“Everybody in, nobody out” or The Art of Connecting

At a time when diversity and inclusion are at the forefront of the national discourse, Everybody in, Nobody out is a most auspicious title. Having known the author, Ken Fischer, for a long time, though, I can assure you that, albeit opportune, this title is not opportunistic: this phrase has been his official motto forever.

The book is an autobiography. Ken’s father was a Ford’s executive in Detroit, but music was “at the heart” of each member of the entire family from day one. Ken himself plays the French horn, married a flautist (Penny), became a regional conference director of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), then a consultant and, ultimately, the president of one of the most prestigious arts presenters in the world, the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan, UMS, in Ann Arbor. After 30 years at the helm welcoming hundreds of artists from all corners and creeds of the earth, Ken Fischer retired in 2017 and passed the baton to Matthew VanBesien, former executive director of the New York Philharmonic. 

Will the book interest you if you aren’t an arts aficionado? Definitely. Because this personal story is a page turner in and of itself and because it displays in action something that’s very hard to learn through simple takeaways: the Art of Connecting. 

Non-discrimination inside

Ken Fischer reports the origin of this great title. Patrick Hayes (1909-1998), a legendary impresario, became a popular radio personality when he started to host a Sunday afternoon radio show on WGMS called People and Events in the World of Music in 1949. In 1966, he converted his for-profit organization into a nonprofit institution, the Washington Performing Arts Society. “As a young man,” Fischer writes, “Patrick had been shaped by one of the most important events in the history of performing arts presenting. In 1939, Marian Anderson, the great contralto, was denied the opportunity to sing in Constitution Hall because the Daughters of the American Revolution, which ran the venue, had a clause in its contract specifying that blacks were not permitted to perform there. This discrimination so incensed the Roosevelts that Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution and the president and Mrs. Roosevelt offered to present Ms. Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Over 75,000 people heard her perform. This event had quite an impact on Patrick. He became determined to do all he could to erase the racial divide in the arts. In 1953, after he and his colleagues were finally successful in getting the Daughters of the American Revolution to change its discriminatory policies, Patrick became the first person to present Marian Anderson in recital at Constitution Hall. To signify that the arts were for everybody, Patrick developed an inclusion policy called EINO—Everybody In, Nobody Out.”

Motto: Connecting with people and connecting people

This book illustrates the multiple facets of the art of engaging, i.e. how to persuade, create collaborative and participatory environments, build bridges between organizations, show and tell to create enthusiasm, identify joint ventures, reveal talents, constructively piggy-back on unexpected opportunities, etc. If you want to see how a person can carry all this out effortlessly, read this book—and while doing so, you’ll enjoy lots of anecdotes about dozens of famous artists.

In this post, I will focus on three particular aspects of the art of connecting that are often overlooked.

Coincidences are the rule, more than the exception: What’s the common denominator between a young white guy who lands a summer job in the line at the Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, MI, and John Apple? Nothing, but when John mentioned that his son was a violinist, Ken asked, “Are you the father of the great violinist Darwyn Apple?” Darwyn Apple was the only Black violinist he knew at the time because Apple had been the concertmaster of the Interlochen orchestra two summers before: “The unlikely coincidence of meeting Darwyn Apple’s father on an auto assembly line gave me a profound appreciation for how race and class all too often create artificial separations that deprive us of essential human connection.” Connectors pay attention to everything around them and develop a deep memory of situations and people, regardless of whether or not it ever will be useful. Real connectors are long-termists.

Disintermediating hosting and facilitating: At some point, Ken thought of becoming a minister until he realized that his vocation was less about preaching, and more about facilitating communication between people—and then to disintermediate it in order to ensure that people would establish their own connective grounds. That’s a constant theme in this book, and the basis for lots of stories. One of the funniest is how Ann Arbor’s students ended up enjoying two after-concert parties with Leonard Bernstein. Connectors are power-brokers, but also have the empathetic talent to release any form of grip. As I was reading this book, I realized how many friends I now have in Ann Arbor, a town I had no connection with before I met Ken, and how he let relationships blossom independently from him: When you don’t request allegiance, you build a long-lasting and heartfelt loyalty.

Trust sinks biases in deep water: Founded in 1879 and incorporated in 1880, the University Musical Society is the oldest of university-related presenting organizations. How do you move from Western artistic canons to creating a performing space representative of the complex human and cultural makeup that characterizes the Detroit–Ann Arbor–Flint Combined Statistical Area? Eliciting the buy-in of a wide variety of donors is definitely not a small feat if you want to not only present Handel’s Messiah, but also a Harlem Nutcracker or a concert by a Sufi devotional singer. How do you build support for what Ken’s programming director since the early 1990s, Michael Kondziolka, called the Renegade Series? More than rational outreach discourses or persuasive qualities (of which Ken has in abundance), connecting requires patient trust-building as well as the deep conviction that uncompromising quality dislodges acquired tastes because it immerses everybody in unknown territories while inspiring new bonds. You don’t dislodge biases. You sink them to enable people to emerge as new selves. Hence the subtitle of this book: Enriching Communities through Uncommon Art Experiences at the University Musical Society.

Unsurprisingly, then, Ken was immensely proud to receive, on behalf of UMS, and from the hands of President Obama, the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government, the National Medal of Arts in 2014. UMS was the first university-affiliated arts presenter to get this award. Of course, Ken also spoke about sports, his other passion, with the President. Incidentally, if you want to see how two “big houses” can combine, listen to the New York Philharmonic brass section joining the Michigan Marching Band for a halftime show at the Michigan-Northwestern game in October, 2015.

Sports and the Performing Arts both structurally invite sharing, but for this to effectively happen, you need a minister of sorts, somebody who doesn’t ask you to know him because the minute you meet this type of person, you have the feeling that he knows you. The charisma of authentic connectors is outside-driven: To attract people into their box, they first get out of theirs.

This autobiography is more than about Ken; it’s about the innumerable people he is connected with in the arts (of course), but also in politics, sports and life at large. It reminds us that our memory works at its best when we remember others and treasure what touches them most. This personal history is about the enchanting power of kindness to others.

Disclosure: The very first person I met in Ann Arbor when my daughter and I were visiting colleges was Ken Fischer. I had no idea who he was. A few hours later, I had met one of my favorite opera singers, Shirley Verrett, and attended a concert directed by Riccardo Muti with the Vienna Philharmonic… and a few years later, I became part of the UMS National Council.