NASO Meetings 2014

Canada Council for the Arts

On Octo­ber 19 and 20, 2014, I rep­re­sent­ed the CNMN at the meet­ing of the Nation­al Arts Ser­vice Orga­ni­za­tions (NASOs) in Ottawa. The meet­ing was short but incred­i­bly impact­ful. I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear Simon Brault, the new Direc­tor and CEO of the Cana­da Coun­cil, speak about his vision for the future of the Coun­cil. You can read his speech here: http://canadacouncil.ca/council/blog/2014/10/remarks-of-simon-brault

In short, he knows the coun­cil is in need of more mon­ey and he’s going to try and get it. He’s less inter­est­ed in con­sul­ta­tion than his pre­de­ces­sor and more inter­est­ed in action. This will hope­ful­ly lead to some sub­stan­tial changes to the Coun­cil over the next few years.

I also had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet with the oth­er NASOs in the music dis­ci­pline along with Aimé Don­tigny, Head of the music sec­tion. A ques­tion was posed to Mr. Don­tigny: what can our mem­bers do to sup­port the music sec­tion? He had three main points that he felt could sup­port the entire music milieu:

  1. Stop being at each oth­er’s throat! This is tongue-in-cheek, but the mes­sage is mean­ing­ful. All genres/styles of music strug­gle with fund­ing, out­reach, audi­ence engage­ment, etc. From orches­tras to exper­i­men­tal soloists, we all are try­ing to cre­ate a stronger musi­cal cul­ture for our cit­i­zens and we should remem­ber we are all in this together.
  2. Habits of Cana­di­ans have changed for spe­cial­ized music: no one cre­ates a gold­en bridge to con­nect to a larg­er audi­ence. How can we make sure that when some­body is look­ing for music on the Inter­net their first dis­cov­ery is Cana­di­an spe­cial­ized music? And, how can Cana­di­ans play­ing spe­cial­ized music con­tin­ue to inno­vate how they get the music to the citizens?
  3. We have to make pub­lic engage­ment impor­tant not by chang­ing our out­put but through engag­ing with the larg­er soci­ety that hosts us as artists. What we do needs to be all intrin­si­cal­ly linked to our larg­er society.

Pret­ty sim­ple, right?

It was a great cou­ple of days and helped me form a sense of our place in the larg­er cul­tur­al ecol­o­gy of our country.

There was a lot of research pre­sent­ed to the con­stituents and you can get it all here:

http://www.canadacouncil.ca/council/blog/2014/10/2014naso

Kyle Bren­ders – CNMN President

 

Direct link: NASO Meet­ings 2014
Return to full Bul­letin – Decem­ber 2014