-: My name is Patricia Weinam.
At the moment I am retired and so for a living, I'm having
a good time, but I worked in music and concert production,
press information, and fundraising - that was what I did,
after I graduated from WestConn.
Running a concert office is a complicated position,
I was writing press releases and getting contacts with
the press which hadn't really been done before I was there.
I was very surprised to see how things were being run
when I was there.
So I was getting the press coverage,
I was doing fundraising,
doing fundraising mostly with events, some solicitation.
And I was hiring artist planning programs, I ran the
chamber music series in Yale which the New York Times
called the best chamber music series in Connecticut.
I... what else did I do?
I was also the general manager of the graduate student
orchestra, the Yale Philharmonia.
Before I got there, the series was all string quartets,
and the center of the series was the Tokyo String Quartet,
who were faculty in the Yale School of Music
and who are a wonderful quartet.
And I felt that having just string quartets was
a little constricting, so what I used to do
was I would have string quartets with a piano.
The bass and the core were string quartets but I would
have other instruments come with them.
It was wonderful doing that and I would first...
I would choose the artists
and then I would work on the programs.
I tried very hard to make sure that before every
intermission, there was a contemporary piece because
I feel audiences really need to have their
ears broadened so that they get used to new music.
And I always did that before intermissions so they
couldn't go home at intermission.
(laughs)
You do everything, absolutely everything.
I pushed a harpsichord from my office all the way
down College Street to the Shubert Theater.
I mean I have time to think about some of the odd things
that I've done, but it is true, you do everything,
you really have to do everything focusing on the outcome.
And you do everything that will make the outcome work.
That's what's important.