To Get To Carnegie Hall, Practice, Practice — But Where?
by Sandy Ikeda
Fri, 16 May 2008 at 10:10 AM
The Orchestra of St. Luke's has announced that in 2010 it will open a state-of-the-art rehearsal, recording, and administrative facility for New York's musical community. To be called The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, it will be housed in half of a six-story building at 450 W. 37th St. (The Baryshnikov Arts Center owns and will use the rest of the building.) Not only will it be the home for the OSL and its various programs, other organizations will be able to rent rehearsal space there. You can read a New York Times article about it here.
The announcement highlights an essential but often overlooked element of cities that are centers of creativity and culture: For culture to emerge from congestion, culture needs room to do its thing. A place to flop for the night and a congenial coffeehouse nearby may suffice for some kinds of artists, but musicians, especially, need performance spaces and even more important a place to practice and practice.
The paradox is that the density of the living city, the hotbed of culture, means that space to perfect one's art is especially scarce. I know from personal experience, having done a little drumming myself, that rehearsal space and the freedom to create what lesser mortals call a "ruckus" is indispensable. All musicians who work in big cities, from the free-lance jazz saxophonist to the highest echelons of the symphonic world, face this challenge. A few organizations, like the New York Philharmonic, are wealthy enough or lucky enough to have permanent rehearsal spaces, but this is very rare.
(Even rarer perhaps is free space, which some artists in DUMBO enjoy. I blogged this back in March in "Can Helping Artists Stay Put Spur Development?"
The DiMenna Center will be a welcome addition to the professional-music community. From the OSL press release,
The midtown Manhattan center addresses the urgent needs of small-to-mid-size organizations and groups challenged by increasingly prohibitive real estate costs while trying to maintain their work and visibility in New York City. Upon completion, the 20,000-plus square foot facility will enable classical musicians to work and strengthen their artistic identities and will include a large rehearsal hall with state-of-the-art recording and staging capabilities, a chamber orchestra rehearsal hall, four sectional rehearsal halls, three artist studios, a musician lounge and café, a music resource center and library, available musician storage, and OSL's administrative offices.
Competition in the music business, while fundamentally the same as any other in a market economy, has some quirks that make it particularly hard for artists to cover their cost of production. Orchestral music in particular, despite advances in its recording and distribution over the past 100 years, is slow to progress technologically and remains a labor- and space-intensive activity. (This is the so-called "Baumol-Bowen thesis," which also applies to lawyers and accounts, the demand for whose services however have far outstripped those of classical musicians lately.) Reasonably priced rehearsal space, the promise of which excites so many about the St. Luke's project, helps to keep the creative output of the living city flowing.
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