Shhh: Why is campaign to build additional venue for KC Symphony such a secret?
By Melinda Henneberger and Dan Margolies
Are you ready to hear the worst-kept secret in town? Try and act surprised.
The Kansas City Symphony wants to build a major new performance venue, which may or may not be located across from the Plaza branch of the Kansas City Library at 49th and Main. (This would not mean they’d leave the Kauffman; it would be an additional large performance space.)
You’d think they’d want to get fundraising off to the best possible start by bringing everybody in.
Instead, since the symphony board approved Kansas City Symphony CEO Danny Beckley’s proposal nearly a year ago, this whole project was supposed to have been kept quieter than the missing pages from the Epstein files.
Even the musicians weren’t initially told. According to someone with a decades-long history in arts leadership in Kansas City, and in a position to know, Julia Irene Kauffman wasn’t given a heads-up, either.
“That tells you everything you need to know about this,” this person said. “Now there’s this huge rift with the symphony” and some of the rest of the arts community, principally over the way it’s been handled, “and it’s breaking my heart.”
Symphony leaders have been talking to potential donors since last summer, so why the secrecy?
On Thursday, Beckley finally broke the news to the Kansas City Symphony League, and later this month, John Sherman, majority owner of the Royals, and Marny Sherman, who is on the symphony board, are hosting a party that, according to the invitation to their home, will give invitees “an exclusive preview of plans for a new amplified music venue in Kansas City — one that will provide millions in new revenue to fuel the Symphony’s mission.”
Patrons are bound to have a lot of questions, and even the two of us writing this piece have different first impressions of what we do know.
Dan: I’m more optimistic that it could, if implemented, replicate the runaway success of the nonprofit subsidiary of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Music and Event Management Inc., better known as MEMI. Established in 2001, MEMI has become a crucial source of revenue for the CSO, generating nearly a fifth of its dollars as of 2024, according to a December 2024 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Two other orchestras—the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra—have similar business models. If the Kansas City Symphony were to establish its own nonprofit subsidiary along MEMI’s lines and achieve similar results, that would spell an additional $4 million a year in revenue. (The Symphony’s revenues in 2023, the last year for which IRS filings were available, was nearly $20 million.)
Melinda: I think that’s a big if. And beyond the turnoff of the strange lack of transparency, I worry that every dollar put into this project is one that won’t go into the arts institutions we already have. I care a lot about those, as I know you do, Dan. Anything that takes away from the Kauffman Center is a hard sell for me, and I don’t see how this would not do that.
There are a bunch of other worthy major capital campaigns going on right now — for the Nelson-Atkins, the UMKC Conservatory, Starlight, and probably some others I’m missing. Maybe there are some music-loving developers who are already in line to write checks so big that no other funding will be needed. But if not, can KC support all of these?
We put in a call to Beckley, who wasn’t in the office yesterday, and will keep you posted.
As someone who knows more about business than the arts and almost nothing about raising money from donors, this seems in need of some numbers that involve population growth, attendance at other events. Football games won't do much good, of course, so new stadium plans won't be of any help.
Would be good to have a large venue for the pops type of material our symphony has been good at selling. Sorry for the musicians who have developed their skills to play the most elevated form of music who have beren stuck playing soundtracks by John Williams instead.