Q. Can CutTime® prepare our students, faculty,
friends and community for the new economy?
A. With climate change threatening to uproot millions in the next decade alone, the classical music industry will need to work further and further outside the box of our comforting traditions. Emerging economic realities present both exciting opportunities and crushing frustrations for today’s music students. The paradox of the matter is while students and music schools have no control over the present, it is also for them to choose what 21st-Century classical musicianship will become.
Building on the public domain with a wider perspective informed by two decades in a major symphony orchestra, CutTime® chose a craftsman artist portfolio (blend of commercial and fine arts values) with a social mission to extend classical and symphonic music outside the heavy doors of our institutions, and into the popular culture ecosystem and even wider public settings. CutTime found many effective methods for real connection and relevance, and for music students with a resilient attitude to become strategic edu-tainers of new audiences.
CutTime Players Publishing offers a sheet music catalog of over 80 symphonic transcriptions, such as Till Eulenspiegel, and a dozen popular originals by CutTime founder Rick Robinson, such as Gitcha Groove On!. Real orchestral music can surprise audiences just about anywhere now. (Not everything, of course.) The skill-sets required to create more surprise are becoming the arms by which cultural institutions can embrace broader audiences with intimacy and excellence. This is not the dumbing down the industry feared, rather the warming up newcomers expect. Let music students go further to smarten up to connect their other friends with inner passion, humor and key listening information such as tension and release. We are in the inspiration business, which means developing good hosting skills.