The Road to Chorus Management

As the profession of chorus management matures, managers are finding new ways into their careers.

While those who lead choruses have traditionally emerged from the ranks of singers, today’s career executive directors have arrived at their posts through a variety of personal and professional journeys. A love of music has often been the first step, but a combination of formal education, serendipity, and the kindness of colleagues have led them to where they are today.

Four Divergent Paths

Being a chorus manager may not top a child’s list of dream careers, but more than a dozen interviews with executive directors reveals that when the opportunity arrives, generally in college, it is embraced with passion.

Christi Schwarten’s background was in choral singing and theater, but it wasn’t until well into her undergraduate years at Baldwin-Wallace College that an arts management career occurred to her. “I thought magic fairies ran all these arts organizations,” she jokes. A class in theater management “opened a whole new world,” leading her directly into a master’s degree in arts management at the University of Akron.

When a mid-level position opened at the Fairfax Choral Society she was pessimistic about her chances, but said “what the heck” and applied. Three months later the executive director departed and the board elevated Schwarten to that position.

Alison Combes followed many dreams in her youth, including physical education, deaf education, and choral conducting. She ultimately graduated from Frostburg State University with a degree in music management and went to work for The Washington Chorus, starting as administrative assistant and advancing to the position of deputy director, all the while getting her masters in arts administration at American University. After 13 years, she was appointed executive director of Washington’s Cathedral Choral Society in 2006.

David Howse pursued music and pre-med simultaneously, but in his junior year took the plunge into professional singing. “I decided to follow my heart and be poor,” he says. After receiving a graduate degree in voice he taught singing for several years and became a stay-at-home dad, but when he came across the opportunity to work at the Boston Children’s Chorus his initial impulse was hesitation.

“I had never had a ‘real’ job, never a 9 to 5 job. I was a singer. I had vowed never to work in an office, so with reluctance I looked at the job description. What excited me was the mission of the organization.” He began as a program manager and over time advanced to executive director.

Linda Moxley, executive director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, considered law school and veterinary school before majoring in music education and piano. Directly after graduation she enrolled in the University of Cincinnati’s graduate program in arts management, which included a year as an intern at the Saint Louis Symphony.

After more than 20 years in the orchestra field as a marketing and public relations executive, she established her own consulting firm. BCAS was one of her clients, a relationship that led to her becoming executive director, a position that has enabled her to maintain her consulting business, albeit on a smaller scale.

Internships, Mentors, and Colleagues Open Doors

Personal epiphany and formal education are just two of the essential ingredients in the development of an executive director. Indeed, the factor that influenced these chorus leaders most profoundly was an internship with an arts organization either during or immediately after their college years. “You want to have that experience before you commit yourself to a career and say, ‘Oh no, what have I done?'” says one executive director.

Moxley believes that choruses should craft an actual job description for their interns to ensure that the experience is mutually rewarding for both the individual and the organization. “Very often an intern is looked upon as someone to do filing, typing, and updating the database,” she says. “It’s important that you give them a meaningful experience. It’s up to the person pursuing the internship to say, ‘Here’s what I’d like to get out of it,’ even if they don’t quite know how to say that.”

She feels strongly that interns should dedicate at least 10 hours a week for three months. “If it’s just a couple of weeks or infrequently, it’s hard for them to delve into the complexities and it could end up being more work than help,” she cautions.

The Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin requires a minimum of two years of post-undergraduate work experience in the arts for its applicants, according to director Andrew Taylor, who expects those prerequisite years to increase. The internship mandate continues while they are in the program: All students are placed with local arts and cultural organizations while they are in the program.

“We are an essential asset to the arts community in Madison,” says Taylor. “We provide highly trained management staff at a subsidized rate because we want skin in the game.”

If the proving ground for a career in chorus management is the internship experience, continued success and career development is a function of reaching out into the field for fellowship among colleagues. It’s not just the little things—Can you show me how you fill out an IRS Form 990? Do you have suggestions for how I can lower my insurance? What documents do you retain and for how long?—it’s the big things, too.

Aaron Wulff, executive director of the Rose Ensemble, spent time in a variety of for-profit and nonprofit arts positions, but says where he really learned management was from a volunteer mentor at a service corps of retired executives. She took him under her wing and has been his advisor for nearly nine years.

“I talk with my mentor about everything from employee work styles to temperaments, motivators, skill sets, values, ethics, human resources, marketing, law, and finance.” --Aaron Wulff 

“We talk about everything from employee work styles to temperaments, motivators, skill sets, values, ethics, human resources, marketing, law, and finance,” he says. Another important mentor for Wulff has been his father, a manager for J.C. Penney. “A lot of what shaped my path was conversations around the dinner table. Dad would talk about work, issues of working with people, people who were team players and those who were not. I oftentimes go to him and ask, ‘What would you do?’”

“Don’t underestimate the value of making personal connections, of being able to network and create opportunities for collaboration,” says Mary Lam-Rodrigues of the Kalamazoo Bach Chorus.

“These days with social media and email it’s so easy not to talk to someone or meet someone to do business. I think when you have the opportunity to do that you should take it. It makes a more meaningful relationship and connection to the people you work with.”

“One of the most important elements in the field is remaining open to and creating friends with your colleagues,” says Kevin C. Stacy, executive director of San Mateo’s Masterworks Chorale, who looks to Chorus America and its Annual Conference as a mechanism for building his network.

“One of the great aspects of Chorus America is bringing leaders together in a single spot so that you can actually form those relationships,” he says.

“It’s a sharing community, and I find that people are very happy to talk about what works for them,” says Howse, who now finds himself fielding questions from other organizations and giving guidance. “They hear about us and our mission. How can we say no when so many people said yes to us?”

Retooling and Recharging with an Advanced Degree

Mary Lam-Rodrigues studied music and business at the University of Evansville and supplemented her formal education with internships, including the Evansville Philharmonic and the Grant Park Festival.

After college, Lam-Rodrigues moved directly to Kalamazoo for her first job as ticketing manager for the Kalamazoo Symphony. Over time she advanced to associate director of development, but after five years she felt burned out and decided that graduate school might be a way to recharge her batteries.

She attended Michigan State where she pursued an MBA in marketing and information systems, but among the most valuable lessons she learned in grad school was that the grass is not always greener on for-profit side.

“A lot of my colleagues were bankers who had worked on Wall Street and they were looking for something different. I needed to remove myself from what I was doing to realize I was lucky to be doing what I was doing.”

She returned to the arts and spent five years managing a Kalamazoo presenting organization before joining the Bach Festival Society as executive director. It was, she says, “a natural progression.”

Schwarten says that the management aspects of graduate school were significantly helpful. “You get a really good feel for all the different components of what it means to be a 501(c)3 and how a board functions in an ideal world. When you come into a job you have all that knowledge to draw from and you are able to apply it as it fits the organization. What you don’t learn is the inner mechanics of working with people and the dynamic of the executive director’s relationship to others and how to work together.”

“I think it’s good for managers to know the theories and the realities,” says Combes. “The two of them played nicely off each other.” Stacy says among the arts management classes he found most useful were those related to strategic planning and time management, which he has found to be a crucial part of choral administration.

Not all chorus managers rave about their advanced arts management degrees. One experienced a situation where other classmates were straight out of undergraduate degrees and had little real-world experience: “The classes ended up being about the professor asking me how I do it.” Another acknowledges that the pursuit of the degree was simply “to be taken more seriously by the field.”

"Grad school gives you a really good feel for all the different components of what it means to be a 501(c)3 and how a board functions in an ideal world. When you come into a job you have all that knowledge to draw from and you are able to apply it as it fits the organization." --Christi Schwarten 

Another says the value of classroom theory was debatable even if the specific takeaways have proven valuable. “I learned a lot about grants receivable, restricted income, audits. I don’t necessarily speak accounting, but I understand money now.”

Taylor of the Bolz Center acknowledges that an advanced degree is not for everyone. “You can be a smart and effective leader without going through a management program,” he says, “but there are people who thrive in the environment.”

Professional Development Keeps Managers Growing

Opportunities for advanced learning exist outside of formal arts administration programs as well. Howse has participated in a local emerging leaders program in Boston and attended an executive leadership program at Harvard Business School, courtesy of State Street Bank, a major BCC supporter.

Mary Ann de Barbieri, a management consultant for nonprofits, was engaged by Chorus America in 2002 to develop a course to assist choruses in developing business and operational skills. A veteran of commercial and nonprofit theater, she brought insight into the challenges of running a nonprofit arts organization.

“They are smart people who want to do right but they often don’t have the knowledge or theory,” she says. “They may have parts but not the means to put them together.”

Working with Chorus America she developed the Chorus Management Institute that addresses strategic planning, governance, fundraising, and communications, with faculty drawn from both inside and outside the choral field. The intensive two-day program covers both the theory of effective chorus management as well as the practical realities that leaders face every day.

Though most agree that the basics of arts administration degrees are transferable to other performing arts jobs—finance, marketing, information technology, governance—there are chorus-specific issues that cannot be taught in graduate school: transitioning a singer board to a community board, managing the tripartite relationship between a manager, artistic director, and a board leader, and navigating the vast range of choruses in the spectrum from all-volunteer to all-professional, from a 12-voice a cappella ensemble with four programs a year to a 200-voice symphonic chorus with a year-round schedule.

And there is something else you can’t learn in graduate school. “You can’t teach passion,” says Taylor. “If someone has no real driving passion to making the art form vital, why are they here? We find people with passion. We don’t or can’t teach elements of personality and character that lead to leaders. We can foster and encourage it, but if there is no kernel it can’t be taught."

A Ladder Short on Rungs

As the chorus field grows and more choruses engage paid professional managers, the opportunities for advancement are expected to grow, but in the meantime the ladder is short on rungs. Compared to the orchestra or theater world, where those with functional expertise can advance to more senior marketing and fundraising positions or those with general management ambitions can move to larger organizations, chorus managers often hit a ceiling.

The primary obstacle is “the law of numbers,” says Taylor. “Full-on professionally-staffed choirs are rare compared to orchestras and the infrastructure is such that there are not a lot of fully staffed professional ensembles. And usually when there is one they don’t have a deep bench.”

Taylor does see fluidity among chorus leaders, but it is often into or out of non-chorus opportunities, such as orchestras or performing arts centers. Bolz Center alumni have also migrated to other nonprofit fields such as healthcare and education.

Geography also sets limitations. What works in Chicago doesn’t work in Boston. What works in a big city does not work in a small town. “This is it for me in terms of choruses,” concedes one manager. “There’s nowhere to go from here except to different types of arts organizations.”

Geography is also a factor among those who temper the dreams of youth to the realities of adulthood. A manager who once dreamed of leading a major arts organization now acknowledges that such an ambition is at odds with the personal goals of family life. With a toddler at home and another child on the way, she says, “I’m more committed to my home life than my job. I’m staying put for 18 years.”

Still, there are those who remain optimistic and ambitious. “Someday I am going to leave,” says one executive director. “The time will come and everybody knows that. But I love working for choruses so much and I love the community so much that it would have to be the perfect job to pull me a way.”

Another says, “I do get calls regularly and while it’s flattering, I’m really committed to this organization over the next several years.”

One executive director has ambitions to set arts policy at a national level, while another has firm plans to stay put in the field, declaring, “At 50 I would love to be running a major choral organization.” Does this executive director have a specific one in mind? Not really. “Any organization that has a mission I believe in, a quality artistic product, and that is making a difference in the community will do.” Success attracts talent.


This article is reprinted from The Voice, Winter 2011-12.