfectionists, it just comes with the territory. So the ability to be like, I think I can do it just a little bit better starts to creep in. And I'll tell you, my husband was recording the bass drummer part for Fanfare for a Common Man last year, it's a very short piece, and I don't even know how many tapes he did. And at some point, I just had to tell him to stop because listen to it anymore. So yeah, that being said, though, I do think technology can do some really interesting things as Symphony Tacoma didn't have that much footage of the entire orchestra playing on stage. So we had to use a lot of our recordings and a little bit of footage. And then we added some interesting things to go alongside with it. So we had footage from the National Park Service, we had footage from several artists, and we tried to be as creative as possible when creating our programming because we had so little to work with and just sound. So from my experience, though, that it really has been an enhancement. You know, you're watching a multimedia presentation, that incorporates music, arts, visual, sometimes poetry, sometimes dance, depending on what you're doing. So I think there's a future to it. The downside, and this is the downside of pretty much everything, is that is expensive. And it's very, very time consuming to make these videos. So I really give a lot of credit to our music director, Sarah Ioannides who put a lot of this together using her own time her own talents. It is a monster to have to do recording projects. And it's a monster then to have to do video projects. So I would say that's probably the only downside to it.

Elizabeth Forrey 7:17

Yeah, absolutely. And kind of with that, you know, we're seeing more recordings in orchestras and symphonies doing that with tech. But in terms of like the orchestral field as a whole looking to the future, what kind of innovation Do you see for symphonies in the age of technology, kind of moving forward from this COVID era?

Karina Bharne 7:42

Well, I will say that I'm not sure if we're going to see more orchestras doing the complete, you know, virtual concert halls, like you see, in Berlin, I mean, Detroit has one also, the larger symphonies might be able to afford that, but then all the smaller community orchestras that's going to be that's too expensive to do, at least in my opinion. So I think more of a hybrid, you know, being able to release some things, at no cost to our patrons is really helpful. One of the things that happened this past year that I don't think I said earlier, is that we had an agreement with our musicians, in order to post all this material on YouTube for free. Normally, in a regular concert year, we don't have that and the majority of orchestras around the country don't have that. You can pay into it. So you can pay to put content up on different media avenues. But this year, we didn't have to, and of course, then we would love to pay as much as possible. But cost is always something that we have to factor in. So this year, we have the same agreement. And we're actually really looking forward to see what changes happen in the future with regards to the musicians union to make, just to allow us to be able to have more programming that's online and digital.

Victoria Sprowls 8:52

Yeah, I would just add to that, maybe do you see technology and digital performances more as a kind of marketing strategy to get people in seats in the hall? Or is there a way that tech can be used during the concert? I know that in the arts, like tech and performances are it's a pretty big no subject, but I'm just wondering if you see a future for technology within the concert hall at all, and what that would look like?

Karina Bharne 9:23

I think, both and another one so I think, first of all, it definitely can be used as a marketing tool for us. So anytime that we're posting stuff on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Snapchat, for whatever organizations have that and TikTok, I don't even know what that is just kidding, I do. But for organizations like that, anything that you put out will show a visual of your organization and it'll show and for a symphony, it'll show you you know, you can hear what's going on, you can “Oh, that's an interesting piece. Maybe I want to go and see that”. So I think there's a space for that for us use as a marketing tool. I also think there's a space for us to use it to, for people that may not want to come to the concert hall, but hey, “I just, I'm on YouTube. It’s a Saturday night, I've nothing else to do, let me just listen to some music.” So it's a way for us to interact with some people that may not want to actually come to the concert hall. Hopefully, we can get them to come at some point. But you know, everyone's different. And you know, you can't force everyone to come and pay money to see a concert. So that's a reality that we have. And then lastly, I definitely think there's a space in the concert hall, I would say, for our audiences, I'm not sure if it's something that we would want to do on every concert, I think there are some of our patrons and even myself, sometimes I just want to watch the the orchestra, I'm not sure if I need to have a visual element. But you know, a couple times a season or maybe even more than a couple times a season, having some other visual will certainly help. And it's a way that you can partner with other organizations that are in your community. So if you have people, you know, you want to partner with, you know, the historical society or one of the art museums or you know, in our case Museum of Glass and just show something else, you have partnership opportunities that you wouldn't normally have Symphony Tacoma, in the past, has done several projects that involve technology. And the first one that received pretty national attention was a project that we did called Fire Mountain, it was a multimedia presentation back and we collaborated with several, several organizations. So we took kids up to it was the premise of the piece was composed by Dan Otto was a premier. And it was to raise awareness of the melting glaciers up on Mount Rainier. So we took a group of high school students up the mountain, we lead them up there, we also show pictures and video footage of the kids learning how to make glass, which is another big part of Tacoma’s history. And then we show some of the not so pleasant things that you see on Mt Rainier because of the global warming. So for us, it was a way just to bring, you know, 7, 8, 9 organizations together to do something pretty cool. And the thing that I like the most about that is that, you know, a lot of times when symphonies or when other arts organizations try and reach out to someone else it’s always about, “Okay, we want you to come to our concert, we want you to invest money in us, we want you to do this, we want you to, you know, give us funds.” And this way, it's like, “Hey, let's just do this cool project together, and we'll see what happens.” So it's a way that's kind of low cost, to get more people coming into your organization.

Victoria Sprowls 12:44

I know that AMT-Lab spoke several years ago to Aubrey Bergauer regarding engaging millennial audiences in classical music. So it's nice to know that that's still that work continues and that Symphony Tacoma is a part of that work.

Elizabeth Forrey 12:57

Yeah, and just kind of with that question and a little bit of what you had spoken to about integrating tech in the past, but making the note that it's really expensive, and it's harder for smaller organizations to kind of do that. And you can integrate it in different ways by making a group of a bunch of organizations to do it, and not just bringing them to the symphony. But do you think that if, in some manner, if orchestras do not embrace technology in some form, that these organizations, which would sadly probably be the smaller symphonies and orchestras that they will become obsolete? Or is that not really a concern of yours?

Karina Bharne 13:39

Hmm, I have not thought about that question. So that's, that's interesting. I guess I'll say that I don't think it I don't think the fate of orchestras is solely on what technology we're using. I think, you know, outreach in the community and involving our community is number one. And technology is a tool that we use in order to do that. I definitely think that there are advantages, but I also think, you know, you have to meet people where you're at, and not, not a lot of folks can afford some of these things. But it's important for us to at least try to make the investment. I'll say also that, while, while this is all expensive, there are certain areas of funding opportunities that orchestras can look at, in order to gain more funds for technology. A lot of places now are changing their funding models to help support technology advancements within organizations, especially after the pandemic. So I think there might be an opportunity a little bit farther down the road for some of the smaller organizations in order to purchase technology. The other thing though, that's important to note, as I mentioned earlier, is that it's not only a technology purchase, but it's also time-consuming for staff. So unless you're outsourcing all this, which is very expensive, but it's what we chose to do for a lot of last year, it's gonna fall on your staff and you have to make sure that we aren't that you're not or and certainly that I'm not burning out all of our staff asking them to make, you know, one minute video here, another minute video here, another minute video here. So one thing that I'll say may be an interesting way, in the future, is if small organizations can kind of come together and hire someone collectively to help with some of the video needs and everyone can collaborate. Everyone can pay in what they can, but have some help on the tech side so that it's not falling on the marketing staff and the other staff that are already overworked.

Elizabeth Forrey 15:42

Yeah, no, that is a very important consideration with all of this. I want to switch gears a little bit. You know, tech, technology enhancements has been a huge impact for the orchestral world with the pandemic. But another byproduct of this past year, year and a half, has been an actual true commitment to DEAI work and actually showcasing BIPOC artists, and Symphony Tacoma already has a history of innovative programming. And this year, I know that there's a large range of repertoire that is old and new, and even some world premieres such as David Ludwig's The Bleeding Pines, but what has been the philosophy of you and music director Sarah Ioannides and choosing the seasons content? And do you see this reflected in other orchestras? Or is it still a struggle due to conflicts with the board? Or even a perception of deviation of too far for what is considered the norm of classical musical repertoire?

Karina Bharne 16:44

Hmm, I don't think there will be at least on my board, on my board specifically, there will never be any sort of anger or why are you doing this or, or anything like that, I think it's something that's at the forefront. I'm lucky that it’s at the forefront of my board’s mind. And something that we're actually thinking about where we struggled this year is that we are trying to make our repertoire as intentional as possible. But we also want this to be the norm. So we don't want to just say, “Hey, okay, it's 2021. And now we have, you know, quite a few BIPOC composers on our concerts or in artists.” We just want to say, “This is Symphony Tacoma. Here's our programming, and this is what we're doing.” You're right, that we in the past have done a lot to help promote, especially women composers, which is another underrepresented group. But for us, the struggle really has been how do we showcase what we're doing? And make it sound intentional, without also making it sound like we were trying too hard? Yeah. So that's a that's a struggle. To be honest, it's still something that I'm really trying to grapple with. And I don't think a lot of symphonies have done a good job of it. But we're, we're, we're learning, we're absolutely learning. And I'll say, you know, the past 18 months have been difficult and in lot of ways, but I think the work in DEIA was definitely able to come to the forefront because of the pandemic, we were able to really re-shift our thinking and our priorities in a lot of different ways. And in a good way for us, we could say no, this really has to be a priority for us moving forward. And while it may have been in the back of our minds in the past, right now, it has to be at the forefront. So I'll say that, and then to your last question about other orchestras. You know, I, I've said this before, the League of American Orchestras has been talking about DEIA work for since for a very long time, and it was actually the subject of the 2008 National Conference. And a couple years ago, I asked a group of my colleagues, Can you think of any orchestra that has really, really done well in this arena? And everyone kind of just stopped and said, You know, I'm not sure. I would say every organization is on their own journey, and it's on their own path. And, you know, certainly Symphony Tacoma is somewhere at the beginning of our journey. But, I would like to answer that question maybe in you know, five to 10 years to see what real impact there has been. So I'm not sure if I can answer that question right now.

Victoria Sprowls 19:23

Yeah. So what has been the biggest challenge navigating through and out of the pandemic as a director of a field that has little history of digital engagement? And what advice do you have for our listeners in different arts fields that may be facing the same challenges?

Karina Bharne 19:41

The most difficult thing for me has been the constant changing and at the beginning of the pandemic, I remember the big buzzwords were okay you need to make contingency plans. You have to do this you have to have Plan A, B, C, and D. and naturally because of my background, having worked for an organization that was in severe crisis mode all the time, I already kind of did that. So okay, well this, you know this grant doesn't come in, okay, then we can, you know, move money around here, here and here. But for me, that became really overwhelming really quickly because, okay, well, if we can have 50% of the hall, then that means we need to do this, if we could have 25% of the hall, that means we can do this. So at some point, during the pandemic, our general manager approached me and said, “You know what, I think we just have to not do this anymore. And we just need to wait and see to just get as close as possible, and then make a decision.” And for me, that served me really well, because I stopped with the anxiety of having to make you know, 50 different plans, and then just say, “Well, I'm just going to live in kind of live in the moment.” That might not work for everyone. But it certainly worked for us and prevented us from spinning our wheels a little bit too much. So I would say that has been the most difficult part of the pandemic. However, on the bright side of things, you know, we were able to pivot really quickly, we were lucky that through very, very sound, financial management, we had enough cash in the bank, and we didn't have to furlough anyone. And we were able to continue as normal. So I feel, for the most part, we've been very lucky. And we've come out of the pandemic, pretty much unscathed.

Victoria Sprowls 21:23

Nice. And hopefully, as you said, people are looking forward to at least in some capacity, getting back to live events, especially considering the fact that with technology, there are those pros and cons. But one of the pros of live performances, of course, is that you never know what's going to happen.

Karina Bharne 21:41

I think that's true. You know, I just don't think there's any, there's no substitute for live performance. And this is coming from someone who's watched a lot on YouTube, there's a difference between sitting in a concert hall, or even sitting in a park, sitting anywhere where someone's actually playing, you know, close to you versus listening to it online. It's just a different experience. And I don't think that will ever change for most people.

Victoria Sprowls 22:04

All right. Well, that's all we have time for today. But thank you so much for, for joining us.

Karina Bharne 22:09

Thank you for having me.

Victoria Sprowls 22:11

Thanks for listening to the AMT-Lab podcast. And don't forget to subscribe, wherever podcasts are found. Let us know what you thought by visiting our website amt-lab.org. That's A M T dash Lab .org. Or you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter, @techinthearts, or on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Arts Management and Technology Lab. We'll see you next time.

Victoria Sprowls

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