CHANGE YOUR TUNE

LISTEN WELL with Kate Mrochkovski

Episode Summary

Kate Mrochkovski started her musical journey on the Cello and ended up completing a PhD in composition. Her curiosity about why audiences would or wouldn’t attend new music have led to a career as a Digital Strategist for arts organisations.

Episode Notes

Kate studied music at Manchester University. Whilst at uni she took a part-time job at The Bridgewater Hall, a concert hall in Manchester. There, she fell in love with ticketing, data and technology and is now Strategy Director at Supercool, a digital design agency working in the cultural sector.

QUOTES

• I have an overview of a lot of different aspects of the business which is what I find really interesting. I see that big picture, where the problems are and join dots. 
• I worked at a concert hall in Manchester, it was really interesting to see what audiences were really interested in, what they were passionate about going to.
• It was always really exciting to have my pieces performed. But the only people that were really in the room were the friends that I dragged along and other composers. 
• So when you study classical music, there is this sense that there is high art, there's proper music. And then you have the less good music and I started to question that a bit.
• After working in ticketing, I geeked out about the technology and ended up at a tech company called Spectrix that build ticketing platform for the art sector. And I really loved it there. 
• When I got to university it was a very different environment, there was a lot of pressure. Having grown up in North Wales, there were loads of orchestras. I took part in the small local orchestra, then the regional orchestra and then the National Youth Orchestra of Wales. And I played the double bass and sometimes in those situations, people are just happy for you to turn up because there aren't many double Bassists so they were just happy that I had an instrument and could turn up and play some of the notes.  But at university, there was a different level of pressure that was on me. 
• I've never loved practicing on my own. When I was at university, that's one of the things that made me realize I'm probably never going to be cut out to be an actual full time professional musician, because spending many hours sat in a room on my own all day is not my idea of fun. I really like being around people. 
• The thing I loved about composing was that you could come up with an idea for something and you could create it from scratch yourself. And I still like doing that, and that relates to the bigger picture problem solving.  You have an idea of what you want to convey and what is the best way to do that. 
• I definitely built up my tech savviness whilst I was at uni, doing electro acoustic and recording. That definitely helped because I was using computers and complex programs at the time. 
• I don't think anybody who is learning music when they're young, and goes to study a music degree says “actually what I want is to work in ticketing”. But it's a fascinating sector.
• In my current role, probably the most exciting bit is when you meet an organization for the first time and you stop and think about what their new website is going to be. 
• Creating a website is like composing, it’s like when you have that really awkward rehearsal with the musicians where they tell you all the things you've written that aren't possible on their instrument because you read it's possible somewhere. They’re not superhumans.
• I think one of the biggest things is listening. I think that I noticed this when I was doing improvisation. Really good improvisers know that they don't have to make sound all the time, it's okay just to listen. 
• I think those improvisation skills have just been incredibly valuable going forward, especially when dealing with other people in workshop situations and discovery situations, or meetings in general. With people being able to realize that it's okay to just listen, and not always having to contribute something. 
• There's lots of other things as well, things like being able to see patterns and see what's going on in a bigger picture. I was thinking recently about how when you're learning a piece for the first time, you're constantly shifting between the kind of very small micro moments and the bigger picture of the piece that you're learning.
• I might spend an hour of my morning testing one tiny little feature on a website. Understanding how that feature applies to the larger customer journey, how it will improve the end customer and the client in terms of how they communicate with their customers, makes that one hour worthwhile. Even if I'm just frustratingly changing a button for one hour.
• Being able to do things like public speaking, being able to walk into a room full of strangers, being able to go to a conference and walk up to somebody and have a chat. That is incredibly hard for a lot of people. Whereas I was sent off to orchestra rehearsals, and it was a whole different social network.
• Community music is a great place to learn it's, a great place to experiment, to learn in a way that you might not have the freedom to do in an organization where there's a little bit more scrutiny on what you post on Twitter and things like that.

LINKS

• Find Kate on LinkedIN and Twitter
• Spektrix
• Bridgewater Hall
• Supercool Design
• The Noise Upstairs

PODCAST TEAM

Production Support from Molly Jenkins 

Audio Engineering from Frazer Ruddick

Theme Music Composed by Danna Yun

Theme Music Performed by Jasper Ly

RECORDED

Recorded on 15 August 2021