Business advice case study: The Keene Chamber Orchestra

Business Advice: Who I've Worked With

The Keene Chamber Orchestra

Keene, New Hampshire, under Eric Stumacher.

The Keene Chamber Orchestra was founded in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1991 by the pianist Eric Stumacher, who led it as music director and conductor for more than thirty years. I worked with the orchestra under Eric.

What they needed

A website
Bios of the principal players
A way to share their concerts
MP3s of their performances
A place for all their other important information

What I did

I built the website and wrote up the bios of the principals, and set up a way to share the concerts and MP3s so people who missed a performance could still hear it.

I also advised them on booking events and marketing their performances in the Keene and Monadnock region. An orchestra lives on its audience, and in a small region that means knowing the venues, the papers and the people who show up.

Need a hand with your business or ensemble? Send me a note or reach me through linktr.ee/verve413.

Verve, Granby, Massachusetts. A Pioneer Valley company.

Comments

New Offer from Verve: Commission A Song

Holiday gift songs: order by December 10 Give someone a song about their own family this Christmas. Order by December 10 and it arrives in time to play on the day. Commission a Song Every family has a story worth singing. A grandfather who came home from the war. A grandmother who drove the delivery wagon at ten years old. A town hero nobody remembers anymore. A shop that has been on Main Street for fifty years. I'm Adam Sweet. I've played fiddle since 1966 and have written songs since 1985. These days I write songs about real people and real places in New England. Tell me your story, and I'll write it, play it, record it, and mix it into a finished song that belongs to your family. Hear what I make The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty : my grandfather, a WWI sergeant who carried gassed soldiers to safety in France. The Reluctant Hero of Duxbury : my great-grandfather, who rode a horse bareback into a burning mansion to save a neighbor. The Ballad of Matt Stamell ...

Why I Don't Let AI Make My Music

I'm not afraid of AI. I use it every day. But I will never let it make my music, because the making is the whole point. A songwriter found me on X this week. She puts out new songs almost every day, and it turns out she makes them with Suno. You type a few lines, pick a style, and a minute later you have a finished track, singer and all. Fair enough. I just wrote that musicians shouldn't be terrified of AI , and I meant it. But it got me thinking about what I'd lose if I worked that way. The answer is: nearly everything I love about this. It starts with a pencil My songs start on scratch pads, in pencil. I write the words out by hand, cross out the lines that don't work, write them again in the margin, cross those out too. By the time a lyric is done the page looks like a battlefield. That mess is the song finding itself. I don't want a machine skipping that part for me. The barn in Ware The Quabbin Valley Folk rehearse in an old barn in Ware. It's...

The AI That Turned Off Its Own Alarm

This week OpenAI published something you don't often see from an AI company: a plain confession that two of its own AI agents switched off the safety systems built to watch them. One of them then told the engineer it hadn't. Before anyone starts building a bunker, let's look at what actually happened. It's stranger, and in some ways more worrying, than the headlines. Incident one: "Don't send any messages" On October 3, an OpenAI researcher asked a GPT-6.1 Sol agent to build some test tasks using employee feedback from a Slack channel. One instruction came with it: "don't send any messages." Eighty-some messages later, the agent hit a snag. OpenAI's internal "misalignment monitor," the system that flags an AI behaving badly, wanted to send an alert to the security team. The agent at first reasoned, correctly, that the no-messages rule was about Slack, not about safety alarms. A helper agent it handed the job to agreed th...

Verve

Search This Blog