Let’s talk about conferences. There are few things I love more. Maybe orchestras. And guess what: my mother was wrong when she said you can’t have it all in life. The truth is, you can have it all, or at least I can have it all (I don’t dare speak for the other gazillion people on this overcrowded planet), because there is actually such a thing as an orchestra conference. And I attended it. And it turned out to be the best thing ever. The 33rd Conference of the Association of British Orchestras centred around the topic of collaboration. It took place at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, which I thought to be an excellent choice because I just love Wales. I was, however, horribly nervous because I was going to the conference all by myself and did not know a single soul there. But I need not have worried. The moment I entered the venue, the conference spirit hit me, which means that I threw back my shoulders and grew ten centimetres, which makes me tall enough to be a runway model. Then I stood in a corner in my wallflower pose.
People always believe me to be a superior networker on the false assumption that I openly approach people and engage them in a conversation. This is wrong. I am a good networker, but not because I approach people but because I let people approach me. No matter where I go, people always come up and talk to me, more often than not to my own detriment. However, this time all the talking would have to benefit me because I was on a mission: I had gone to the conference to find an internship. My master plan was to talk to different people and if I felt there was a good moment, I would ask them if there was any chance they could give me an internship. As master plans go, this one was crap and was abandoned around three seconds after I arrived at the venue so that by the end of the day, the whole conference knew that there was a student called Gabriele and that she was looking for an internship. But first, let me tell you about the opening panel.
Although I have been to dozens of opening panels in dozens of countries, it soon became clear that this was different. Everywhere you looked, you saw the orchestral training of the participants shine through. People arrived for the welcome panel well on time and were so quiet during the speeches that you could have heard a pin drop. This would have been the perfect orchestral audience. In fact, this would have been the perfect orchestra. The speakers were the most accomplished group of speakers I have ever heard. The speeches were well rehearsed and lightened up by the occasional joke. Thus, Sophie Lewis told us that she was Sophie, but the that she assumed we had already figured that out, given that she was the lady in the group. Gavin Reid, chair of the ABO, called the board a handsome bunch without sounding even the tiniest bit patronizing. Upon hearing this, the handsome bunch got up from their front row seats, turned around and bowed with a stunning degree of synchronicity. I am assuming this had been practiced as well.
It was also during the opening panel that I found out who I want to be when I grow up. I want to be the next Kathryn McDowell, although a bit less British and terribly Austrian (Vienna Symphony Orchestra be afraid, be very afraid). Life is, after all, about being at the table, rather than the menu, as she said. And while I was still dreaming about the mayhem that will break loose in Vienna when I get appointed Chief Executive of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in about a decade (I want burning cars, no less), the opening panel closed with the words, ‘Thank you for the music and enjoy Cardiff’, the sweetest closing words I have ever heard. And then there was another short surprise because right the moment those words had been spoken, people jumped up from their seats and vacated the hall so quickly that the scene was eerily reminiscent of those airplane evacuation videos, except for the fact that nobody told us to protect our heads.
As is normal for conferences, there was a lot of talk about but the downside to talking about collaboration is that you also have to talk about what happens when collaboration goes wrong. Fortunately, I have a very mean streak and enjoy the odd ‘and then it went all down the drain’-story. I got my fair share of them during a session called ‘The Big Debate: International Collaboration’ and some of them were very enlightening. What surprised me most was that there are people who still feel strongly about the British Empire. This became evident when a gentleman grabbed the microphone, declared that he was from an Australasian Country (you could have been a bit more specific, young lad) and that the British had abandoned them. ‘With a signature you cast us aside’, he reprimanded the panel. Nobody quite knew what to say to that.
As was to be expected, there was an awful lot of talk about Brexit and about how negatively this would impact the arts world. And just as if I had not seen enough miracles for a day, the French appeared on the scene and saved the day. When the whole room had begun to wallow in self-pity to an extent that even I began to mourn the loss of the empire, a lady took the microphone. She was from a French orchestra and had come with some more French delegates. She then told us what seemed obvious to her but nobody else: if the French of all people go all the way to Cardiff to talk to their British orchestra colleagues, this shows that the people on the continent are still interested in collaborating with their British counterparts. There was no need to fret. She got a roaring round of applause. She deserved it. Then we were sent off with the advice to seek out as many networks as we could, to engage, network and play. I am not sucker for advice, but this one I was more than willing to take.
Next, I took part in a workshop called ‘I am biased!’ That could also be the title of my autobiography. The aim of the workshop was to uncover hidden biases and work on strategies to get rid of them. So far so good. We also looked at the question how unconscious bias can hinder equality. My educated guess is that if you’re unconsciously biased, you are mean to somebody without being aware of it rather than doing it on purpose, which kind of takes all the fun out of bias. There were also some stats. Apparently, our brain has to deal with 11 million bits of info in any given second, but we only consciously process 14. That explains why people sometimes don’t greet me. Rather than ignore me, they might not even see me. At least, that’s going to be my working hypothesis from now on. Also, we learned about different kinds of biases, ranging from conformity to confirmation bias, from halo effect to horns effect.
Next came the topic that has managed to creep into each and every conference I’ve ever been to like a broke student in search of free food: partnerships. You might think that this gets boring after a while, but quite the opposite. Everything I know about relationships of any kind does not come from self-help books, but from dance class and conferences. This time I learned that a good partnership should result in positive change for both (or more, we don’t want to perpetuate dated stereotypes here) partnerships (fine by me). However, you are not in control entirely (tricky), you need to let go of the need to control everything (oh, the misery!), and be realistic about what you can achieve (yes, go ahead and spoil all the fun!). Sometimes it’s also necessary to think about where you haven’t been a good partner (excuse me?), be prepared to start small and grow the partnership over time. After having received all this info, we were told that the session was nearly over but that there was still time for ‘just one long-winded, self-indulgent question that relates to nothing we’ve been talking about’. Apparently, the speaker really understood audiences.
There are so many more things I could tell you about the conference. I could tell you about the BBC Sessions which were presented by BBC 3 presenter Katie Derham, so it felt like being inside the radio, and Geza Kovács, who said that he had been invited because Mark Pemberton was looking for someone with fluent Hungarian and broken English. There was also a session on choruses during which I had to stifle a minor laughing fit because there was an organisation the acronym of which as ABCD. But here’s the most important thing: I looks like I might have found an internship. And as always when I go to conferences, I found my future boss the way I usually find people at conferences: by throwing back my shoulders, growing ten centimetres and then standing in my wallflower pose, waiting for people to come and talk to me.
