Maybe you’ve heard about National Sawdust, the vast concert space that opened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last month. Maybe you were lucky enough to snag tickets to National Sawdust’s sold out opening shows, which featured—among other highlights—the debut of a new piece by buzzy young composer Nico Muhly and a DJ set by perennial cool kid James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. Or perhaps you’ve glossed National Sawdust’s eclectic concert calendar, and pondered checking out a night of songs curated by Lion King director Julie Taymor, or a performance by the New York Philharmonic, or a live scoring of the film The Great Beauty by Norwegian string orchestra 1B1. And on the other hand, maybe you just found about National Sawdust—here, now, reading this paragraph—and what you’ve gathered is that it’s a fantastic place to see new music. Which is true, of course.
But National Sawdust is no mere concert venue. A better way to think about it, according to Creative and Executive Director Paola Prestini, is as a music incubator. Like Y Combinator or Tech Stars or any of the many other incubators galvanizing innovation in the tech world, National Sawdust is an institution that provides emerging artists multiple kinds of support as they embark on ambitious projects. The goal is both to generate a creative hothouse—one exciting enough to lure a new audience into its fold—and, as Prestini takes care to point out, “to give musicians the tools they need to build flourishing careers.”
