A successful music scene in rural America
I had the great pleasure of visiting Keene, New Hampshire for the Radically Rural conference, which Keene hosts each year. To begin, I highly encourage attending this annual September economic development conference. There is an arts track that you can engage with but it also helpful to hear about rural America on the whole. The arts after all are a part of a larger ecosystem and hearing about how housing, employment, and the environment impact smaller communities can help an arts professional see how they can both respond to their community’s needs and also understand the larger forces at play.
Keene, NH has about 23,000 residents and is the home of Keene State College. It is two hours from Boston and about three hours from Burlington. There is no major interstate and the last leg of the drive from Logan International Airport weaves down two lane roads. When you enter the downtown, what is most striking is the lack of empty storefronts. In any town or city in America in 2023, that is a big deal and the sign of a very healthy community. The town has many unique qualities but Keene is known for its entrepreneurship and is home to the Hannah Grimes Center of Entrepreneurship, one of the founders of the Radically Rural conference.
Nestled in between downtown and the Keene State College campus is an old brick warehouse. It is home to a fantastic partnership between multiple businesses and organizations. During the day, it is home to Brewbaker’s Cafe. This fantastic coffee shop and eatery is a must when visiting Keene. Also in the warehouse is Brewbaker’s coffee roaster Terra Nova, a vinyl shop, a small florist, a space for art workshops, and there is retail art for sale. At night, the space turns into a music venue as Nova Arts run by Eric Gagne takes over. This music producing entity presents multiple shows a week across genres and is investing in the community’s music scene in a profound way. This continual series of music events is building a culture where the people of Keene can discover new music, create and perform music of their own, and have what so few small towns have; a music scene. Nova Arts also produces an annual festival called The Thing in the Spring, also worth checking out.
How are they doing this?
Collaboration
This is possible because of revenue and expense sharing across entities. Eliza and Jeff Murphy, the owners of Terra Nova and Brewbakers are the economic engine of the collaboration. They lease the space and drive continual commerce through the cafe and its adjoining businesses. The space that they dreamed up when they moved to the warehouse from a previous location is modular in design and the tables and chair set up for the cafe can be reconfigured or moved out of the space for the evening activities. They also invested in a stage and sound equipment for activities. This allows Nova Arts and Eric to utilize the infrastructure for free, while the Brewbaker’s staff runs the bar for the concerts.
Umbrella Organization
Nova Arts is in the process of applying for their federal 501 c(3) designation but needed help to get off the ground. As many of you may know, concert promotion is rarely a money making endeavor, particular at a smaller scale. Eric needed the ability to raise funds (he raises about 40% of his operating costs through sponsorships and grants) and needed the ability to have his payroll and bills processed. This is where Jess Gelter and Arts Alive! stepped in. Arts Alive! is a non-profit organization with the mission to support, grow, and connect a sustainable arts landscape in the Monadnock Region (where Keene is situated). The ability for Nova Arts to scale up their organization over time has also been key to making this work.
Vision
In the October 31st, 2023 podcast in which I interview Eliza, Eric, and Jess, it was clear that this is only the beginning. The entrepreneurial spirit of Keene lives in this team of visionaries. The Terra Nova/Brewbakers project that Eliza and Jeff dreamed up is actually not isolated to their current building. They have hopes to transform an entire block that is dedicated to culture building for Keene. This group is investing in their home and they see this as a step in a larger plan. This vision gives them the endurance and the patience to work through some of the inevitable kinks that arise in building culture in a small community (or any community for that matter).
Flexibility
This is a common theme in success in rural arts delivery. They are adapting to what they find and are inherently agents of change. Agents of change embrace change because they want it. When the environment shifts, they meet it. They are making continual adjustments to the arrangement and the delivery of what they do.
If you are in a small town and want to create a culture of live music, I can’t think of a better model. Seeing what they are doing in Keene was an “aha” moment for me. Running a larger organization that produces music has given me a hyper awareness of what a market failure music presenting is for a small community. The approach in Keene is collaborative though and spreads the financial burden out across institutions. This helps lift up the endeavor and provide the time needed to build a culture of concert attendance, which means a community learning how to take a chance on something they haven’t heard of before. A community needs to learn the joy of discovering new artists and they invest in this educational experience because they believe in the mission of the presenters, just like those in Keene.