Know Your People: How Music Entrepreneurs Can Expand the Audience for Classical Music

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Audience engagement is all the rage these days as the classical music field grapples with how to stay relevant in today’s culture. Many of us are asking the question of what do today’s audiences REALLY want. In my class at Yale last semester, we took up this question as part of our collaborative projects. The charge to my students was …

How Music Entrepreneurs Survive Tax Season: 6 Deductions to Help Minimize Your Taxes

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This week, I am delighted to share a guest blog post to help your financial management from Carolyn Mescher, an Entertainment CPA and musician from Nashville, TN who specializes in music accounting and taxes. As an artist and songwriter herself, Carolyn is intimately familiar with both the business and creative side of the music industry.  Carolyn wrote this article after …

Creative Problem Solving for Music Entrepreneurs: The Two Mindsets of Creativity

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How can a group of 20-something professional musician graduate students generate breakthrough solutions to the problems facing classical music today in order to insure the health and the vitality of the field? This was the focus of my new class last semester at the Yale School of Music entitled Collaboration, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. My goal was to teach creative problem …

How To Jumpstart Your Career Satisfaction: Take the Career Assessment

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Happy New Year! I hope that you enjoyed the holiday season and are looking forward to great things in the coming year! I am not big on New Year’s resolutions since it’s too easy to set yourself up for failure by reaching for unrealistic goals. Instead, I encourage people to reflect on the important areas of their lives and assess …

Professor of Music at Portland State University

I came to Astrid looking for ways to more effectively organize and pursue my work and life goals. As a creative artist, educator, arts administrator and entrepreneur, I was struggling to find a more fulfilling balance between my work, creative and personal pursuits Astrid’s coaching provided many helpful ideas for prioritizing and time-management, but it went far beyond that. Because …

Sō Percussion’s Model of Success: The Collaborative Entrepreneurial Ensemble

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One of the highlights of my class at Yale is when I invite alumni from the School of Music to speak to the students about their experience. Since my class this semester is focused on collaboration, I was thrilled to invite Jason Treuting and Eric Beach, two of the four members of the percussion ensemble Sō Percussion. Jason Treuting is the longest standing …

Know Your Purpose and Share Your Vision: How Music Entrepreneurs Find Their Collaborators

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Classical music faces a lot of challenges today and my goal in teaching and working with musicians is to help them find their place in the world of music and contribute something valuable and innovative. This fall, I began teaching a new class at Yale, entitled “Collaboration, Entrepreneurship and Innovation”. The premise of the course is that today’s artists need …