PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
Click on the tabs below to advance your career by searching Contests & Awards, Schools, Festivals, Camps, Service Organizations, and our list of Services and Products, Scholarships and Grants and Events and Conferences.
And be sure to browse the excellent career advice offered by legendary Artist Manager Edna Landau in her Ask Edna blog and the entertainment law experts in their Law and Disorder blog.
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Send your questions to Edna Landau at AskEdna@MusicalAmerica.com and she’ll answer through Ask Edna. Click the links below to read Edna’s recent columns on the critical aspects of launching and managing and professional music career.
Communicating with Your Audience
During Edna’s 23 years as managing director of IMG Artists, she personally looked after the career of violinist, Itzhak Perlman and launched the careers of musicians such as pianists Evgeny Kissin and Lang Lang, violinist Hilary Hahn, and conductors Franz Welser-Mõst and Alan Gilbert.
Edna believes young musicians can grow their own careers, with “hard work, blind faith, passion for the cause, incessant networking and a vision that refuse[s] to be tarnished by naysayers.”
Special Reports
MA Top 30 Professional: Jan Feldman
Executive Director
Lawyers for the Creative Arts
Even before the Covid pandemic struck in March 2020, Chicago-based Lawyers for the Creative Arts was a trusted friend in need to the city’s artists and small arts organizations.
“One of our donors called us ‘the Red Cross for the arts,’” said Executive Director Jan Feldman, who has headed the 50-year-old organization since 2014. Trained as a commercial litigator, he served on the nonprofit LCA board for a decade before taking the top administrative post. LCA’s staff is small, but it has organized a network of hundreds of pro bono lawyers willing to work with artists and arts groups on legal issues.
“Normally our work is a steady flow,” Feldman said, “800 or so people or organizations each year that come to us for legal help of one kind of another. It’s very broad-based.”
When arts activity of all kinds ground to a halt due to Covid restrictions, he expected those typical requests to drop off. He was wrong.
“It was remarkable,” he said. “The arts community continued to come to us for legal help, to start new businesses and write new contracts. None of that seemed to stop. But on top of all that, there was this tremendous demand for [help with] Covid-related commercial problems.”
Feldman shifted all of LCA’s usual conferences and group presentations to the internet and added new ones related to the pandemic.
‘‘Interruption insurance, we did a program on that,” he said. “Estate planning—what if people get sick and die? We ended up rolling out all kinds of assistance programs to help organizations apply for loans and grants.”
As the pandemic eases, those kinds of questions are disappearing. But Feldman is still inspired by the way artists forged new ground early in the pandemic.
“It was amazing that folks continued to produce art,” he said. “There was a hopefulness about it that I found quite moving.”