Latest / Arts Unscripted with Monica Holt / Andrew Recinos, President and CEO of Tessitura

Transcript

Andrew Recinos, President and CEO of Tessitura · Arts Unscripted with Monica Holt

0:10
Welcome back to CI to Eye.
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I hope you had some time over the winter break to rest,
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to be with the people you love,
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and to experience art that reminded you why you do this work.
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The start to 2026 has been heavy,
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with some days feeling impossible to reconcile the weight of the world with the
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obligations in front of us.
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And each of us is experiencing that weight differently.
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As I grapple with my own grief and outrage, I find myself returning to this:
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I have never been more certain about the power of our arts community.
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Artists speak truth when silence feels safer.
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They bring us together when division feels inevitable.
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They give voice to what we can't yet articulate.
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Watching the videos come out of Minneneapolis, of communities gathered in song,
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finding a path forward,
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have made all the more clear that the work of the arts and culture sector is not
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optional work. It is essential. So keep making art,
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keep protecting artists, and keep building community.
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Keep going.
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I'm so glad to be back with you all and I'm really looking forward to sharing
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our season ahead. To start, as we closed out our 2025,
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I had the opportunity to sit down with someone who's been thinking deeply about
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how we move forward: Andrew Racinos, the CEO of Tessitura.
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Many of you know Tessitura well,
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but this conversation goes well beyond the nuances of running a member-owned
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tech nonprofit.
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Andrew spent 2025 visiting 103 arts organizations across 10
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countries, and what he found gives me hope. Everywhere,
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people are rebuilding, re-imagining,
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and asking hard questions about what comes next.
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Andrew himself started as a musician-piano, trumpet,
2:00
composing-before working his way up at Carnegie Hall and eventually leading the
2:05
Tessitura Network, a global company. We talk about creative pragmatism,
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why everything being under construction right now may actually be a good sign,
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and his message to all of us: Pay attention.
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I think you're really going to appreciate this one. Thank you for being here.
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Now let's dive in.
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Andrew Recinos, welcome to CI to Eye. Thank you for being here.
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It's so fun to see you in this context.
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Oh, thank you, Monica, for inviting me to be here. I'm absolutely honored.
2:41
Well, I know everyone is used to seeing you on stage, giving us encouragement,
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talking about the field and what we can look forward to.
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But I think maybe folks might not have a sense of how you got into the arts at
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the very, very beginning.
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You have lived inside the arts most of your life as a musician,
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as a composer, now obviously in a very different role.
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But when you look all the way back to the beginning,
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what were your first impulses with art and music that drew you in?
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It's funny because there's a lot of folks sort of in my orbit who know me as the
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Tessitura guy, but most of my life,
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I've really started to find myself as a musician going all the way back to the
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beginning. I fell in love with the piano first and foremost,
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playing the piano and then later playing the trumpet,
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and then later writing my own stuff.
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And I've always found that music is a solace for me.
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It is an emotional outlet.
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I was so into music that I went to school for it.
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I have a degree from the Jacobs School of Music in Indiana,
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and Indiana had and has a really great arts administration
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program. And I met someone who was a performer as well who told me about it.
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And so that was when I learned about it.
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I ended up staying at Indiana after my undergrad and getting a master's degree
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in arts administration, actually.
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My understanding is you started your career from there as an intern at Carnegie
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Hall, which... that's a pretty great place to start.
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When you look back at those early days,
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what did you learn immediately about audiences and institutions
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that you still harken back to today as you're navigating organizations of all
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sizes across the world?
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Yeah, it's amazing how much I still think about what I learned there.
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I ended up staying at Carnegie for about eight years.
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I kind of worked my way up, but to me it was like postgraduate work.
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Spending eight years seeing really how one of the world's most
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recognized arts institutions gets that way and stays that way
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was an incredible learning experience for me.
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And I think the first big thing that I've taken with me since is this
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commitment to absolute excellence.
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You can't have Carnegie Hall be your product and phone it in.
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You can't be good enough. You can't have typos in your acknowledgement letters.
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There is an understanding from whoever's on stage to whoever
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is opening the mail that you are absolutely at the top of your game.
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I think that excellence is kind of a charged word, right?
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It is. Yeah.
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There's many different ways to define excellence,
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but I always like to think of it as, are you best fulfilling your mission?
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So for me,
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it's something I've taken forward in my career that however
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it's defined that we're striving, that we're pursuing that which is best.
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I would also go back to what you were saying about Carnegie being a great kind
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of secondary graduate education in its own right.
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I always felt that way about the Kennedy Center,
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but I'd really encourage anyone who's starting in an organization
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early in their career for the first time of any size to treat it that way. Yes,
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you have your job to do,
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but you also just have immense learning opportunities all around you.
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And I think you and I are similar in our curiosity and lifelong approach
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to learning at every opportunity.
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I definitely agree with that. And I think where you have the time,
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embedding yourself in your organization,
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even if it's outside the job that you're doing. So when somebody said,
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"We need a volunteer to help put together packets for the board meeting that's
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about to happen," I'd raise my hand. That is something new to learn.
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One of my favorite weird stories about working at Carnegie Hall is I ended up,
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because of that,
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I ended up being asked to escort the late board members to the board meeting.
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And so I ended up escorting Oscar de la Renta to a board meeting as a
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24-year-old kid who just moved there from Indiana,
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which was a pretty surreal experience. And he was very polite, I've got to say.
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We're glad to hear that, certainly. Okay. So what came next after Carnegie Hall?
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Yeah, so I had worked mostly in development.
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I was the director of the Friends of Carnegie Hall,
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which is their membership program, for a few years,
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and they're dealing with a lot of data.
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And so I became quite enamored with the systems that Carnegie Hall had in place
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at the time. And in fact, in my last couple of years at Carnegie,
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I moved out of fundraising and out of the development team and into the IT team,
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supporting their databases and that sort of thing. But along the way,
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I started working with one of their consultants, a company called JCA,
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who's actually a great friend and partner of Tessitura,
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and I know of Capacity Interactive as well.
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And JCA offered me this job to be a consultant working with
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nonprofits and arts nonprofits in a more general way.
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And the first big project I got was being a contractor for this strange
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little company coming out of the Metropolitan Opera called the Tessitura
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Network. And by 2007, 2008,
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the Tessitura board was talking about,
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what was the next generation of their technology going to be?
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And they decided that even then they needed to replatform.
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And to do it, they decided they needed to do more than the business-as-usual,
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'Let's add a feature here and there.' That they needed a big project.
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And then they called it the Next Generation project.
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And because I had kind of been around the virtual halls for several years making
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friends with the team and knowing a bunch of the members and having a
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pretty good solid understanding of technology,
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they actually asked if I would be the product manager for the
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Next Generation project. And I said yes.
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And that sort of naturally then moved to a point where our
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co-founder, Jack Rubin, asked me to be his second in command,
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which was executive vice president,
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which ultimately became president in 2017. And then I took over when Jack moved
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on in 2021 as CEO. So I've been doing that for five years.
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Yes. And actually I assume that most, if not all,
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of our listeners know what Tessitura is,
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but on the off chance there are some --
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I'm thinking of my family members who might be tuning in this week --
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could you just quickly explain what is Tessitura?
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Yeah, I'd be happy to explain what Tessitura is.
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So we provide a software which is combined
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ticketing, fundraising, e-commerce, CRM, and analytics,
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purpose-built for arts and culture organizations. So this is a party trick I do.
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If it's people who I don't know or I'm in a city I'm not familiar with,
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I'll ask somebody,
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'Where are you from?' And they'll give me the name of a city and I will say,
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'Well,
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if you've ever bought a ticket at their opera or their orchestra or their art
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museum or their science center or their zoo,
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you have actually bought a ticket through the Tessitura system.' And we provide
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technology, we provide services, consulting,
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and our sort of world famous and award-winning community.
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Yes, absolutely.
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And Tessitura is a nonprofit and it's a member-owned co-op,
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which is all unusual in the tech world.
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How does the structure of being a nonprofit and member-owned change the way you
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might innovate as opposed to a company that I'm hearing about on the Acquired
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podcast or something like that?
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So yes, Tessitura is a nonprofit, member-owned co-op.
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We are a 501(c)3 charitable organization in the United States,
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and we have subsidiaries in several other countries.
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And we are the only tech company that serves arts and culture
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that is founded, funded, governed,
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and owned by the arts and culture sector itself.
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So let me sort of explain what that means.
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The original Tessitura software was the custom-built ticketing,
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fundraising, CRM at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
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And it did something that no other system did at the time, which was:
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it was all in one system.
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The Met had solved a problem that was endemic throughout our sector,
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which is you had multiple systems that were storing and operating information
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about your customers. So you had fundraising over here,
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you had ticketing over there, maybe you had a membership system, maybe...
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The Met, I think,
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famously had six or seven different systems and none of them talked to each
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other.
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Wow.
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Almost as soon as Tessitura went live at the Met,
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there were other major American arts organizations that got wind about it
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and wanted it. And pretty quickly,
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the Met recognized that they did not want to be a software company.
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They wanted to continue to be an opera company,
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but they also wanted to be a good citizen.
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And so they convened a working group with other
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major arts organizations that wanted to get access to this software and
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ultimately decided a way forward,
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which was to create a new company devoted to supporting
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and improving this software for the sector.
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And so when Tessitura was founded in 2001,
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it was founded by seven organizations.
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Each organization had a member on the board that became the governing board.
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They hired the staff, and that is Tessitura today.
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We've gone from seven organizations to 800.
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We've gone from one country to 10. And I think it's fair to say in
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the communities that we operate in,
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we are the major player when it comes to ticketing, fundraising, e-commerce,
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and CRM in the arts and culture sector.
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That's right.
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I do think that in this era of Ticketmaster
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and some of these larger for- profit entities who are looking at ticketing
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from a very specific viewpoint, let's say,
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and how that can align with their other interests in live performance
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and venue management,
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I just think it's all the more important to highlight the fact that Tessitura is
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also a nonprofit,
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the fact that it has a board that consists of members of all the organizations
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that it serves,
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feels really important in a moment where we're keen to discuss values at every
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aspect of how we do our business and how we can all be better aligned with each
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other and working together.
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Yeah. I mean,
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it was very intentional that it was founded both as a nonprofit and as a
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member-owned organization. So by choosing this model, they were saying,
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'We won't have a profit motive.
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Our mission will be to enable and inspire arts and culture organizations to
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achieve their goals.' And as a member-owned organization,
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the sector itself will ultimately have agency over how the
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software is developed and managed.
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Yeah. And this is why the creation and cultivation of Tessitura, I think,
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is just such an interesting story as we talk about how we look at our field as a
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whole and how it's evolved. I think the other piece of that is:
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the approach Tessitura has to innovation has a pretty significant impact on
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innovation in the field. Yes, mostly related to technology,
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but then with branches out into audience engagement more deeply,
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how we look at changing our organizational structures and making different
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choices for the organization as we progress.
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How do you cultivate a culture of experimentation and a
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love for innovation at Tessitura while still remaining the steady
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drumbeat that's required as this large, mission-driven partner to our field?
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Yeah, I mean, it's a constant balance.
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I had a composition professor when I was a kid,
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and she had all these funny sayings, but one of them was, "You are what you eat,
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so eat good music." So she would encourage me to go to all sorts of
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different kinds of performances --
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modern music and early music and jazz and all this stuff --
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and to listen to all different kinds of music.
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And I think that that is a big part of how we think about innovation at
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Tessitura, is that we are what we eat, so we have to eat good ideas.
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The primary input to how we think about innovation is listening to our members.
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And we have all of these sort of structures in place and committees and groups
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and forums and ideas boards and sessions at our conferences,
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but that's not our only input.
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We look at what else is happening in our marketplace. We look at adjacent
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marketplaces.
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We keep an eye on hotels and on travel trade and on commercial CRM
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and other areas like that.
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And I think that that balanced diet of eating all of that rich variety
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of food, all of the levels of the pyramid or whatever you want to call it,
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is what allows us then to be able to continue to innovate and serve the sector
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on the whole.
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I think the last thing that I just think is one of the coolest things about
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Tessitura is we have this spirit from the very beginning of egalitarianism.
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The majority of our organizations are smaller than $9 million annual budget.
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You think -- often in the sector,
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you think of Tessitura and you think of the Carnegie Halls and the Metropolitan
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Operas and that sort of thing.
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But what we've learned is by having a much richer ecosystem -- like,
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we are not a monoculture -- that there are incredible ideas that smaller,
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more nimble organizations come up with first that end up helping the large
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organizations. And there are things that the really well-funded organizations do
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first that we're able to then democratize so even the smallest organizations
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can benefit from it.
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That makes a lot of sense, and I'm glad you put a finer point to it.
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I'm curious what you think of our field's overall tolerance
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for innovation, and if you've seen that change over the past, let's say, 10,
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15 years.
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Oh, that's a great question.
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I think that there is more of a thirst for innovation than there once was.
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When I started out as an implementer for Tessitura 20 years ago,
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there were a lot of leaders who saw technology as a necessary evil,
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and more and more leaders and more and more folks now are recognizing that arts
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and culture lives side by side with Amazon and Netflix,
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and there is an expectation of a certain level of
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innovation.
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It doesn't matter that you're a $2 million theater company and Netflix is an
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increasingly big
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monolithic media company that if you can get into Netflix and do what you want
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to do in two clicks and you only have to sign up once,
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that you should be able to do the same thing with your $2 million theater.
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And so our job as Tessitura for the sector is to make sure that we can
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take the economies of scale that we have to make sure that that technology can
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be delivered at that same level.
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That makes sense to me. And yes, as you say,
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I do think we're in a moment where the field is beginning individually
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to examine what their organization's tolerance has been and could be for
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growth.
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So you and I have talked about AI on kind of our own time over the
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past several years,
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and I know that you've said technology shouldn't replace meaningful interaction,
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but instead be an enabler of that.
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So what does that look like in practice for you and what does that look
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like in practice for Tessitura?
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Yeah, it's a great question. And you're right,
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we think of our role in the art sector as providing
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technology that can elevate humanity. If our technology is working right,
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then cultural organizations that we serve are able to connect with their
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people in a more meaningful way,
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which means that more art and culture is getting out into the world.
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And what could be better than that? I mean,
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our vision is working towards a day when every human and every community we
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serve has arts and culture as a meaningful part of their life.
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So we don't see this as,
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'Let's have robots just do arts and culture now.' I like the
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term popularized by Ethan Molick, which is co-intelligence.
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Because there are many things that AI can do to help
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deepen somebody's work, either to make it faster,
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to make it richer, to make it scale.
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So one of the prototypes we did was pretty simple. It's using GenAI
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on a constituent record and you press this little button and it just gives you a
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quick paragraph about them,
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but it's not that hard to imagine that going just a step or two further.
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You're a frenzied development officer.
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It's intermission. You've got the donor lounge.
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You've already got the list from Tessitura of the 20 people who are going to be
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there. You could certainly run reports on each of those people,
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or maybe you just have that report and AI has generated two sentences on each of
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the important people and why they're important and put them in the order of
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importance so you know who to walk up to first.
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And because you can store their photos in Tessitura,
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you know the photos so you can find them.
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It's all things that you could do today, but as a co-intelligence,
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AI is able to magnify that and make you more effective. And because of
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those relationships that you build, because of course we know in fundraising,
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building the relationships is the key to all of it.
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These are ways that can help ensure that that organization can survive for years
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to come because of these wonderful folks who you've been able to make a deeper
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connection with. And I hasten to add that that feature is not on our roadmap.
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I just kind of made it up as I was talking,
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but it's an example of the sort of thing that you can see even today's AI being
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able to do, and it's advancing by leaps and bounds all the time.
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Well, we won't hold you to it,
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but I'm sure you'll get a few curious emails after this to see,
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'How can we do this? When can we do this?' So sorry in advance for that.
20:41
As Tessitura is exploring its own approach to AI,
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what are some of the decisions you've made,
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some of the features that you've created, that you're most excited about,
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and what are the principles guiding the decisions about what you're creating?
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Yeah, well, a couple of things. I mean, first I want to say,
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being a nonprofit member-owned organization means that you make different
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decisions. If we were a commercial provider,
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we would be answering to investors.
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Our board would be made up of people who have skin in the game.
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They have put money into the company and they expect to get money out of the
21:14
company. But that means, for instance,
21:17
that you've seen a lot of businesses start putting out AI features left and
21:22
right that frankly aren't very useful because from a sales
21:26
perspective, from a positioning perspective,
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from a keeping-the-investors-happy perspective,
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you have to be able to show that you're doing AI.
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Tessitura has put out AI as well,
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but not because we wanted to show that we were doing AI.
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It was because it was a way to answer specific needs that we've heard from our
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members. We are releasing -- early in 2026, in Q1
21:50
-- GenAI around analytics so that if you are looking to build a
21:55
dashboard of all of our ticket sales for this particular
22:00
show and we want to see web versus anything else and break it down by
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postal code or something like that,
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you just type that ChatGPT style into a window and it just builds the
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dashboard. It just builds the widget,
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and you put it in and then you can tweak it if you need to tweak it. But again,
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it's the co-intelligence thing. Today you can do that,
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but you need to drag and drop and understand the vernacular and all of that.
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So this is something that we hear from our members all the time.
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'[Analytics are] so powerful. We get so much great data out of Tessitura.
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It would be great if it was just a little bit easier to understand in plain
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English.' Well,
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one of the things that AI is great at is understanding plain English,
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as long as you train it right.
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So that is something that we're quite proud to be releasing to all of our
22:44
members imminently.
22:46
That's wonderful. I'm excited for that one.
22:49
So listeners who have stuck with CI to Eye for a long time might remember that
22:55
back just as I think you were taking the CEO role at Tessitura,
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maybe just before,
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you were on CI to Eye and you had been spending months listening to over a
23:05
hundred member organizations This past year,
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I know you did something similar,
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but this time in person across 10 different countries.
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What was that experience like and what did those conversations reveal to you
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that you couldn't have learned in any other way?
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Yeah. Since I became CEO five years ago,
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we've been on this tremendous journey of renewal.
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We have grown... our top line has almost doubled.
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We went from 220 to 370 staff in that time.
23:40
We've completely replatformed our user application.
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We've completely replatformed our cloud infrastructure.
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It's just been a time of tremendous change.
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And you know when you're working on a big project and you haven't come up for
23:54
air? As we got to the start of '25,
23:57
I felt like it was time for me personally and for us as a company to
24:02
start looking outside again. So
24:07
I gave myself a goal.
24:09
Tessitura operates in 10 countries and to my knowledge,
24:12
no one had ever visited all 10 in the same year. So I decided to do that --
24:17
not only all 10 countries,
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but in the UK where we operate in all four countries of the UK,
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I also visited all four countries of the UK,
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so England and Wales and Northern Ireland and Scotland. And
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it was so interesting in 2025 where there is a lot of
24:34
upheaval in lots of different ways in the world itself where
24:39
arts and culture has been under a lot of pressure, a lot of funding pressure,
24:44
a lot of will-audiences-come-back pressure, a lot of changing tastes...
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It's very interesting to spend time sitting in the offices or
24:55
touring the buildings of what ends up being 103
25:00
arts and culture organizations around the world.
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And there's some big themes where it doesn't matter the size of the organization
25:07
or even the country that it's in,
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there's some big themes that just kept coming back. And the first one is:
25:13
everything is under construction. First of all, as a traveler --
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I don't know about you, Monica.
25:19
I have not been in an airport that hasn't been under construction...
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In a long time.
25:23
Downtowns? I'm in Atlanta right now. I've walked past...
25:27
I don't even know how many buildings going up right now.
25:30
The hotels I stay in half the time are under construction.
25:34
But more importantly, the arts organizations,
25:37
the cultural organizations themselves,
25:39
[are] sometimes physically under construction.
25:40
There is a lot of building happening,
25:43
either in the middle of a renovation or they're adding a wing or they're
25:47
creating a new building or they're planning it or they're building an endowment
25:51
campaign and and and.
25:54
But then maybe the most important or almost existential is
25:59
rebuilding the business itself. And I've seen more and more of that.
26:03
And I think that there are meta themes about that as well.
26:08
There is generational change happening in leadership all across the world.
26:12
Boomers are retiring. I think COVID is also kind of with us forever in a way.
26:16
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
26:19
It just remains part of the conversation,
26:21
even as just that 'before times' and 'after times' thing.
26:25
How we structure our organizations is being questioned,
26:30
how we program, what we program, what our role is.
26:33
There's a lot of soul searching. And so everything is under construction.
26:37
And I think that's a good thing because as much as it is a pain
26:42
to not know where baggage claim is, the reality is I've also seen,
26:47
and we've probably all seen, communities where nothing is under construction.
26:50
Yeah, that's right.
26:51
And the only communities I've ever seen where nothing is under construction are
26:54
communities that are dying. And I've seen it in parts of this country,
26:59
I've seen it in the UK, and there is simply nothing sadder than the decay.
27:04
So yes,
27:05
it can be kind of irritating and it can be challenging while you're in it,
27:10
and ultimately it's a good thing.
27:12
And I don't know if that's something you've seen, Monica...?
27:15
I agree with that completely. And I agree that with construction,
27:19
you also get renewal, new beginnings, expansion, hopefully.
27:23
And I am heartened to see how much of that there is in a time where it
27:28
is desperately needed across the board.
27:31
Yeah. Another theme that I'm seeing is around fatigue.
27:36
I think that there's a whole lot about fatigue. There's just physical fatigue.
27:42
There is donor fatigue. Just
27:46
do the mad lib of '-thing fatigue.' Arnold Toynbee, I think,
27:50
has famously said, 'History is just one damn thing after another.' And honestly,
27:55
I mean, I started as an arts administrator in 1995,
27:59
and we've lived through 9/11,
28:02
and we've lived through the first dot com bubble,
28:05
and we've lived through the Great Recession, and COVID,
28:07
and political shenanigans, and George Floyd.
28:11
It is sort of one thing after another. So on the one hand, I think,
28:15
of course the fatigue is real.
28:18
Arts and culture leaders and employees are being asked to do more with less all
28:21
the time.
28:22
And it's also a reality that there isn't really a normal.
28:28
A great point. The only thing constant, right?
28:31
Yeah.
28:32
As you're talking to leaders around the globe,
28:34
what is giving you the most hope right now about where the
28:39
arts are heading?
28:42
I learned about so many amazing things that are happening in
28:46
communities all over the place.
28:49
And I'm not suggesting that arts and culture isn't under a tremendous amount of
28:54
pressure -- financial pressure, political pressure, structural pressure.
28:58
And there aren't a whole lot of blaring headlines that talk about the
29:03
multitude of good that every single one of these organizations is doing every
29:08
single day. I sit down with organizations and we talk about:
29:13
ticket sales are back, but expenses are up so much more.
29:18
We're having trouble finding attention from donors because there's so many
29:21
social causes that they feel compelled rightfully to give to those sorts of
29:25
things. And in the same conversation,
29:27
you hear about all of these new things that they're doing.
29:31
I think that there's this multi-decade pivot away from the
29:36
purity of the high art to the primacy of
29:40
community.
29:41
And I see it everywhere. I'm hard pressed to think of an organization that I
29:45
visited this year that community is not one of the first three sentences out of
29:49
their mouths. It is incredibly important.
29:52
And what arts and culture is doing at the ground level,
29:55
at the nobody-is-being-left-behind level, is tremendous.
30:00
And so I think that gives me amazing hope. I wish --
30:03
and this is not just an arts problem. This is sort of a how-media-works problem.
30:08
I wish those stories got as much airtime as the stories of the
30:13
impending doom of arts and culture,
30:15
which looks strangely similar to articles I used to read when I was an arts
30:19
administration student in 1993.
30:22
Man,
30:23
we really need some of our friends in media to start telling the stories for joy
30:28
and inspiration instead of just for anxiety.
30:32
We'll get into quickfire culture in a second,
30:35
but I have looked up to you as someone who has been such a great leader for the
30:39
field,
30:40
both in terms of your viewpoint but also in watching you take on the leadership
30:44
of this important organization.
30:47
What do you think will define the arts and culture sector's most successful
30:51
leaders over the next decade?
30:54
Yeah, that's a good one.
30:57
I feel like I can spend about three minutes with the leader of an arts
31:01
organization or a cultural organization and have a pretty good sense of how that
31:06
organization's going to do. I mean at a really high level.
31:10
And the ones where I'm like, 'There's no stopping [them]'...
31:14
I would say what they have in common is sort of this creative pragmatism.
31:20
Sure.
31:20
Almost, but not quite, an oxymoron. It's this, 'let's do great things.
31:26
Let's do something new and let's not go bankrupt doing it.'
31:31
And we've all sort of seen the dangers of being on
31:36
one or the other side of that pendulum. I mean, there's...
31:40
How many famous stories are there of the
31:43
unbound artistic director who decides to do something crazy and spend all of the
31:47
money,
31:48
or on the ultra conservative kind of business director who won't allow
31:53
any innovation to happen. But I think creative pragmatism means --
31:58
is different than walking a line down the middle.
32:02
There's really famous examples. The Phoenix Zoo in Phoenix,
32:07
Arizona is credited with being the first zoo to do zoo lights back in the early
32:12
'90s. What did they do? They're like, 'What do people love?
32:17
They love looking at Christmas lights. What do we have?
32:20
We have this huge campus that can fill an endless
32:25
number of people.
32:28
What is a time of year that we have trouble attracting people to the zoo?
32:31
Not a lot of people are going to the zoo in December.' But when it features
32:35
millions of LED lights,
32:38
they have opened up an entirely new revenue stream.
32:42
They are activating their space in a completely new way.
32:45
They are bringing genuine joy. That to me is creative pragmatism.
32:50
It was a very clever idea.
32:52
I think of symphonies who perform with film and now
32:56
it's a staple of most symphony orchestras. That's creative pragmatism.
33:03
When you hear these things that have been huge successes and you're like,
33:05
'Why didn't I think of that?
33:07
' I think those are the kind of leaders that we're going to see leading us
33:11
into the future in the next 10 years.
33:14
So we have sadly reached the end of our time together,
33:18
but of course we have our quickfire culture questions just to wrap things up.
33:22
So what is one piece of culture right now that you are currently obsessed with?
33:28
David Byrne's 'Who is the Sky.' So it's his new
33:33
album and he is on tour right now.
33:36
And my good friends at Massey Hall were presenting David Byrne for three nights
33:41
and hooked me up.
33:43
And it was one of the best concerts I've ever been to in my life.
33:46
It is just a joy from beginning to end.
33:51
If you could go back in time,
33:53
what is a live performance or event that you would want to have attended?
33:58
I would like to have been in the room where it was created maybe more than
34:03
performed.
34:04
So the creation of West Side Story where you've got Bernstein and Sondheim and
34:08
Robbins and Arthur Lawrence.
34:10
And it was so groundbreaking in so many ways. But just as a music guy,
34:15
I've always appreciated how Bernstein was able to take his
34:20
towering classical music prowess and make
34:25
it current to the time that he was living in. I mean,
34:28
West Side Story has four-part fugue in it,
34:31
but it's a bunch of street kids singing about the fight they're about to
34:36
have. I mean, and it's all jazz with a hi hat behind it. I mean,
34:41
talk about creative pragmatism. This has to be catchy.
34:45
And from his perspective, his idea of excellence is,
34:48
'It has to stand up as a work of art.' I just wish I was there to see that
34:53
happening.
34:54
That's a fantastic answer.
34:55
And I hear a little bit of your music nerd come out there.
34:59
What's one free resource in any field that everyone should check out?
35:04
So I'd be remiss if I didn't say Tessitura.com.
35:06
You can sign up for our mailing list. It's not spam.
35:10
We send maybe once a month.
35:12
And it's really more of a newsletter of what's going on in our community.
35:15
We share a lot of just cool stories that we've heard. So that's one.
35:20
The things that I literally read every day,
35:23
the first is ArtsJournal.com. Doug McLennan.
35:28
It's a compendium of arts stories in the last 24 hours that
35:33
is incredibly complete, actually.
35:36
The other one that's more on the AI side is a newsletter called TLDRAI.
35:41
And again,
35:41
it's just sort of everything that happened in the last 24 hours with AI,
35:45
which right now is a lot.
35:49
A day goes by and there's like 10 big news stories about AI and I just read it
35:54
-- I devour it every day.
35:58
And finally, if you could broadcast one message to executive directors,
36:03
leadership teams, staff,
36:04
and boards of thousands of arts organizations today,
36:09
what would that message be?
36:11
I think the message would be: pay attention.
36:15
It's not news to anyone who's listening that the way that we are sort of wired
36:19
into the digital landscape today has changed our brains and has changed how we
36:23
interact with each other.
36:24
But if you can start to pay attention a little bit more -- to your staff,
36:27
to your colleagues, to your audiences, to your artists --
36:32
I think that that unto itself could help dial back a little
36:37
bit of this kind of zombie apocalypse that we all sort of feel in some days
36:42
and help us move forward as a sector.
36:45
Pay attention. Thank you, Andrew.
36:47
Appreciate your time and thanks for a great conversation.
36:50
Thanks so much for having me, Monica. It's been great.
37:03
Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. If you enjoyed today's conversation,
37:08
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37:11
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37:15
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them. A huge thanks to our team behind the scenes, including Karen McConarty,
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Yeaye Stemn, Stephanie Medina, Jess Berube,
37:32
and Rachel Purcell Fountain. Our music is by whoisuzo.
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next on CI to Eye. I'm Monica Holt. Thanks for listening.