The chance to be a part of creating the Philharmonic’s future is a great opportunity. I feel this way because the problem of how to engender and sustain creativity is absolutely core to America’s future.

America is highly unlikely to re-industrialize for quite some time — if ever.  There probably aren’t a lot of new car factories coming our way. It’s not likely we’ll see the building of a new cement plant in Brooklyn over the next few years, or that the old sugar mill will reopen soon. Our jobs aren’t going to come from these places and so neither is our future prosperity. Those days are gone because that sort of activity no longer provides realistic solutions to society’s problems now that commerce has become sufficiently globalized to allow billions of new employees to enter the workforce.

The future of America, I believe instead, will be found in creativity: in the creative economy, in the arts, entertainment, biotechnology, nanotechnology, the green economy, by inventing more effective ways to search for things, by building more useful social networks, by making previously unimagined mobile technologies and the like. All this growth ahead of us will come from innovation, from the new things we create, more than it will from manufacturing old things we already know how to build by rote. So to meet this challenge, we need people who know how to be creative, who are comfortable and skillful at it. And Brooklyn loves creativity, so I think our future is going to be bright!

The most effective way to prepare Americans for a future driven by creativity is to immerse them in the arts quickly, from early childhood then continue that sort of rich creative exposure over the full span of their lives. We need to become creators, not just consumers. But to do that, we have to invent new more sustainable business models to support things like the arts so we can afford the sort of creativity we’re actually capable of realizing.

This is another mystery then that we hope to try to help solve at the Philharmonic: How can we create truly sustainable business models for complex non-profit arts groups like the Brooklyn Phil so they can go about their mission of connecting with and inspiring creative energy for generations to come?

I think the answers to this question are of paramount importance to America today, because the same things we’ll learn by building the Phil in this new way will have applications to all businesses, even those in the for-profit sector.

Businesses succeed because they’re creative. We all see that. That’s why companies like Apple and Google do fine even in a depressing economy like this one. But then most companies eventually begin to die when they run out of good ideas and instead turn to eating their own young for sustenance, forsaking their customers and employees to desperately get at that one last nickel. That’s why when you try to buy a bookshelf this year to match the ones you bought last year, the newer one is quite likely to be a little smaller, thinner and made of cheaper materials than the ones you bought in the past. It’s also why prices keep going up and wages and benefits keep going down. But that path doesn’t ultimately lead to the life we really want in our society, I think.

What companies — and I would argue families too – need to be doing instead is to focus their efforts on creating new and more innovative ways to provide one another with truly positive impacts, not just squeezing the last drop of blood from the veins of an old dying system. I promise you’ll see the Brooklyn Phil really trying to make this kind of a innovative change this year, trying to be creative about everything from the content of its concerts to the underlying business models that aim to make it sustainable. And if we can do it with music, anyone should be able to do it!

So I do believe this is a revolution, and I’m thrilled to be able to help join in leading the charge.

We hear in the news nearly every day about people trying to force the same tired old solutions onto life’s new and more challenging problems, even when it’s clear they don’t work anymore. But this just leads to deadlock. As stewards for future generations, we must think creatively if we’re going to make any progress. We must find more sustainable ways of supporting creativity if we want to see a bright future ahead of us. So that’s another thing that the Brooklyn Phil will be doing this year, beneath the surface, behind the curtain.

Thank you so much for your friendship and support. I hope you’ll join us.

Warmly,

Richard Dare
Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director

Alan Pierson, Artistic Director
Richard Dare, Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director
Greg Pierson, Chief Operating Officer
Aleba Gartner, Press Agent & Publicist
Gary Padmore, Interim Director of Education
Dacia Massengill, Associate Director of Marketing
Christopher Shannon, Associate Director of Development
Kathleen Coughlin, Production Manager
Daniel Curtis, Artistic Planning Assistant
Jonathan Taylor, Personnel Manager
David Carp, Librarian
Yasiin Bey, 2011 – 2012 Artist in Residence
Randy Woolf, Composer Mentor

(c) 2011 – 2012 Brooklyn Philharmonic