Video: Making the Music Happen

TRANSCRIPT

SOM’s mission is fundamentally about educating folks who will go on to have impact in whatever sector they choose. In a lot of ways, my dual degree, my professional experience, has been, I think, a direct embodiment of the mission of SOM. It may seem like a series of unconnected pivots, but really it is all about trying to discover where I can have the biggest impact.‌

I was a theater kid for as long as I can remember. I asked my parents to send me to acting class when I was six years old. I applied to a huge range of undergrad institutions. My top choice was Yale. I did not get in. I ended up at Harvard, which was, to be fair, a great thing to settle for.‌

I went there and studied music theory, musicology, and music composition, trying to hone my craft as a composer. Graduated in 2010 and moved to New York for the first time, and so at the same time that I was pursuing my artistic practice, I was also working full time in education and arts education.‌

The thing that really made me pivot strongly to arts administration… I saw my cohort of writers and the ones who were starting to be successful were the ones who sat down at their piano every day and wrote, and I sat down at my piano every day and thought about the theater in general. And realized that if I wanted to have the career and really achieve my end goal of having a direct impact on art and society, I needed to better understand management, leadership, and organizational direction. And so that’s what brought me to graduate school.‌

Business school taught me more about how to work with people and about how to deal with emotion than I ever imagined it would. I think about courses like Managing Groups and Teams, like the Yale Center for Consumer Insights, that really were about a deep drill into what motivates people, how strongly held beliefs, how personal idiosyncrasies are directly related to business decisions.‌

What was so valuable to me about the dual degree at the drama school and the School of Management is that at the School of Management, I was like a kooky lefty, do-gooder, and at the School of Drama, I was like a finance business monster. I think it’s probably the most valuable education I had because what I feel like I do now on a day-to-day basis is translate business principles to the arts and translate arts principles to business.‌

My first job out of SOM was at a consulting firm called TDC, applying rigorous business and financial principles to the cultural sector, to the nonprofit sector. I did the merger of the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts and the Philadelphia Orchestra; I did a financial recovery plan for the Baltimore Symphony. But I think a good consultant brings facts, brings analysis, but doesn’t necessarily bring opinions. And I wanted to bring opinions because I have a lot of them. And that’s what brought me to Beth Morrison Projects.‌

I joined BMP in 2022 just as the art sector was coming out of the COVID shutdown and came back into the sector at a time of massive changes in the philanthropic world, where a lot of arts funders are either shifting funding away from the arts or focusing their funding in the arts much more narrowly than before.‌

As executive director of Beth Morrison Projects, I like to describe my job as everything that isn’t art, but that makes the art happen. I act as our chief financial officer. I am our chief operating officer. I manage our marketing and development effort. I am the main point of contact with our board of directors. All executive leaders are responsible for raising capital, and I do a bit of that as well. ‌

Beth Morrison Projects is the country’s leading commissioner and producer of contemporary opera and an avant-garde music leader. Our work has won two Pulitzer Prizes for music. Our work has been nominated for a Grammy for best opera recording. BMP’s work is important and it is acclaimed, and that takes time and that takes people and that takes money. Revenue sources are all down; expenses are all up. That does put arts leaders in this challenging position of, how do we advocate for the importance of art and ensure a standard of quality, and at the same time how do we navigate the fact that all of those things cost money, and most of us have less of that?‌

I could see someone with a more traditional business training coming in and saying, “Our work is too expensive, so let’s do it cheaper.” My SOM training made it really clear that if we are not investing in the art, then our donors are not going to invest in us. We’ll be in this downward doom spiral. And at the same time, I have finite resources and I need to understand how to invest them in the most impactful way.‌

I take my management training every day and apply it to the arts. Even though I don’t spend my time drafting lyrics, writing music, I still feel like creativity is a huge part of my life, not just in the outputs of Beth Morrison Projects, the creative work we put on stage, but in the decision-making I get to do every day. I am so grateful both for the education I had and also for the people that I connected with. SOM has become such a core part of my community and still a time I look back on as one of the happiest times of my life.‌

Sam Linden is now director of finance at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.