The Fredösphere

Fun stuff at ChoralTalk, an email list I subscribe to.  (It's archived on a public website.)  Gary Wayne started it off with this request:

The community chorus for whom I work is interested in creating an "artistic committee" to help guide the director in planning of programs and selection of musical literature. This is to be an advisory committee with the final decisions left to the director.

Please reply with your opinion on a committee of this nature. If your community chorus has a written description of such an committee, our chorus would love to have a copy.

Many directors responded with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility, to such a committee.  I served on one once, but it was a task force for generating suggestions, nothing more, and everyone stayed calm about it, so it ended without disaster.  (The director even programmed one of my suggestions, the gorgeous Corpus Christi Carol by Trond Kverno.)  Nevertheless, one board member with tons of music experience insisted the very existence of the committee was an insult to the director.

Scroll down from the link and you'll see other opinions, especially from those involved in arts marketing.  I can imagine a group helping enormously by brainstorming about concert themes, as long as the chain of command was well understood. 

More entertaining are the horror stories of micro-management.  My very favorite is from Dr. Alan Mason:

I have been the Director of Music at Temple Israel in Miami, Florida since 1991. This year we established an "artistic committee" consisting of several prominent congregants: a gynecologist, a lawyer, the owner of a large corporation, a dentist, a psychiatrist, and an accountant. After Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the "artistic committee" recommended that next year's High Holiday Choir should not include "the five girls up front" (the sopranos), because they sing so high. At that point I told the Rabbi, "there is no more artistic committee. There is only me." Thank goodness I have 14 successful years under my belt. My word carried more weight than their idiotic suggestion.