When You Have Lemons...

How do you handle an unpleasant and difficult situation? How can you turn it around and convert it into a positive one? I was faced with just that scenario recently.

I’m sitting at a breakfast meeting, across the table from the sales manager of a major hotel telling him my organization has just decided to drop it’s multi-year, multi-thousand dollar contract with him. And this right after he has made their best deal ever and offered some serious additional incentives. He is clearly pissed. He says there is nothing left to talk about and stands up to leave.

What would you do? Can you imagine turning this around, so that not only does he leave happy, but a couple of short months later he contacts you to offer YOU business? Read on if you want to see how this happened.

Here's the background and story:

I'm on the board of directors of the Toronto Summer Music Festival, and am also the chair of the corporate fundraising committee. In that role, my job is to oversee all corporate sponsorship of the festival (banks, etc), but also the in-kind donations such as hotel sponsorships. So every year one of my jobs is to meet with some of the big Toronto hotels and negotiate deals.

Toronto Summer Music is now celebrating it's fifth season. Virtually since our inception, we've been dealing with two of the top hotels in Toronto (we'll call them Hotel One and Hotel Two here) for hosting our visiting artists and faculty for the concurrent academy. Why two hotels? Well, one of them is very close to our main performance venue and the academy (five minute walk), but it is a little pricier than the second (five minute cab ride). So for budgetary reasons we've had to make deals with both and split our room nights between them. Both are excellent, first rate hotels, with great reputations both locally and internationally, and we've had nothing but positive feedback from our artists and faculty for both. However, the fact remains that Hotel One is more expensive than Hotel Two, slightly more exclusive, and closer to us as well.

Over the years I've gotten to know the sales managers at both hotels. I’ve even become friendly, in particular, Hotel Two’s sales manager. For example, in the course of conversation at a meeting some time ago I found out that the sales manager for Hotel Two was something of an amateur singer and liked jazz, so I mentioned to him that I had a jazz trio that played club dates occasionally, and offered to add him to my email list.

Fast forward to last year, when we were doing our hotel meetings to discuss deals for the 2010 season. Sitting down in our meeting with sales manager of Hotel Two, he pitches us a deal: He says Hotel Two would like to be our exclusive hotel sponsor this year. He realizes they are further away and therefore not as convenient, but he's willing to offer us an incredibly low room rate, plus he'll throw in limo rides to and from his hotel to the festival venue via a deal with Hotel Two's livery service. He also has good ideas about how to market the festival to hotel guests (displays in the hotel's restaurants, etc) and is willing to broker a meeting with Hotel Two's livery service for us to discuss an airport transfer deal for our artists. In short, he's bending over backwards to be helpful. This deal is sounding very good, and the administrative director and I are seriously considering accepting.

Next, we meet with Hotel One. They give us their discounted rate for 2010 (not nearly as good as rate from Hotel Two). We then tell them that Hotel Two has offered us this unbelievably low rate in exchange for being our exclusive sponsor this year. We are convinced that we're done with Hotel One as a sponsor, because we believe there's no way they'll be able to match Hotel Two's rate. Leave it with us, they say, and we'll see what we can do.

A couple of weeks later we get a response: they've agreed to match Hotel Two's room rate, but for that THEY want to be our exclusive sponsor. Well, this worked out better than we could have ever hoped. We now have a super low room rate from the closer, more exclusive hotel, and we have the added benefit of being able to put all our artists and faculty in one hotel, which simplifies things hugely from a logistical point of view. We take this to the board of directors, and they vote unanimously. It's a no-brainer.

BUT, we're faced with the problem of going back to Hotel Two's super nice, friendly, and helpful sales manager and delivering the grim news. This is not going to be easy. And guess who's job it is? You guessed it: chair of corporate fundraising. I have to break up with him.

So, reluctantly, I send him an email requesting a meeting to discuss sponsorship details (sounding as vague as possible so as not to arouse suspicion). He suggests a breakfast meeting at Hotel Two's restaurant. I show up there, and shortly after, he arrives. We shake hands and he asks if I'd like to order anything. I'm very aware that I have bad news to deliver and that he may not want to stick around long after he hears it, but I also don't want to tip my hand too early, so to be polite I ask if he's having anything. He says he's
going to have the fruit plate. So I order one as well to be sociable.

Now that the order's been placed, he turns to me and asks what this meeting is about. I tell him I'm not going to beat around the bush, and recount the whole story of what happened at our meeting with Hotel One, how we never expected them to be able to come down that low, and that while we are extremely grateful for all that he has done for us, the board has voted to go with Hotel One as the exclusive sponsor, primarily because it is closer and more convenient. I apologize profusely and continually, and as I'm talking I'm looking at his face and can tell he is not a happy camper. When he finally breaks the uncomfortable silence it is to say "Well, serves me right for going into a meeting without knowing the agenda". There's a long and awkward pause as we look at each other across the table, which is broken ironically by the server delivering the two fruit plates. He then says "You're welcome to stay and enjoy the fruit plate but if you
don't mind I'm going to excuse myself and go back up to my office as we have nothing left to talk about."

So here is the turning point. Many would say "I understand", and just let it end there, but for some reason I feel for me this is not an option. Thinking fast I tell him that I only ordered the fruit plate to be sociable and if he's leaving without eating his I will leave too. But, I say, why can't we stay and have breakfast together? "What is there to talk about?" he says. I tell him we have a lot to talk about. "We could talk about our travels: you just got back from the Winter Olympics, I just got back from South East Asia. We could talk about what's new in our lives, or we could talk about music." I must have disarmed him, because he agrees to stay and be sociable. At first it's a little stiff (understandably), but by the end of the breakfast meeting he's smiling and we're both relaxed and friendly. After a respectable amount of time we shake hands and say our goodbyes. I follow up a few weeks later with a note on official letterhead thanking him and the hotel for all the great work they have done for us and apologizing once more for having our relationship end this way.

And that’s the end. Or is it?

To my great surprise, a couple of short months later I get an email from this very same Hotel Two sales manager, asking if my jazz trio is available to play at a function they are hosting for their top corporate clients! So: I drop him as a business client after a multi-year relationship, and he turns around and offers me work. How does this happen? How do you take a situation where you've canceled a man's business after he's bent over backwards to help you, and where he should rightfully be pissed off, and turn it around so that after a few short weeks not only is he not mad at you anymore but he's offering YOU business opportunities? I'm not entirely sure myself -- it seems almost magical to me. But I like it.

The Story of Bhagavan

Kirtan is an ancient form of call and response chanting, which typically involves repetition of Sanskrit mantras. The idea behind kirtan is that by repetitively chanting the name of God, we reveal our true nature, bringing us closer to God. It is said that when we chant kirtan we should open our hearts so much that we sound “like a child crying out for it’s mother”.

I’ve been a musician all my life – drummer, keyboard player, composer, producer. I have had the good fortune to perform all over the world with many great musicians in a wide variety of styles – jazz, rock, pop, classical, and several forms of world music. However it was only after getting serious about yoga that I was first exposed to kirtan. One morning, while on a visit to the serene Sivananda Ashram in Canada’s Laurentian mountains I was invited to chant in the temple. Some time later the Swami took me aside and told me there was something special in my voice and that I should follow this path. Well, after a lot of hard work, and with the support of many very talented friends, the path has led to this moment, and the creation of my first kirtan album, Bhagavan.

Because my yoga training is in the Sivananda tradition, it’s no surprise that Bhagavan is an album of Sivananda chants. However I wanted to do something slightly different as well. I love to sing along with kirtan albums. Particularly in the car. I have often found though, that the sound of the voices in the kirtan chorus is distracting and an influence on how I sing the responses. So I decided to do an album of kirtan with no chorus, but rather leaving an open space for you, the listener to put in your own voice and “be” the kirtan chorus. If anyone remembers the old “Music Minus One” series, think of it as “Kirtan Minus One”. So instead of having a vocal kirtan chorus, we have instruments playing the responses in the spaces, to outline the melody. Of course, if you don’t feel like singing, you still have a lovely instrumental melody playing. For some chants we felt just one lone instrument was enough, while on others we used a “chorus” of instruments.

In the end we couldn’t resist adding a vocal chorus to a few chants that felt like they “needed” it. This will give newcomers to kirtan some idea of what a live kirtan might sound like, and also an idea of how to sing in the spaces on the other tracks… like a child crying out for it’s mother. So please, sing in the spaces. Sing outside the spaces. Just sing!

The Space Between the Notes

The third week of amazing master classes at the Toronto Summer Music Academy includes classes by stellar Academy faculty James Anagnoson, Ian Swensen, Patrick Gallois, Antonio Lysy, and Marietta Orlov.

Orlov talks to one of her piano students playing a piece from operatic repertoire and reminds him to "visualize orchestral sonorities". She then moves on to discuss building "finger memory" to alleviate performance anxiety.

"The space between the notes is when music happens" she says.

"There are millions of people who can play very well the piano, but to make music on it, there are very few."

James Anagnoson tells his piano students "All the good pianists know how to practice." "If I practiced with the animation and intensity that you do, I'd be exhausted in 20 minutes!"

He talks about the importance of yoga/breathing for piano playing. (I take the opportunity to remind about the free yoga classes Toronto Summer Music has organized for the Academy students.)

Using a metronome helps you develop a strong internal pulse, says Anagnoson. He stresses the importance of practicing slowly with the metronome. "It will be your policeman."

Fingering, he says, is a huge issue, and very personal: finding the logic of what one's hands will do, and applying that to the piece. The litmus test is playing in front of people. "Sometimes it takes me four or five years to find the right fingering (for me), and when I get it, it's like 'Eureka'!"

Master flutist Patrick Gallois is the quintessential Parisian gentleman, suave and charming. At 17 he started studying with Rampal, and at 21 was appointed 1st flute of the Orchestre National de France. He plays a one of a kind wooden flute because he says its sound is better than gold.

One of the students asks if he can teach circular breathing. He tells a story about how he once locked the door to his class, put the key on the table, and told his students no one could leave until they had all learned circular breathing. In the end they all did it. Later the dean told him he should not do that -- they could get in trouble.

In my experience the best teachers are the ones who are gutsy and bold enough to make an impression. My father as a young teacher once lit a dollar bill on fire in front of a classroom full of high school students to make the point that if they wasted his time they were also wasting money. They never forgot that lesson.

Some of Gallois' comments on a student playing CPE Bach:

"Play this like you're spreading jam on bread."

For another phrase: "Play like you're sitting back with your cigar and whiskey." (I'm surprised he says whiskey and not cognac)

"The Germans took the Italian and French styles, brought them together, and made them better. Like with cars."

For one phrase: "It's like you've shot a bullet and then the smoke is rising up."

Another music/yoga parallel: "Music is breathing -- tension (inhale) and release (exhale)."

Violinst Ian Swensen is a very physical teacher. He gets "in the face" of his students, often adjusting physically, and using big physical gestures to illustrate his point. He can also get metaphysical, making reference to the big bang theory and the expanding universe to coax a performance out of a student playing a Brahms piece. "You see that blue sky out there? There are stars inside that sky!"

He, like almost all the other teachers I've visited, stresses visualization in music. He has a visual image for practically every phrase.

"Brahms is all about good and evil" he says.

"Imagine you have 100,000 people around you, humming."

"Hear the sound spin."

"It's important to hear the sense of the music, and not worry about the notes. This is hard to do, because if you think too hard about it, it doesn't work." (Makes me think of practicing handstand -- as soon as I'm aware I'm in it I fall out.)

Later, chatting with Swensen I find out he is very into yoga. Living in the Bay Area, turns out his next door neighbor for many years and best friend is the great yoga master Rodney Yee. At one point he and Rodney would practice 4 hours a day! I tell him I'm a yoga teacher and he says we should practice together. So I suggest we do one of the Academy classes and he agrees. The yoga classes offered to the Academy students are donated by the studio where I teach, the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center and are held at 8am twice weekly throughout the Festival. Sure enough, Ian shows up to join me, as does cello master Antonio Lysy and one of our Academy students. With just the four of us plus the teacher there is a special intimate quality to the class. Afterwards we are all completely relaxed, loose, yet energized, and ready for another wonderful day of Toronto Summer Music.

Music for a fragmented society

For the second year in a row, Toronto Summer Music offered a string quartet workshop for emerging composers. Last year the workshop was led by R. Murray Schafer, and this year it was multiple Juno award winner Christos Hatzis, hailed as one of the most important composers writing today. Four lucky young composers were selected out of a field of fifteen to workshop their compositions with Hatzis and the Penderecki String Quartet. At the end of the week long workshop, all the works were performed at a public concert by the Penderecki.

Hatzis' composition workshop was less a class than a forum, in which philosophy, politics, and of course, music, were discussed with equal passion. He started by telling the students that rather than approaching string quartet writing in terms of a spectrum of sound (satb or sstb), one should approach it as "a play with four characters" (once again, the music-as-story metaphor).

"Composition is always a mirror that reflects it's times", Hatzis tells his students. "Because we are fragmented as a society, composition is also fragmented."

When discussing higher education he points out that "Academia always teaches the culture of at least one generation behind."

Afternoons were spent workshopping the student compositions with the Penderecki String Quartet. Some of the students, after getting feedback in this forum, opted to rewrite some of their works before the Friday recital.

Sitting in on the dress rehearsal for the Friday recital, I watched the amazing Penderecki quartet work through the student compositions, and then they moved on to rehearse Hatzis' second string quartet, "The Gathering", which was also to be performed at the recital. Hatzis asked if I'd like to follow along with a score. The Gathering is a very complex piece, especially the third movement, "Nadir", which gallops along at a frantic pace employing micro-rhythms and utilizing advanced compositional techniques like metric modulation. I'm just happy I could flip the pages at the right time!

I spoke with several of the students afterwards and without exception they felt this was an extremely worthwhile and valuable program. I could not agree more. I only wish that more people were there to hear these wonderful new works performed by an exceptional ensemble.

Blogging the Festival - Part II

The hardest part of blogging the Festival is finding time to do it! I have a few minutes now so will try to get caught up on some the notes I've taken over the past few days.

First a bit more on Menahem Pressler, who is a marvel and inspiration on so many levels. 85 years young and sharp as a tack, he's able to keep up with and often outperform his students technically. He doesn't even wear glasses. Sitting in on his last master class I overheard some more precious quotes.

After a 14-year-old prodigy displays dazzling pyrotechnics on a Ravel piece, Pressler has this to say: "There were a few good things, but most of it was wrong. When he writes piano, you play forte. When he writes pianissimo, you play mezzo forte. You play it at a tempo which means you're spending money which you don't have." He sums up by saying "If you have the fingers to play this, and the brains, you
should also have the responsibility."

Another young boy plays for him and he responds: "This piece needs 50 more pounds. So you've got to eat a lot!"

---

On to the great German clarinetist Karl Leister's master class. Leister's bio reads like a who's who of the classical world. He's played under the baton of Herbert von Karajan, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Neville Marriner, Aaron Copland, and many more. When I mention I'm a jazz musician, he shares a story about his friendship with legendary jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman. He once offered Benny tickets to his concert and Benny insisted on paying for them -- he found a cheque waiting for him at his hotel. He did not want to accept money from his friend, so he never cashed the cheque, and still has it to this day. I joke with him that this would be worth a lot on eBay, but he will never part with it.

He describes one variation his student plays as a long "discussion" between the piano and clarinet, and at the end, "you shake hands". The importance of visualization and storytelling in the music is something that all the teachers -- Pressler, Parker, Tsutsumi, Seiler, Laplante -- have stressed: Don't just read the notes.

"The clarinet must always *sing*, not play", Leister intones.

"This is done in a bakery, not on stage", he says as a clarinetist swirls his bell on a long note.

"You polished the floor" (he drags his feet), he says regarding another phrase.

"You don't listen", he chides a young student, "I see it in your eyes."

---

Juno Award winner Andre Laplante is a Canadian national treasure, and one of the world's top piano virtuosos. When I entered his master class he was working with a student on a Schumann piece. The following are some of his comments:

He stresses the fluidity of body movement in playing, telling his student to "make the phrase dance".

"Horowitz looks a bit like a turtle when he plays. It's kind of freaky, but it works."

"If there ever was a Sturm und Drang composer in Germany, my God, that is Schumann."

"When we take a new step, we are often afraid we're going to fall. Don't be afraid. Take the step. You won't fall. You're so ready."

"This is the best crazy music in the world. But you have to bring enormous contrast. You're trying to control too much. You have to be free as the wind."

"It's good sometimes to practice playing without emoting -- just play the logic of the piece."

"Tell us the story that *you* hear."

---

I've already drawn one parallel between music and yoga by comparing the musician masters to yoga teachers making small adjustments that make all the difference to their students' practices. Lately I've been thinking about another parallel: At the end of a yoga retreat, I feel uplifted, revitalized, and like all the molecules in my body are vibrating with energy. After a month of the Toronto Summer Music Festival, I feel much the same way. To sum up, I'll end here with one last Pressler quote: "When you hear a great artist perform, you feel fulfilled -- you come out a better person. You feel sanctified, elevated -- a better person."

Toronto Summer Music Festival master classes

My new favourite element of Toronto Summer Music is the master classes. (Although Cecelia says I said that last year!) These, to me, are the heartbeat of the Festival. Here youth meets experience, the future meets the present, the up-and-coming meets the established. The inspiration felt by the students in these classes is palpable, and it's infectious.

Yesterday my first stop was Mayumi Seiler's class. We have great masters coming to the Festival from all over the world. Maybe because they've come from far away they seem more glamorous, but we should not forget that we have among us one of the very best in Mayumi Seiler. I defy anyone to attend one of her master classes and not laugh. There is so much humour in her teaching style, all lovingly served up to her students, and anyone else lucky enough to be around. At one point, describing a sound on the violin she said "if you play that way it sounds too much like an Indian restaurant". Another time when reminding a student to keep her fingers in place on the neck, she said "your fingers look like they're on a hot oven". To bring life into the piece Seiler suggests images to the student: She describes one section as "cossacks dancing", and for the next she says "the old ladies are shaking".

After Seiler's class ends I move down the hall to Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, whom I just heard one of the cello students refer to as "the best in the world". The small classroom is packed with cello students (half the space is taken up by their bulky fiberglass cases). Some of the violinists from Seiler's class decide to join me as well. Oh, and there's fellow TSM board member Diana Wiley (She's probably blogging
too!)

Tsutsumi tells one student to keep her eyes half closed through a passage. "Most important is the colour of the sound. Not how you look." He assures her though that she looks fine, and he's right. "Play it like you've had too much vodka!" he says for one phrase. Next up, a student plays two movements from Bach's C minor suite. After the applause, Tsutsumi asks if she has any questions or anything she wants to work on. She asks a couple of technical questions but more importantly she asks a very broad question: How should I play Bach? She feels it romantically but is not sure that's the right approach. Tsutsumi responds: Most important thing is the music should be "alive"!

On to Pressler, whose reputation precedes him. First he has a reputation for stamina. No breaks. I notice the students, and the auditors, having to step out for multiple "bio breaks", but he just keeps going and going, like the Energizer bunny. I also hear he is brutally honest with his students -- no sugar coating here. Spoke
with one of the promising young piano prodigies who had played for him the day before and I asked what Pressler's comments had been. "Oh, he ripped me to shreds. But I need that".

Here are a few Pressler quotes:

"You are like a soccer player on a breakaway about to score a goal, and then he stops running and starts walking. Don't you want to win?"

"The F is like the cherry on top of an ice cream soda"

"You are pressing a button and going on cruise control. I want to hear the accelerator"

"Trills are like the salt and pepper you put on your food"

"This sounds too much like a woodpecker"

"You're playing like somebody who reads a joke, and can't laugh"

Finally, as one of the students has finished his time on stage and is walking back to his seat, Pressler calls after him and asks his age. When he hears that the boy is only 14, he responds: "I would say that's nice. I would say that's very nice. I would say that's extremely nice!"

Mypods and Boomsticks

Did anyone see last week's episode of the Simpsons? Haven't been watching that show as regularly as I used to, but happened to flick past it Sunday night and caught the part where Lisa gets her own "Mypod" (from the "Mapple" store). She loves her new Mypod, that is until she receives her first bill from the Mytunes store for $14,000 for the 14,000 songs she's downloaded. Seems even Matt Groening and The Simpsons agree that the retail model just doesn't work anymore. Everyone knows how absurd it is for someone who pays a couple of hundred bucks for an iPod to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to fill it legally. Are the majors listening? No. At least not yet. But at Noank Media Inc. we've been saying this for years. And we've developed (and patented) what we believe is the future model of digital media distribution.

A brief history: The company was founded in 2006 at Harvard by William "Terry" Fisher, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (the same "think tank" from which Wikipedia, podcasting, and Creative Commons emerged). Noank was a natural offshoot of his book "Promises to Keep," which examined the current crisis in the entertainment industry and proposed various ways in which it could be solved. Noank's co-founder is Paul Hoffert, former director of the CulTech Research Centre at York University in Toronto, now a composer, researcher, technologist, and media industry executive.

In brief, here's how the system we developed works: Noank sells blanket licenses to ISPs (university, consumer broadband, and mobile) in exchange for providing licensed content to the ISPs who provide it in turn to their subscribers. We then distribute 85% of the revenue to content owners, based on the popularity of their content. We count file usage using what I believe is the most sophisticated counting technology (patents applied for) out there right now: Our system counts not only downloads, but plays, copies, burns to CD, plays on mobile devices, and even partial plays. So we can tell a content owner that users are listening to only the first 30 seconds of their song, or watching only the last half hour of their movie, etc. Our statistics are gathered in the aggregate, while protecting individual users' privacy, and are available at all times to content providers via a secure web interface.

Our model is based on two premises: 1) Users are going to continue file sharing without compunction, and instead of antagonizing them, we need to embrace and find a way to monetize their behavior. Thus we've developed a "turbo-charged" P2P system, which uses
super-peering and hierarchical caching at the network level to both enhance the user experience, and reduce bandwidth costs for ISPs. 2) Users hate so-called "digital rights management." So our system is completely DRM free, and instead we use a fingerprinting technology to identify and count file use. Furthermore, we are format agnostic, and don't insist on any particular format for our files.

Noank CEO Paul Hoffert spoke on Canada's BNN TV network recently and said "the key to the business is that unlike what everybody else is trying to do which is to take the old model of having a retail business where you sell CDs or songs one at a time, the new model is to have a tethered, DRM'd, retail systems for online media delivery. By contrast, Noank offers an wholesale business. And it's economically, fundamentally, more efficient."

Last month, I was in the UK keynoting at a music industry think tank session, and was frankly disheartened to see that most of the industry is still thinking in terms of the old model -- closed, DRM-based, retail, tethered. By contrast, the Noank system is open, DRM-free, wholesale, format-agnostic, and even player-agnostic. This is clearly the way of the future. And even Lisa Simpson knows it.