Thursday 17 May 2001 – Singapore
I kept an ‘appointment’ to meet with a Marketing and Communications Executive at who looks after some of the orchestra’s operational marketing, including maintaining the website and email bulletins. The Marketing Director had suggested that I discuss branding with this officer, but they didn’t even begin to understand the questions that I was asking. Again, I ended up discussing the problems that TSO had overcome and the ways we’d done this.
Had lunch with Richard Adams, a British teacher and brass player running the music department of Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. He was voluble on Singapore management style, having been here a year and implemented a BA course in Music, accredited by a Welsh university where he’d worked previously. He said that the school’s management hadn’t displayed any interest in what he was doing – he simply prepared thick reports and documentation which went unread but was initialed as being approved by the head of the school. We ate fish and chips, which was a pleasant change after a fortnight of rice and noodles.
Not being in any hurry to rush back to the SSO office, I visited the nearby National Art Gallery, which houses a small but quite interesting collection of contemporary Southeast Asian art.
