We were lucky to catch up with Audrey Vardanega recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Audrey, thanks for joining us today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?

One of the most unexpected problems I faced in my creative journey was the absence of preparation or training for becoming an arts entrepreneur and advocate for my own artistic career. As a classical musician, I received a tremendous amount of mentorship from my teachers on interpreting works of music and developing as a pianist. However, when it came to guidance on how to get concerts and create the foundation for a self-directed career, my preparation was extraordinarily lacking.

This has a lot to do with another major problem – the sense of mystery in attaining a classical music career and the inherent financial instability of the profession. Unless you have an agent getting concerts for you or you know the ‘right’ people, there’s no clear process for getting to perform – every single concert I have been invited to play has been through someone in my network who recommended me, a musician colleague who asked me to play with them, or through my own organizations which create opportunities for artists to perform. Because the opportunities to play in concert halls are limited in number, there’s a salient culture of keeping one’s contacts close and not sharing them with fellow musicians for fear of being passed over an opportunity to play. The real-world experience of a career in the classical arts boils down to waiting for presenters (people or organizations who organize and fund concerts) to ask you to play – in other words, waiting for other people to book you on an independent-contractor basis. The key phrase here is ‘independent contractor.’ We practice many hours to prepare for a performance (sometimes hundreds of hours if we’re learning a new piece for a performance). The performance takes place, then we’re back to square one – hunting for another opportunity to play. After confronting this problem through my own musical path, I feel extremely motivated to create sustainable alternatives that empower young artists to have control over their musical paths.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I began performing as a classical pianist at a young age in the Bay Area (where I grew up), and proceeded to attain a degree in the liberal arts. During my time in college, I felt that a life without music wasn’t the kind of life I wanted, so after I received my B.A., I went on to do a Masters in piano performance at Mannes The New School. I’ve always felt a strong need to have a say in my own career, so after I finished my Masters program, I went on to create a 501c3 nonprofit organization called Musaics of the Bay in the Bay Area devoted to providing opportunities for great young artists to perform and share their work. Creating Musaics was integral to my development as a self-directed artist and arts entrepreneur because it gave me the experience of curating events, programs and collaborations – some involving over 70 artists from the Bay Area and beyond – and helped me grow my confidence as both an artist and an artistic director. It was through this work that I connected with my partner, the pianist/composer and arts curator Christos Vayenas, who was doing similar work on the East Coast through an organization he founded called The Autumn Salon. Together, we have committed to creating an ecosystem that provides a sustainable alternative to young performing artists, composers and visual artists, which includes the work we do through Musaics of the Bay on the West Coast, The Autumn Salon on the East Coast, MuseDAO, a blockchain project creating the first patron token for classical music and historic performances (founded by Christos Vayenas and Sam Bodkin), and Arium, a free streaming platform devoted to sharing global stories of classical artists.

The vision for Arium arose during the early days of the pandemic, when virtual concerts were prolific. Together, Christos and I wanted to create a beautiful, curated online space for cinematic stories of inspiring young artists that Christos and I knew through our individual networks. In the classical music world, there’s a pronounced and harmful stereotype that musicians are ‘replaceable’ with one another since we play much of the same repertoire. With Arium, we wanted to shift the focus from the notion that musicians are ‘replaceable’ to the unique stories of individuals who are making music around the world. In a conventional concert season, you wouldn’t necessarily plan to see five different cellists playing the same works of solo Bach – however, Arium holds the space for the stories of five individual cellists, playing music around the world in different contexts and coming from different life paths, who play Bach to express something that’s completely unique to themselves.

The work we’re doing with Arium, The Autumn Salon, MuseDAO and Musaics of the Bay is still very much a work in progress. But we’re totally committed to devoting our lives to creating a more meaningful, more empowering, and more financially sustainable path for all great artists – not just the 1% of performers who are fortunate enough to build sustainable careers on performing alone.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Our mission is to create a more equitable future for classical musicians and artists, and to help shape the industry for a more sustainable future. Conventional ‘successful’ careers are predicated on an artist flying from city to city performing a program for their respective audiences. I always found the idea of musicians flying to perform for people odd, since there are people in one’s local community who are hungry for music! It’s like a great chef who travels to cook for people in other cities but never their own. This is not to mention the harmful environmental implications of a livelihood centered on flying to a new city once (or even twice) a week.

Christos and I have had the wonderful opportunity of learning what happens when you mobilize your local community through our work with Musaics of the Bay and The Autumn Salon. What we’ve created is a huge network of artists (both emerging and established) and community members who convene for salons, concerts, workshops, open rehearsals and artist gatherings who feel really connected to our vision. Through our concerts and salons, we’ve inspired new friendships to form and created a new ritual for our community to feel deeply connected to craft. I hope that in the years to come classical musicians will begin thinking more about the enormous potential of mobilizing their local communities and developing relationships with community members. For me, that’s been the most powerful element of my artistic career thus far – having community members consistently attend events, offer suggestions and support, and most importantly feel that they are part of something they want to pass forward and nourish for a long time.

Being an arts entrepreneur in the classical music space is a bit like having one foot in the 21st century and the other in the 20th. So many of the practices and expectations propagated by big classical music institutions are no different than what was happening 100 years ago! Christos and I both believe that there is extraordinary responsibility to help renew the art form; 1) by providing new contexts for sharing classical music that are less fixated on tradition and more focused on the music, 2) by empowering and coaching artists to create their own initiatives to share music with their communities, 3) by creating spaces for the nexus of Western classical music practices with world music traditions, and 4) by continuing to build patron communities to support this work over the next decades.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding part of being a performer is being in dialogue with the audience. As performers we develop the ability to feel how our audiences are responding to the music. We feel whether they are connected to what we’re sharing or distracted. I think of performance as a collective act – if every single person in the audience is willing to go where you’re taking them, then you have the potential for a life-changing and ecstatic collective experience, kind of like a group meditation. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does it’s one of the most extraordinary feelings.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.arium.live
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/audreyvardy/
• Other: www.musaics.org www.theautumnsalon.com https://www.vmedia.ventures/ https://www.muse-dao.co/

Image Credits
Pierre Lidar Christos Vayenas