August 22, 2024 • 67 mins
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Priya Patel (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the arts and everything in between. I'm your host Pria Patel. In today's episode, we are chatting with art scopes, founder and director Caroline Winn about collaborating community building and managing arts projects with multiple stakeholders.
(00:01):
Caroline is the director of art scope. Art scope specializes in the provision and management of high caliber arts programs and events for government bodies, local authorities, national and international festivals and projects, schools, and community groups.
Caroline Wynne (00:02):
I studied music in college and I suppose back in the 80s when you went to college to study music in Ireland, it was very one dimensional and you went there to be a classical performer and to either teach music or play in an orchestra afterwards. So I wasn't as lucky as the current graduates were. The arts world is your oyster really once you graduate. Luckily I was practical enough to realize quite early on that the performing career wasn't for me. I just was realistic to know I was a piano player. I was a harp player. And I, while I loved playing, there were so many things.
And I suppose because I wasn't specializing in any one instrument, I got to, learn a little bit about lots of different instruments and try and pass on a starting point to children and teenagers. Throughout, as I was teaching, I always still felt that I wasn't in my niche. And I joined a local arts festival committee and back then arts festivals were run voluntary and you know you gave everybody for their own genre of expertise was on the committee and I can still remember it could be sometime around 1996 every month when we met you know there was always Things in the post, people advertising their wares.
And when I did that, I found that managing events was what I wanted to do, and maybe get paid for it, not always be voluntary. And that I also wanted to keep within the strand of education, which was very much my comfort zone, and which I felt was very much the starting point for where the arts should be going.
Priya Patel (00:05):
Oh, wow. So really a spark of inspiration. Okay. So can you tell us about some of the earliest events you were managing and organizing with art scope? How did you build up art scope?
There wasn't, you couldn't go on and Google, how do I find a percussionist to come to County Leitrim or to County Wicklow? You had to ring someone up and say, do you have any connections for that? So I suppose I became for a number of years and pre Google, I became the little black book of arts and practitioners for workshops and performance.
So They auditioned quartets from Ireland, the UK, Germany, Russia. There were many contenders for it. And the successful quartet were the Vogler Quartet from Berlin. So they moved to Sligo. They didn't actually want Lock, stock and barrel. They came and lived two weeks per month for three years in Sligo.
And so we ran a festival year one, the Vogler Spring Festival, and it was a festival of chamber music in Sligo. It was wonderful, it was in the grounds of, it was in the church where WB Yeats is buried outside of, and it was just a wonderful experience. And we did that for 20 years. And I still continue to work with the Vogler Quartet and they still have very much roots in in Sligo.
And it was, So energizing. It was getting into the communities, getting into the schools and most of all, it was dealing with and working alongside really high quality professional artists and you can't go wrong if the quality is right you're on the right track, really. So that was the first grown up art scope experience.
Yes, they go to the pub, they go out for a meal, but unless it was something really that they were following for a long time or that they had a great interest in, people didn't just take attending events as part of their daily social life. So I noticed that has changed so much. And I think a lot of that is down to good education practice.
And I remember saying to her, what do you mean? She said this kind of a, we were going to an orchestra and it was a lunchtime concert. And I remember she felt that this was not something that was for her. And then she said at home, we wouldn't listen to this kind of music and we wouldn't go to events like this.
Back in the, the late 90s their job was to promote culture within the county, to find money to promote it, but they also found themselves being the people producing the events. And, for a number of years, they were all things to all people. sectors of the arts community in their county.
Caroline Wynne (00:13):
So I think it's almost like a, Hand in glove situation now where things are matched correctly and that took a number of years and the Arts Council of Ireland were, funding and creating new funds all the time and I remember when I used to look at the Arts Council for what they were funding, maybe 15 years ago, there was a limited number of funds available and sometimes they weren't even available for organizations like myself to apply for.
No matter what walk of life they're from, they wouldn't be intimidated anymore by going to a concert. They would feel that was, part of their cultural journey. And it might not be something that they would go home and say, Oh, I'm looking 18, but it's something that they will have taken in and built their experience on.
They may end up, taking off in the direction of science finance, but they will always bring that knowledge and that, and it will, it'll, I'm trying to think of it'll make their social life and their creative life in their adult life flourish and be very all encompassing because they won't feel a threat by it and they'll just feel familiar familiarity with different genres of music and I think that's the key thing that you're not going into study music to be a leader of an orchestra or to be a, a, band that's selling sold out tours in the States.
I remember my first delving into a genuine collaboration. was when I started doing the Irish Festival or the Creative Connections Ireland Festival in Sitges, which is just outside Barcelona. And it evolved from, it was the year 2013 and Ireland had just received the EU presidency for the first six months of 2013.
So I delved into this and I thought, how wonderful would this be? And I used the word collaboration with such ease. And then I was awarded the funding for the first the first event. We never thought it would continue into a festival. And I can remember getting a call from the funders and I'm saying, okay, you have a very wide portfolio of things you do in Ireland.
And it was in a small space, and I hadn't got the chance to, quite realized what the instruments sounded like indoors. And it's just, I thought, Oh, that should, it should have been in a different context. Now, everybody was very interested in it. It was lovely to hear it close up. But again, I realized very quickly why we had the tin whistle in Ireland for indoors.
You can put two people in a room from different countries and say, you play some of your music and you play some of yours, and you have a nice concert of two different genres of music. You don't have a collaboration really needs it needs somebody to lead it. It needs somebody to marry the understanding of both music.
Yes, we are definitely. And I do think that, there's a lot of reasons for it. I suppose education is the foundation of a lot of us and an openness. And I suppose in the past, a lot of music was passed down. In, from home to, from generation to generation. That's why traditional musicians.
And they've made the work and the journey of the promoter so much easier as well, because we no longer have to, when I think back at my early days, everything, I was surrounded constantly by paper and envelopes and labels, and, the notion, and I remember a colleague of mine ringing me up, and I was, oh, busy Monday afternoon, I was surrounded by paperwork.
That was 19, that was March. 1999 we were sitting in our office waiting for the post and with the picture of the Russian pianist so that we could complete the brochure. I would then have had to drive that said picture to the printers, whereas now everything is immediate, like we record stuff on our phone it's out in the public realm.
Yeah it, it has changed a lot and it's definitely, it's moving faster because now the Irish musician coming to Catalonia, they can Google a performer.
Priya Patel (00:24):
So leading on from that. What are your thoughts about Irish music on the world stage and into the future then?
And they'd suggest we do this, so we do that. And I used that to be honest, pretty a lot of the time to learn myself and to keep up with what was going on in the world. But one of the days, I think it might've been March and we were coming up to St. Patrick's weekend. And I said, now, okay, next week, now we're going to we're going to do a whole day of listening to Irish music and just discussing Irish music and who the main performers are.
We had maybe 130, 140 students there from, I think, eight different counties. And they were all at the top of their game in arrangements of music and learning and proficiency in their instruments. And they were all school age, all under 18. 18 and under, some of them 13, 14, 15, but and they were being mentored by tutors that they would be listening to regularly themselves.
Let it be an arrangement for a trad orchestra or a singer songwriter. And they're getting further, out there further. Like in Ireland, we're a small country. They do, they need to have an agency that promotes their music. to a larger audience and to a larger stage. And that is happening, also, the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris and the new Irish Centre in New York. It's a new strategic way, of looking at Irish culture because it's been funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Culture Ireland. And it's the hallmark, of quality of Irish performance regardless of the genre.
And I think, I'm hoping that the journey on that will be that every major city in, that there'll be a major Irish Arts Centre in at least one city in, as many countries as possible in the next 20 years. And I think that would, the amount of people I know who live in Paris who wouldn't possibly have gone seeking out a concert of a classical piano player from Ireland or a fiddle player from Clare, but now because it's been managed, it's been it's become a place that They frequent, they bring their children for workshops there, they go to the concerts, they'll all be there for Patrick's weekend in the courtyard, similar in New York.
Wow. That is so wonderful to hear such an exciting time for artists, but also for audiences, I think. And just to shift gears a little at the minute we talked about collaboration and community building. Which of course means multiple stakeholders. And do you have any advice or tips for arts managers when managing multiple stakeholders? Especially when dealing with really collaborative projects.
Working with the artists, I find it's a wonderful experience. And they're so willing to just put, to put their heart into it. To just, not have everything the one fit for all stages, they want to communicate about what's the audience going to be like here, how big is the audience, how, they're not just churning out the product now, they're actually, without actually realizing it, I think they're involved.
And then suddenly I'm thinking, Oh, my exuberance doesn't always match the Excel sheet. So I always have to make sure I have somebody having sight of my budgeting so that I don't get overexcited and run off with this. The community needs, I think I've talked about that a lot from the point of view is people are actually.
And that's a great gathering of people that go, they perform in, local libraries, they perform on the street, they perform. It's a lovely holistic day where everybody is celebrating their local culture and all communities turn out to that. There's such a wide range of arts workshops and music workshops for children now, that the adult audience is actually passively, and the adult community is passively learning about new genres of music.
How long is a piece of string? You could never put a full stop. It's like when I'm programming an event, it's really hard to put the full stop because you keep thinking of, Oh, I should let that person know what's happening. Oh my God, I didn't do this. You're constantly you're thinking of where else you could engage and it could, your head would be going around in circles thinking about that all the time.
I'm just implementing at the next level, but it is happening and it's been very considered at the moment. Local authorities, their roles have changed so much. The role of the. The arts office now is very much in the strategic planning and in the budgeting and the funding, and they're much more omniscient than they would have been in the past.
A lot did change after that in a very positive way. Artists became and performers became, so vital. In the sustaining people's mental health, their day to day existence during lockdown. And I also think then by virtue of that, that the funders realize this isn't just something we're doing to humor the communities and humor everybody.
And they had a, the government initiative was the local live, where they invested in each county. To pro to promote the artist and pay the artist for events in a very controlled environment in 2021. And so the art scope project that evolved from that was the Rev. We called it the Revival of Live.
That there's now in South Dublin, they have an annual programme now called South Dublin Live, where, which is an initiative to do things outdoors, indoors, to just engage with the creative community. So it went from the local live and our umbrella of that was Revival of Live, and it's now the umbrella of the county is South Dublin Live.
Caroline Wynne (00:38):
I think again, maybe it's just so easy for artists to connect now that it's not about in the past that, they went did their gig did an ex, Friday night gig, Saturday night gig, Sunday night gig. And it was all very much, it was, quite in isolation. Whereas now there's a great willingness for performers to, if they're doing a gig somewhere Saturday night, Oh, let's invite my colleague.
Every now and again, I think, Oh, I'd love to do some collaboration in Turkey, or I've had lots of places I'd love to do stuff. But Time is against me, I think, and so I'm just so delighted with the connections we've made in Sitges between the Irish performers who travel over and the local connections with local performers.
They go for their swim in the morning. I remember a number of years ago, meeting a performer coming down the street at eight o'clock in the morning with a barrel on case. And I thought, Oh my God, there must be a workshop on I've forgotten about this. Where is it? And I said where are you off to?
It just, it does bring about there's a different, and I've had so many performers and they're not the same. It's genuine. They say to me, something happens when the Irish performers come to Sitges. Something happens over those five days. And one of the performers told me that as far as he knows, six albums have actually come out of the Sitges Festival, where somebody meets a performer that they wouldn't have worked with before.
Will you join me for that song? And then they say to the clarinet player, Will you join us for that one? You're actually evolving daily with the festival. That by the time our final concert on the Sunday of the festival last year was programmed for no crows, six musicians, And 15 musicians actually appeared on stage.
So that's very much about being the community of performers and time to spend together and performing. If you're on the circuit, it can be quite lonely, can be quite tiring. Whereas the Sitges experience is it does, it allows things to happen. And then the audience, it's not often as well, that an audience go to a festival and that they get to, to, meet their, the performer that they've come for and they get to see them having a coffee on the street and they stop and chat.
Yeah, things happen. Sitges is a very special place and a lot of things happen there, but I do think it's the neutrality of it and time because performers are on a roller coaster and they're self employed. Nobody is, handing them an end of week or summer holiday.
You're igniting ideas yourself of where that little bit of news could take you and how that could develop into a new program. Yeah, so it's, That, that community of audience, I think, and that happens very much at smaller events. That's, I remember saying to somebody a few years ago when I was planning something and said, how will that work or, and I said now, it's, we expect a listening audience and the person laughing at me, they said, how can you expect an audience to listen?
We have worked at some of the larger festivals, but that wouldn't be what we curate or produce because it's just not, coming from the journey I have, it's been more niche things. And I think in that. You can make interesting, you can make wonderful things happen and just seize that moment of where people are open enough to go.
It's the little moments that you have to capture. And on the days, I suppose that programming and managing and promoting of something, it becomes tedious and you're just thinking you're on a merry go round that's never going to stop. And where do you, at what point in the lead up to it, do you say I've done enough now?
And I think once, when you share those nuggets with people it makes. It springboards to them appreciating the little detail of what makes the experience special. And, yeah, I'm, I'll stick it out for another while, Priya. You have to. Yes, exactly. I love that idea of what you were saying about sort of ArtScope's focus in terms of kind of these smaller, more intimate really audience
And the Catalan poet said I've, an interesting thing happened to me, he said, I've a suitcase in my attic full of Pierce Hutchinson's, memorabilia. Pierce had lived in Barcelona for a long number of years and had translated a lot of Catalan poetry into Irish and English. And when he was coming to the end of his time, he was ill.
He was lecturing in the, he was lecturing in the university. And After meeting at the end of the poetry reading in Sitges, that suitcase was returned to Ireland and is now in Pierce Hutchinson's archives in Maynooth University. Oh, that little chance meeting and chatting over dinner afterwards came about the suitcase and that conversation happened the end of October and the 7th of December the suitcase landed in Ireland and I think by Christmas it was Christmas.
That wouldn't ordinarily happen. Now, unfortunately, there's no grant for those kinds of little happenings. So you have to just hope they happen along the way. But yeah, so there's, they're the moments that keep you going when you're doing events.
But with not being indulged in the, we did a lovely event last Saturday in the wonderful in Dun Laoghaire, the lexicon it was Ireland Reads Day and it was a day in celebration of reading and books and the lexicon library and theatre space. They had the whole building taken over with events.
We started doing that over during lockdown and a number of projects evolved from that one called Follow the Tune, where we studied the music and recorded the music of North and interviewed the performers and just did a trail of indigenous stuff. traditional music through the musician and the tune.
So we're off to do a bit more filming in March on that. And I'm planning my work and some more gigs with the Vogler Quartet in Berlin. And then lots of days working on interesting things in, as backup. event management staff for events in the lexicon.
So I've just was chatting to myself as I often do to my computer. I said, Oh my God, this is like a Rubik's cube trying to get this together. I'll just never get everybody. And then I suddenly thought yeah this ensemble is like a Rubik's Cube because they're all different genres of musicians.
They really want to come together for just a creative reason and a creative platform. And if they get a couple of gigs out of us where they can showcase what they've put together, then that's great. Everybody's happy and we, there's no there's no clock ticking on it, but it's a lovely creative one. So that's, yeah, there's no standard month in the life of Artscope really.
And you're trying to keep up with all the moving parts. And then I'm thinking, Oh my God, things were all so easy when it was the envelopes and the labels and the stamps, but Oh my God, no, it wasn't. It's so easy now to just feel you can. It was sad actually years ago when I think of it some of the lovely projects we did and only a handful of people would know about them unless you had their address and unless you had them on your mailing list, they weren't going to know.
I think experience and as somebody young going into the business and you see back, even, in Ireland a number of years ago, you could, and I think this has gone back to my very first five minutes of my bending your ear where I was saying I went to study music. But what I didn't realize was I wanted to do what I'm doing now, but there was no platform.
(00:59):
But I think I'd hope that younger people going into it will take the work experience because it, you cannot beat the experience of it. It's so much built on the ground and some of the situations you find yourself in. I just, I don't know how you could learn that in college. You can learn that now, maybe I could well have done with going to college to learn a little bit more about budgeting, but for young people starting into event management, it's the day before your event when you've spent this money and you have people coming and it, it's a, it's scary at times.
And also to. Have a good knowledge about a lot of genres. rather than feeling you have to be an expert on one, I think. And also, key for me is that I know where to draw the line on where not to interfere. Surround yourself by good people, and I always have a good stage manager, a good lighting technician, good sound engineer, and don't interfere.
We didn't get it right the first time. So you just have to move with it. But I think it's just important to, to just. to go with it, but to not to be afraid of it and to stay in your lane. And if this is what your role, and you can't beat a good event management plan and stick to it. Now I'm the first to break that rule, but everybody says to me, No, Caroline, your Bible is your event management plan.
You just you like to feel that they have been thrown into a few different scenarios and that it's not and it's amazing things that that you take for granted as you move on in the work. They don't actually come naturally to people at the beginning. I remember working with somebody and in the early days, and they continued to work really well with us, while, they're no longer, they were emigrating then, so we continued working very successfully together.
So that was just the initial thing. So never take for granted that just because something seems seems, Just the, very simple because you've been doing it for years that you know the part everybody has to be given no matter what role they go into they have to be nurtured along as though presuming that they're not sure what direction to face when they're standing in the door so you have to take it from that and be patient with them and patience is not my virtue.
But it's it's. It's a great journey and it's been a great, it's a great job to be in event management, production, all of that. And we're in it at the best time. I don't know how better it can get really, because there's only so many people can go to so many events in their lives and it's just, it's flourishing at the moment.
And then, another, you look on a Facebook post another day and it's about, an indie awards and it's about contemporary classical music, it is just such it's such a great time to be part of this because you're at the cutting edge of so many genres and coming of age of a lot of genres, that were very marginalized for a long while and not getting the funding they needed and therefore they, the performers not following that.
And I admire them so much because I would never be one of them. I'd be a good organizer and I could talk forever, But put me into a room to try and come up with a strategic plan for something that I'm not immersed in is such a different skill set. And I think that's, there's a there's a thinking and there's a style of education I think at the moment where it's allowing younger people to be more critical thinkers.
Priya Patel (01:07):
That's it from us at the arts and everything in between. And if you're interested in learning more about art scopes work, you can visit art scoped dot I. E. And if you fancy a trip to switches Spain, this October, Do check out creative-connections.edu that's connections with an ex. The festival takes place from the 24th to the 27th of October.
Hello, and welcome to the arts and everything in between. I'm your host Pria Patel. In today's episode, we are chatting with art scopes, founder and director Caroline Winn about collaborating community building and managing arts projects with multiple stakeholders.
(00:01):
Caroline is the director of art scope. Art scope specializes in the provision and management of high caliber arts programs and events for government bodies, local authorities, national and international festivals and projects, schools, and community groups.
Caroline Wynne (00:02):
I studied music in college and I suppose back in the 80s when you went to college to study music in Ireland, it was very one dimensional and you went there to be a classical performer and to either teach music or play in an orchestra afterwards. So I wasn't as lucky as the current graduates were. The arts world is your oyster really once you graduate. Luckily I was practical enough to realize quite early on that the performing career wasn't for me. I just was realistic to know I was a piano player. I was a harp player. And I, while I loved playing, there were so many things.
And I suppose because I wasn't specializing in any one instrument, I got to, learn a little bit about lots of different instruments and try and pass on a starting point to children and teenagers. Throughout, as I was teaching, I always still felt that I wasn't in my niche. And I joined a local arts festival committee and back then arts festivals were run voluntary and you know you gave everybody for their own genre of expertise was on the committee and I can still remember it could be sometime around 1996 every month when we met you know there was always Things in the post, people advertising their wares.
And when I did that, I found that managing events was what I wanted to do, and maybe get paid for it, not always be voluntary. And that I also wanted to keep within the strand of education, which was very much my comfort zone, and which I felt was very much the starting point for where the arts should be going.
Priya Patel (00:05):
Oh, wow. So really a spark of inspiration. Okay. So can you tell us about some of the earliest events you were managing and organizing with art scope? How did you build up art scope?
There wasn't, you couldn't go on and Google, how do I find a percussionist to come to County Leitrim or to County Wicklow? You had to ring someone up and say, do you have any connections for that? So I suppose I became for a number of years and pre Google, I became the little black book of arts and practitioners for workshops and performance.
So They auditioned quartets from Ireland, the UK, Germany, Russia. There were many contenders for it. And the successful quartet were the Vogler Quartet from Berlin. So they moved to Sligo. They didn't actually want Lock, stock and barrel. They came and lived two weeks per month for three years in Sligo.
And so we ran a festival year one, the Vogler Spring Festival, and it was a festival of chamber music in Sligo. It was wonderful, it was in the grounds of, it was in the church where WB Yeats is buried outside of, and it was just a wonderful experience. And we did that for 20 years. And I still continue to work with the Vogler Quartet and they still have very much roots in in Sligo.
And it was, So energizing. It was getting into the communities, getting into the schools and most of all, it was dealing with and working alongside really high quality professional artists and you can't go wrong if the quality is right you're on the right track, really. So that was the first grown up art scope experience.
Yes, they go to the pub, they go out for a meal, but unless it was something really that they were following for a long time or that they had a great interest in, people didn't just take attending events as part of their daily social life. So I noticed that has changed so much. And I think a lot of that is down to good education practice.
And I remember saying to her, what do you mean? She said this kind of a, we were going to an orchestra and it was a lunchtime concert. And I remember she felt that this was not something that was for her. And then she said at home, we wouldn't listen to this kind of music and we wouldn't go to events like this.
Back in the, the late 90s their job was to promote culture within the county, to find money to promote it, but they also found themselves being the people producing the events. And, for a number of years, they were all things to all people. sectors of the arts community in their county.
Caroline Wynne (00:13):
So I think it's almost like a, Hand in glove situation now where things are matched correctly and that took a number of years and the Arts Council of Ireland were, funding and creating new funds all the time and I remember when I used to look at the Arts Council for what they were funding, maybe 15 years ago, there was a limited number of funds available and sometimes they weren't even available for organizations like myself to apply for.
No matter what walk of life they're from, they wouldn't be intimidated anymore by going to a concert. They would feel that was, part of their cultural journey. And it might not be something that they would go home and say, Oh, I'm looking 18, but it's something that they will have taken in and built their experience on.
They may end up, taking off in the direction of science finance, but they will always bring that knowledge and that, and it will, it'll, I'm trying to think of it'll make their social life and their creative life in their adult life flourish and be very all encompassing because they won't feel a threat by it and they'll just feel familiar familiarity with different genres of music and I think that's the key thing that you're not going into study music to be a leader of an orchestra or to be a, a, band that's selling sold out tours in the States.
I remember my first delving into a genuine collaboration. was when I started doing the Irish Festival or the Creative Connections Ireland Festival in Sitges, which is just outside Barcelona. And it evolved from, it was the year 2013 and Ireland had just received the EU presidency for the first six months of 2013.
So I delved into this and I thought, how wonderful would this be? And I used the word collaboration with such ease. And then I was awarded the funding for the first the first event. We never thought it would continue into a festival. And I can remember getting a call from the funders and I'm saying, okay, you have a very wide portfolio of things you do in Ireland.
And it was in a small space, and I hadn't got the chance to, quite realized what the instruments sounded like indoors. And it's just, I thought, Oh, that should, it should have been in a different context. Now, everybody was very interested in it. It was lovely to hear it close up. But again, I realized very quickly why we had the tin whistle in Ireland for indoors.
You can put two people in a room from different countries and say, you play some of your music and you play some of yours, and you have a nice concert of two different genres of music. You don't have a collaboration really needs it needs somebody to lead it. It needs somebody to marry the understanding of both music.
Yes, we are definitely. And I do think that, there's a lot of reasons for it. I suppose education is the foundation of a lot of us and an openness. And I suppose in the past, a lot of music was passed down. In, from home to, from generation to generation. That's why traditional musicians.
And they've made the work and the journey of the promoter so much easier as well, because we no longer have to, when I think back at my early days, everything, I was surrounded constantly by paper and envelopes and labels, and, the notion, and I remember a colleague of mine ringing me up, and I was, oh, busy Monday afternoon, I was surrounded by paperwork.
That was 19, that was March. 1999 we were sitting in our office waiting for the post and with the picture of the Russian pianist so that we could complete the brochure. I would then have had to drive that said picture to the printers, whereas now everything is immediate, like we record stuff on our phone it's out in the public realm.
Yeah it, it has changed a lot and it's definitely, it's moving faster because now the Irish musician coming to Catalonia, they can Google a performer.
Priya Patel (00:24):
So leading on from that. What are your thoughts about Irish music on the world stage and into the future then?
And they'd suggest we do this, so we do that. And I used that to be honest, pretty a lot of the time to learn myself and to keep up with what was going on in the world. But one of the days, I think it might've been March and we were coming up to St. Patrick's weekend. And I said, now, okay, next week, now we're going to we're going to do a whole day of listening to Irish music and just discussing Irish music and who the main performers are.
We had maybe 130, 140 students there from, I think, eight different counties. And they were all at the top of their game in arrangements of music and learning and proficiency in their instruments. And they were all school age, all under 18. 18 and under, some of them 13, 14, 15, but and they were being mentored by tutors that they would be listening to regularly themselves.
Let it be an arrangement for a trad orchestra or a singer songwriter. And they're getting further, out there further. Like in Ireland, we're a small country. They do, they need to have an agency that promotes their music. to a larger audience and to a larger stage. And that is happening, also, the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris and the new Irish Centre in New York. It's a new strategic way, of looking at Irish culture because it's been funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Culture Ireland. And it's the hallmark, of quality of Irish performance regardless of the genre.
And I think, I'm hoping that the journey on that will be that every major city in, that there'll be a major Irish Arts Centre in at least one city in, as many countries as possible in the next 20 years. And I think that would, the amount of people I know who live in Paris who wouldn't possibly have gone seeking out a concert of a classical piano player from Ireland or a fiddle player from Clare, but now because it's been managed, it's been it's become a place that They frequent, they bring their children for workshops there, they go to the concerts, they'll all be there for Patrick's weekend in the courtyard, similar in New York.
Wow. That is so wonderful to hear such an exciting time for artists, but also for audiences, I think. And just to shift gears a little at the minute we talked about collaboration and community building. Which of course means multiple stakeholders. And do you have any advice or tips for arts managers when managing multiple stakeholders? Especially when dealing with really collaborative projects.
Working with the artists, I find it's a wonderful experience. And they're so willing to just put, to put their heart into it. To just, not have everything the one fit for all stages, they want to communicate about what's the audience going to be like here, how big is the audience, how, they're not just churning out the product now, they're actually, without actually realizing it, I think they're involved.
And then suddenly I'm thinking, Oh, my exuberance doesn't always match the Excel sheet. So I always have to make sure I have somebody having sight of my budgeting so that I don't get overexcited and run off with this. The community needs, I think I've talked about that a lot from the point of view is people are actually.
And that's a great gathering of people that go, they perform in, local libraries, they perform on the street, they perform. It's a lovely holistic day where everybody is celebrating their local culture and all communities turn out to that. There's such a wide range of arts workshops and music workshops for children now, that the adult audience is actually passively, and the adult community is passively learning about new genres of music.
How long is a piece of string? You could never put a full stop. It's like when I'm programming an event, it's really hard to put the full stop because you keep thinking of, Oh, I should let that person know what's happening. Oh my God, I didn't do this. You're constantly you're thinking of where else you could engage and it could, your head would be going around in circles thinking about that all the time.
I'm just implementing at the next level, but it is happening and it's been very considered at the moment. Local authorities, their roles have changed so much. The role of the. The arts office now is very much in the strategic planning and in the budgeting and the funding, and they're much more omniscient than they would have been in the past.
A lot did change after that in a very positive way. Artists became and performers became, so vital. In the sustaining people's mental health, their day to day existence during lockdown. And I also think then by virtue of that, that the funders realize this isn't just something we're doing to humor the communities and humor everybody.
And they had a, the government initiative was the local live, where they invested in each county. To pro to promote the artist and pay the artist for events in a very controlled environment in 2021. And so the art scope project that evolved from that was the Rev. We called it the Revival of Live.
That there's now in South Dublin, they have an annual programme now called South Dublin Live, where, which is an initiative to do things outdoors, indoors, to just engage with the creative community. So it went from the local live and our umbrella of that was Revival of Live, and it's now the umbrella of the county is South Dublin Live.
Caroline Wynne (00:38):
I think again, maybe it's just so easy for artists to connect now that it's not about in the past that, they went did their gig did an ex, Friday night gig, Saturday night gig, Sunday night gig. And it was all very much, it was, quite in isolation. Whereas now there's a great willingness for performers to, if they're doing a gig somewhere Saturday night, Oh, let's invite my colleague.
Every now and again, I think, Oh, I'd love to do some collaboration in Turkey, or I've had lots of places I'd love to do stuff. But Time is against me, I think, and so I'm just so delighted with the connections we've made in Sitges between the Irish performers who travel over and the local connections with local performers.
They go for their swim in the morning. I remember a number of years ago, meeting a performer coming down the street at eight o'clock in the morning with a barrel on case. And I thought, Oh my God, there must be a workshop on I've forgotten about this. Where is it? And I said where are you off to?
It just, it does bring about there's a different, and I've had so many performers and they're not the same. It's genuine. They say to me, something happens when the Irish performers come to Sitges. Something happens over those five days. And one of the performers told me that as far as he knows, six albums have actually come out of the Sitges Festival, where somebody meets a performer that they wouldn't have worked with before.
Will you join me for that song? And then they say to the clarinet player, Will you join us for that one? You're actually evolving daily with the festival. That by the time our final concert on the Sunday of the festival last year was programmed for no crows, six musicians, And 15 musicians actually appeared on stage.
So that's very much about being the community of performers and time to spend together and performing. If you're on the circuit, it can be quite lonely, can be quite tiring. Whereas the Sitges experience is it does, it allows things to happen. And then the audience, it's not often as well, that an audience go to a festival and that they get to, to, meet their, the performer that they've come for and they get to see them having a coffee on the street and they stop and chat.
Yeah, things happen. Sitges is a very special place and a lot of things happen there, but I do think it's the neutrality of it and time because performers are on a roller coaster and they're self employed. Nobody is, handing them an end of week or summer holiday.
You're igniting ideas yourself of where that little bit of news could take you and how that could develop into a new program. Yeah, so it's, That, that community of audience, I think, and that happens very much at smaller events. That's, I remember saying to somebody a few years ago when I was planning something and said, how will that work or, and I said now, it's, we expect a listening audience and the person laughing at me, they said, how can you expect an audience to listen?
We have worked at some of the larger festivals, but that wouldn't be what we curate or produce because it's just not, coming from the journey I have, it's been more niche things. And I think in that. You can make interesting, you can make wonderful things happen and just seize that moment of where people are open enough to go.
It's the little moments that you have to capture. And on the days, I suppose that programming and managing and promoting of something, it becomes tedious and you're just thinking you're on a merry go round that's never going to stop. And where do you, at what point in the lead up to it, do you say I've done enough now?
And I think once, when you share those nuggets with people it makes. It springboards to them appreciating the little detail of what makes the experience special. And, yeah, I'm, I'll stick it out for another while, Priya. You have to. Yes, exactly. I love that idea of what you were saying about sort of ArtScope's focus in terms of kind of these smaller, more intimate really audience
And the Catalan poet said I've, an interesting thing happened to me, he said, I've a suitcase in my attic full of Pierce Hutchinson's, memorabilia. Pierce had lived in Barcelona for a long number of years and had translated a lot of Catalan poetry into Irish and English. And when he was coming to the end of his time, he was ill.
He was lecturing in the, he was lecturing in the university. And After meeting at the end of the poetry reading in Sitges, that suitcase was returned to Ireland and is now in Pierce Hutchinson's archives in Maynooth University. Oh, that little chance meeting and chatting over dinner afterwards came about the suitcase and that conversation happened the end of October and the 7th of December the suitcase landed in Ireland and I think by Christmas it was Christmas.
That wouldn't ordinarily happen. Now, unfortunately, there's no grant for those kinds of little happenings. So you have to just hope they happen along the way. But yeah, so there's, they're the moments that keep you going when you're doing events.
But with not being indulged in the, we did a lovely event last Saturday in the wonderful in Dun Laoghaire, the lexicon it was Ireland Reads Day and it was a day in celebration of reading and books and the lexicon library and theatre space. They had the whole building taken over with events.
We started doing that over during lockdown and a number of projects evolved from that one called Follow the Tune, where we studied the music and recorded the music of North and interviewed the performers and just did a trail of indigenous stuff. traditional music through the musician and the tune.
So we're off to do a bit more filming in March on that. And I'm planning my work and some more gigs with the Vogler Quartet in Berlin. And then lots of days working on interesting things in, as backup. event management staff for events in the lexicon.
So I've just was chatting to myself as I often do to my computer. I said, Oh my God, this is like a Rubik's cube trying to get this together. I'll just never get everybody. And then I suddenly thought yeah this ensemble is like a Rubik's Cube because they're all different genres of musicians.
They really want to come together for just a creative reason and a creative platform. And if they get a couple of gigs out of us where they can showcase what they've put together, then that's great. Everybody's happy and we, there's no there's no clock ticking on it, but it's a lovely creative one. So that's, yeah, there's no standard month in the life of Artscope really.
And you're trying to keep up with all the moving parts. And then I'm thinking, Oh my God, things were all so easy when it was the envelopes and the labels and the stamps, but Oh my God, no, it wasn't. It's so easy now to just feel you can. It was sad actually years ago when I think of it some of the lovely projects we did and only a handful of people would know about them unless you had their address and unless you had them on your mailing list, they weren't going to know.
I think experience and as somebody young going into the business and you see back, even, in Ireland a number of years ago, you could, and I think this has gone back to my very first five minutes of my bending your ear where I was saying I went to study music. But what I didn't realize was I wanted to do what I'm doing now, but there was no platform.
(00:59):
But I think I'd hope that younger people going into it will take the work experience because it, you cannot beat the experience of it. It's so much built on the ground and some of the situations you find yourself in. I just, I don't know how you could learn that in college. You can learn that now, maybe I could well have done with going to college to learn a little bit more about budgeting, but for young people starting into event management, it's the day before your event when you've spent this money and you have people coming and it, it's a, it's scary at times.
And also to. Have a good knowledge about a lot of genres. rather than feeling you have to be an expert on one, I think. And also, key for me is that I know where to draw the line on where not to interfere. Surround yourself by good people, and I always have a good stage manager, a good lighting technician, good sound engineer, and don't interfere.
We didn't get it right the first time. So you just have to move with it. But I think it's just important to, to just. to go with it, but to not to be afraid of it and to stay in your lane. And if this is what your role, and you can't beat a good event management plan and stick to it. Now I'm the first to break that rule, but everybody says to me, No, Caroline, your Bible is your event management plan.
You just you like to feel that they have been thrown into a few different scenarios and that it's not and it's amazing things that that you take for granted as you move on in the work. They don't actually come naturally to people at the beginning. I remember working with somebody and in the early days, and they continued to work really well with us, while, they're no longer, they were emigrating then, so we continued working very successfully together.
So that was just the initial thing. So never take for granted that just because something seems seems, Just the, very simple because you've been doing it for years that you know the part everybody has to be given no matter what role they go into they have to be nurtured along as though presuming that they're not sure what direction to face when they're standing in the door so you have to take it from that and be patient with them and patience is not my virtue.
But it's it's. It's a great journey and it's been a great, it's a great job to be in event management, production, all of that. And we're in it at the best time. I don't know how better it can get really, because there's only so many people can go to so many events in their lives and it's just, it's flourishing at the moment.
And then, another, you look on a Facebook post another day and it's about, an indie awards and it's about contemporary classical music, it is just such it's such a great time to be part of this because you're at the cutting edge of so many genres and coming of age of a lot of genres, that were very marginalized for a long while and not getting the funding they needed and therefore they, the performers not following that.
And I admire them so much because I would never be one of them. I'd be a good organizer and I could talk forever, But put me into a room to try and come up with a strategic plan for something that I'm not immersed in is such a different skill set. And I think that's, there's a there's a thinking and there's a style of education I think at the moment where it's allowing younger people to be more critical thinkers.
Priya Patel (01:07):
That's it from us at the arts and everything in between. And if you're interested in learning more about art scopes work, you can visit art scoped dot I. E. And if you fancy a trip to switches Spain, this October, Do check out creative-connections.edu that's connections with an ex. The festival takes place from the 24th to the 27th of October.
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