July 2009 Archives

I chopped 10 inches off my hair on Monday. Well, I didn't do the deed personally, by regardless, I now have short hair. My sister and I donated our ponytails to the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program, which is like the more famous Locks of Love but more honest, according to Aliza. She's donated three times before, and she and Jerry, who cuts our hair, totally peer-pressured me into it.  ("Trying to look like the girls on Mad Men is really more important than charity??? So what if you can't wear your hair up to the Met Gala?" OK, OK, fine: CUT ME.)

The whole ordeal (all three minutes of it) reminded me of those times in elementary school when, if the students raised enough money or brought in enough soup cans, the principal or teachers would do something crazy like wear jeans to work. Now, I don't think I look as ridiculous without hair as, say, Mr. Grushner (Mom, am I spelling that right?) at East School looked without his mustache, but there is a certain degree of silliness in sitting in a chair and having someone cut your 'tail and then move right on to another pony. Also, it is a Universal Truth that doing crazy things with people you care about is fun.

The Pantene Beautiful Lengths website has a page rather unfortunately called "Cutting Parties" where they encourage folks to "Host a cutting event". We'll get back to the post/my point in a moment, but tell me this does not read like a Saturday Night Live commercial:


Regardless, this all got me thinking about orchestras and charity. Insert "playing for an orchestra is charity" joke _here_. My intern Nate brought the Boston Symphony Orchestra's recent run to Tanglewood, which I hadn't heard about, to my attention. From BBC Music Magazine:

Members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) are to swap their instruments for running shoes to run a 150-mile relay race to their summer home in Tanglewood. Each year the orchestra decamps from its winter home in Boston for its summer season at the Tanglewood estate in the Berkshire hills in Massachusetts. And this year 14 musicians will be making the trip on foot, arriving in time for the opening night on 3 July.

The musicians asked family and friends to sponsor them and raised funds for the BSO. I had intended to write this post about group acts of charity as community-building and publicity-gaining initiatives. Members of a string quartet all grow out and then cut their hair for charity together just before a concert starts. An entire orchestra wears pink if everyone in the audience brings a soup can. While these things are technically publicity "stunts", they are for a good cause and would humanize the musicians a bit. There's never anything wrong with showing you have a sense of humor.

Out-of-character acts like the BSO members running a relay race could also prove to be valuable fundraising events for the orchestra, though, and still make for good public relations that way. If everyone donates an extra dollar at a concert, the musicians will swap instruments and play a movement that way? I'd pay a dollar (or more) to see/hear that. (Would the unions allow it?)

It would be an illuminating look into the orchestra-as-community, anyway. Is physically participating in raising money for the orchestra part of a musician's job? I'm not friends with anyone who plays for an orchestra full-time, so I really have no gauge for how much they care or should care about the orchestra as an organization. And if it is part of their job, how committed to their ensemble, quartet or orchestra are musicians required to be beyond rehearsals and performances?

This is the second joint blogging exercise with my friend, composer Nico Muhly.   The first Co-Bloganza topic was Programming and can be found here (him) and here (me). This time, in a collaboration we hope will someday turn into a PBS talk show called "Crack Margaritas with the Arts", the topic is The New Music Scene in New York City. We originally discussed our posts over, you guessed it, crack margs, and then over IM, and then exchanged entry drafts, and then revised so we could refer to what the other had actually written. In exchanging drafts, we realized he had named his entry "Scene but not Heard" and I had named mine "Scene and (not) heard", which is embarrassing on a lot of levels.

Now read his post.

I'll start with three short stories, but as anyone on any scene knows, there more where that came from.  By definition, scenes create expectations: expectations of time, expectations of attitude, expectations degrees of commitment.  Here I'll use myself - because that's how it goes on Life's a Pitch - as an example of what every industry "insider" goes through when it comes to performances and artists for which they don't have direct responsibility.



On Thursday, July 16, I got texts from four different people around 8 p.m.:

"Are you here?"
"Where are you?"
"Are you going tonight?"
"Are you Kronos-ing tonight?"

Before I got the "Kronos-ing" text, I had no idea what anyone was talking about. I could only assume the others weren't asking whether I was at Candide at the Berkshire Theater Festival, which is in fact where I was. I Googled "Kronos Quartet" on my phone and clicked on the schedule. Turns out they were playing a piece by Michael Gordon, who I work for, at a Celebrate Brooklyn! Prospect Park show. Gabriel Kahane's voice was also used in a piece on the program. It wasn't a Michael premiere, and Gabriel wasn't performing, but because of those associations, it made sense that industry friends would assume I would be at that concert.

An almost similar situation happened with the "New Music Bake Sale" this spring; Galen Brown, who writes for Sequenza21, and a few other industry friends said they were surprised I wasn't there. Again, I had a sense the event was going on, but didn't really understand 1) why I would go, or 2) why anyone would think I would go. Looking at the website now, I see a list of groups I have mostly heard of, but no one with whom I have any direct professional link. Kronos Quartet in Prospect Park: clear work responsibilities, thus my scene. New Music Bake Sale: vague peer pressure to see and be seen but no real personal or work obligations.

I was sitting on the aisle waiting for Nico's ScentOpera to start at the Guggenheim in early June when my friend Dan Bora, an audio engineer/producer who has worked with Nico and Alarm Will Sound, among others, came up on my left. "Why do you hate New Amsterdam?" he opened. I twisted my mouth and paused; best to do an internal TV-style flashback-clip sequence of any time I might have said something about New Amsterdam Records (possible), might have commented on someone affiliated with New Amsterdam Records (also possible), or (most likely) said something in general about the demise of the recording industry as we know it. Nothing terribly incriminating flashed through my head, so I asked Dan what he meant. "You didn't come to any of the Friday night shows in May," he said. "I thought I would see you there."

New Amsterdam Friday night shows in May. Right - at Galapagos in Brooklyn, including Nadia's CD release concert. I remembered the very cool-looking post-er post-ed on Sequenza21. But let's break this down: Darcy James Argue. I used to see his name on Wordless Music Series guest lists. Someone recommended his blog, so I asked him to participate in the Michael Gordon Trance scavenger hunt. (He declined.) I do not know what his music sounds like, and I do not know if his Secret Society is a website or a band. The following Friday, Nadia Sirota. An actual friend of mine, plus Nico - another friend -performed that night. I did think about going to the concert, but wanted to see the Jenny Holzer show at The Whitney before it closed. Nadia didn't invite me specifically, and I figure that if I'm friends with someone and she wants me to be at a concert, she'll just ask or put me on some kind of mass e-mail. We'll come back to this later in this blog entry. 

Moving on to May 22. I've worked with but am not friends with anyone in Signal, and have a total work-crush on So Percussion. So Percussion is related in my head to David Lang, whom I work for, and Signal is related in my head to Michael Gordon. Not related enough, though, that I feel it is my job as David and Michael's publicist to support those groups. And I have no idea who Sarah Kirkland Snider is. As for the last Friday show, I didn't know any of the participants but was invited by my friend Damian, a music writer. He canceled, and I didn't want to make the trek alone.

So except for being friends with Nadia, I have no connection to New Amsterdam Records. Yet the aura of the thing led Dan Bora to assume I'd be there. 

If there is just one new music scene in New York City, I suppose I'm "on" it. I worked for Wordless Music last season, I've handled publicity for Hauschka and Max Richter through FatCat Records, I represent David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and Gabriel Kahane - all living composers. I'm friends with Nico Muhly and Nadia Sirota, and I have a good friend who works at Works and Process at the Guggenheim. My friends Rob and CJ - collaborators with Gabriel - started a new new-music ensemble. Eric Owens, Hilary Hahn, and The King's Singers have all commissioned or been directly involved with world premieres. Through work responsibilities and friendships that formed through those responsibilities, yes, I'm on some kind of a scene.

"On the scene." What a completely bizarre phrase. Is one on a scene if one is on a record label? On a management roster? On a music series? To get off "on" for a moment, are classical music scenes created through teachers? Through universities and conservatories? What about physical neighborhoods? Rob, Hilary/Gabriel's manager, and I live within a 10-block radius; when do we become a scene? Can sites like Sequenza21, Brooklyn Vegan, or Pitchfork be defined as scenes, or do you not get to be a scene without physical interaction? Perhaps most important, once you're friends or work with an artist, is there an obligation to attend his friends' and collaborators' concerts? The answer here is yes; were it not for that pressure, we would be scene-less.  Note: the transitive property of liking music - if I like something on this label or on this series, I will like that other thing on the same label/series/scene - doesn't always work, which complicates matters. Not unlike the transitive property of friendship; who actually likes all her friends' friends?

It should be noted that I'm talking about the new music scene as it applies to intra-industry audience building. Perhaps there will be another post about audience members who come to a scene on their own and eventually become part of it after arriving purely as fans.  I've also been focusing on the contemporary classical scene as a scene focused on music by not-dead composers, not the contemporary classical scene as it relates to music presented or recorded by my contemporaries. As Nico points out in his post, we all know who we're going to run into at basically any Zankel concert, at the Met's opening gala, and at the Avery Fisher Career Grant Awards. Or at least we think we do. If we're wrong, we've probably missed some marketing opportunities.
 
Not only is there not one classical music scene, there's not one contemporary classical scene, either. I had thought about doing a diagram of the artists/bands/ensembles I perceive as being part of The Monster Scene. But as I started doing that, I wondered: Does everyone connected to these scenes perceive them the same way? Can you define a scene if you're on it? Are the scenes I could list for blog readers simply narcissistic projections of my own interactions with them?  Nico, looking back at perceived music scenes of the past, writes,

In school, we're taught that fin-de-siècle Paris was a very specific scene: we fantasize about Picasso and Stravinsky and Ravel and Debussy sitting around a table, drinking absinthe and smoking skinny cigarettes.  Maybe that even happened one day!  Maybe it happened every week!  But to what extent, I wonder, does that make sense only when viewed a century later, and to what extent are we New York musicians involved in producing (or resisting) our fantasy versions of the past?

I think it was last spring when Ronen Givony, who founded the Wordless Music Series, asked me what time I was going to "our Superbowl" - sometimes known as the Bang on a Can Marathon. If you work in or write about new music, you don't miss Bang on a Can.  Bang on a Can has been around for 20 years, so - at least in New York City - it serves as the meeting point of the scenes. But this doesn't mean Bang on a Can can slack off in the marketing department. I work for the composers who founded it, and I still saw River to River posters all over the city, got e-mail blasts, and read press previews. Where the various new music scenes get into trouble, I think, is assuming people are part of their sub-scene because they work for and associate with people on related scenes. By defining the new music scene so broadly to both ourselves and the outside world, we miss audience-building and networking opportunities.

Now, back to Nadia not inviting me to her concert. As my mother would ask me when I was growing up, "Who owns this problem?" That is, how much are any of us responsible for the scenes we're a part of? Should the New Music Bake Sale or New Amsterdam Records have found a way to get me to their concerts? Should an artist's/group's publicist? Their manager? Perhaps not; I'm only one body, and I'm not new audience blood. At the same time, I'm a body that works with artists who commission new works, a body whose client list is involved in new music, a body with a blog. This argument goes both ways, of course: Nadia & Co. could potentially help me and my clients down the road, in which case I then own the problem of staying informed.

I did see both the New Music Bake Sale and the Galapagos concerts on Sequenza21, so that's getting to me once. But as we in the marketing business know, getting potential audiences' attention once is not enough; you have to hit people on multiple fronts. I know about Nico's concerts because he sometimes invites me, sometimes someone else asks if I'm going, and most of the time I see his concerts listed on his website. But I go to his website because he has a blog that I read at least weekly on the homepage. What would drive me to the New Amsterdam homepage unless something outside of it (press, word of mouth, link forwarding) led me there? If putting a concert on your record label or personal website isn't enough, if targeted press coverage isn't enough, is that e-mail necessary? Or a text? Or an IM or a phone call? More and more, I think that personal interactions really are necessary in creating, curating, and promoting a scene. A record label can have consistent album art and a series can have its logo on everything, but it's those people with their individual motivations, their inexplicable musical tastes, who not only fuel a scene but are the scene itself.

Yikes, this blog sure is going downhill with a quickness. All I did this week was talk about hot girls, Muppets and mice. I meant to write a dignified post about all-day theater and music marathons: how you can possibly convince someone to spend an entire day watching one thing, and how local businesses can profit from knowing that a very specific type of person will be in one physical location at one time. I guess that post will have to preview All Points West rather than The Norman Conquests.

Your homework, though -  should you choose to accept it - is to go see the over-the-top-good Norman Conquests on the broad way this weekend before it closes. What better things do you have to do, I wonder, than fully immerse yourself in 1970s British sex farce? It's well worth your time and money.

I usually don't like it when artists hold their instruments in press photos, but because these are otherwise so spot-on, I'm willing to make exceptions. Here are some new artist publicity shots that I think are just fantastic, courtesy of my gal pal Opera Chic. Note how the photos capture each artist's unique personality and musical aesthetic, and are artistic without being artsy.


Béla Fleck:

Sarah Palin:


Edgar Meyer:

The God Pan:

John Cage and Merce Cunningham:

Jordi Savall:

Someone get Jordi Savall some cheese.

Or, A person can't marry a duck.

For two years now, my #1 goal has been to get a client on Sesame Street. Fame is a fluid concept: you may have never heard of the people who are most famous to me, and people who are famous in their own industries may be nobodies to the world outside those niches. And if everything can basically be defined as a niche market if one uses broad enough strokes, then there are, what - 100? - people in history who the entire world has heard of.

That said, I think we can all agree that if you're a guest on Sesame Street or, previously, The Muppet Show/Muppets Tonight, you've pretty much "made it" by any definition. At lunch today, however, when I mentioned that the new Harry Potter movie would have kept me up nights as a kid (instead, I had the utterly terrifying The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles to contend with, thank you Julie Andrews), one of my summer interns mentioned that her biggest childhood fear was a Muppet named Placido Flamingo. You heard me. Placido. Flamingo.

After lunch, naturally the most pressing order of business at First Chair Promotion was to find Placido Flamingo clips, and I'm happy to announce that the new company Life Purpose is to not just get a client on Sesame Street, but to get a reoccurring Muppet character named after a client. Shoot for the moon and you may land on a star.

Three marketing items from my client Gabriel's concert at Rockwood Music Hall on Friday night:

1. The place was crawling with hot girls - I do not know why -  so I texted a few of my guy friends and told them to get over there. [Does that make me a good publicist or a bad woman?] This led me to wonder (a) whether or not the classical music audience is attractive, (b) whether or not that matters and (c) if it does matter, if it's a publicist's job to make that happen. The last time I thought about this was when my friend Megan and I were at a Land of Talk concert at Mercury Lounge last September. I love you Land of Talk, but you had the most unattractive fans we had ever seen in one room.

2. Someone "shushed" the crowd in the middle of Gabriel's set! Rockwood is a tiny room with a one drink minimum and maybe 12 seats; bascially, a bar with a small stage in one corner. I don't mean to put the space down at all - I think it's fantastic - but suffice to say it's usually a shush-free zone. Here's a photo from a previous Gabriel/Rockwwod performance, with cellist Alisa Weilerstein:

So this guy in the audience shushed some people (me, for one) who were talking quietly during the concert. Coincidentally, someone also shushed the crowd at The Clientele concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Sunday night. Have anal retentive classical music manners crossed genre borders?? Fan...tastic.

3. They pass around a tip jar for the artist at Rockwood near the end of every concert. It has some church offering plate connotations in that you kind of feel guilty passing it without throwing in some cash, but generally it's a pretty casual, no-pressure thing. Regardless, I cracked myself up for a few minutes wondering what would happen if a tip jar for the artists was passed around during a NY Phil concert. Would people drop in their $10K donation checks? Would they think about how many ways the five bucks they had in their wallets would have to be split? At what point in the program would ushers have to start passing the jar around to get it to everyone before the concert ended?

Is the New York Philharmonic threatening me with their ad budget prowess?

In an e mail blast from last night:

Is it strange to be advertising your advertisements?

When the working week is done, I like to interview friends and colleagues about specific marketing and publicity topics. This week we have C.J. Camerieri, a frequent collaborator of my client Gabriel Kahane's, discussing how he's navigating the promotion of his new new-music ensemble yMusic. For an interview with yMusic co-founder Rob Moose from - coincidentally enough - exactly one year ago, click here.


C.J. Camerieri, a Brooklyn-based trumpet player, enjoys an active and diverse career as a freelance performer.  Since completing his classical training at Juilliard, he has become an indispensable collaborator for numerous indie rock groups. He has toured the world as a member of Rufus Wainwright's band and as the lead soloist in Sufjan Steven's horn section. Additionally, he has recorded extensively as a trumpet player, arranger, french hornist, and pianist with Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, David Byrne, Antony and the Johnsons, Martha Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III, Gabriel Kahane, The National, Julia Stone, Jesse Harris, Baby Dee, Diane Birch, Joan Osbourne, Sean Lennon, Harper Simon, Clare and the Reasons, Welcome Wagon, Anthony Coleman, Argento New Music Ensemble, Riverside Symphony, and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. C.J. was recently appointed principal trumpet of the American Composer's Orchestra, plays on numerous Broadway shows, and frequently performs with such groups as the New York City Ballet, Orchestra of St. Luke's, I.C.E., Riverside Symphony, and Argento New Music Ensemble.


All the members of yMusic play for other ensembles, orchestras and bands throughout the city. How are you cultivating a 1. unified and 2. unique identity as a group while, at least for the time being, you're all affiliated with other groups?

We feel that by working with other ensembles, orchestras, and bands we are strengthening our individual reputations as collaborators which in turn strengthens yMusic's collective reputation. One of the unique assets to being in yMusic is that we are all proud of the work each other does outside of the group and are happy to have ourselves represented through their work.


It seems to me that one of the selling points of yMusic is the diversity of your members' artistic pursuits. Do you think yMusic's profile in the, for lack of a better description, "new music" world depends on making your process and background accessible to the public? That is, when you're playing as yMusic on stage, do you want the audience to be thinking about how one group member may have just come from recording with Sufjan and the other may be coming from the South Pacific pit, or should they take the ensemble as singular entity?

I do think that our process and background should be made clear to the audience. We like to think that the Way in which we perform and What we perform will make it clear to audiences that we are comfortable and experienced performing in many different sorts of artistic endeavors. I feel like this is an important part of yMusic in that we approach "new classical music" from the perspective of a pop musician and we approach "pop music" from the perspective of a classical musician. This solves a lot of each genre's shortcomings in accessibility and quality.  


You recently launched a website on which members blog from home or on the road. Is everyone in the group committed to blogging? Do you plan when you're going to post, or is the idea that the yMusic site serves as a personal blog for all members and you post when inspiration strikes?
 
One of the things we discussed in our first meeting as a group was the importance of a dedicated internet presence that everyone must be involved in. If we have noticed that a certain member of the group hasn't posted something in a while - we may provide some gentle nudging - but the blog is generally reserved for when inspiration strikes.


Twenty - maybe even ten? - years ago, the extent of ensembles' and soloists' "audience outreach" was post concert discussions, CD signings, and press interviews.  Today, you're practically expected to live-Tweet while playing the trumpet. Do you think the expectation that artists will be in constant contact with fans has detracted from artistic pursuits?

I think that it has torn down the wall between an artist's life onstage and offstage. This has been good for the fans because they have greater insight into who this artist is - but it has also become quite invasive to the artist. I can certainly imagine that having your personal life invaded in such a way could infringe on your ability to concentrate on your work.


Presumably the point of hosting a blog is that current and future yMusic audience members will get to know the different personalities in the group. As a performer, can you tell when you're playing for an audience who knows you - even if they've just read your bio or one blog post - versus for an audience who knows nothing about you?  

Yes! One of greatest parts about playing "pop music" is playing music for people who have a deep love for the music and the musicians performing it. I'm glad that people like Nico Muhly or Jeremy Denk are also tapping into this resource to make contact with fans in a way that classical music hadn't done nearly enough of before them. People are interested in the music and in knowing the performers and it only serves the music and ourselves to give them an opportunity to get to know who we are and how the music comes to fruition.


How are you liking the administrative aspects of organizing/booking/marketing an ensemble? Obviously, the drawback is that these things are time-consuming. But what are the benefits of artist-driven organizations?

It is time consuming but so far it's been exciting and fun. Those administrative tasks are so important in molding the group around our artistic vision that it seems as integral as performing the music. It's also been an amazing opportunity to learn how the business works.


As previously mentioned, members of yMusic perform with other similar ensembles. In speaking and writing about it, how do you distinguish yMusic from the pack without putting down friends and colleagues in the process?

This can be a little tricky. Luckily each member of the group has a singular, almost peerless, musical identity that can be spoken of in a way that doesn't diminish the talents of others. For instance, one can speak about Rob [Moose]'s talents as a violinist, guitarist, mandolinist, without drawing immediate comparisons with other violinists. I personally have been working on my french horn playing and piano playing for the same reason. We also reside in a pretty unique place in the present musical landscape and want to continue to solidify our brand without comparing it to others.


Let's talk about you for a moment, shall we? How do you promote yourself as a solo artist amidst all this? When does self-promotion start to reflect badly on your collaborators and fellow ensemble members? What's the balance?

I haven't been especially interested, at least up to this point in my career, in developing a solo career. It's something that I've begun to contemplate and I am confronting those exact same questions. I feel that artists are wary sometimes of musicians who may be using them to promote their own solo career - and this is a problem I have avoided thus far with my lack of ambition in my own solo career. I generally am not a fan of solo trumpet music or musicians and so I am wary of jumping into that very shallow pool. That being said, I work with so many fantastic composers who write so well for me that hopefully it is something that happens at some point. I'm just hoping it happens organically.  


You've played in the pits for a lot of Broadway shows, though you wouldn't know it from the lack of preview tickets I've been offered. Do the show marketers ever enlist the help of the musicians in marketing and publicizing productions?

NO! and sorry......


Remember when your trumpet solo in 'Fake Empire' was blasted to the known universe on election night?  That was cool.

Indeed!

I'm sure you'll be shocked to read that I love when marketing matters come up in critical reviews. This is funny stuff, from writer Doyle Armbrust at Time Out Chicago:

Head over to the Harris Theater entrance on Randolph. Observe any instrument-lugging musician's reaction to the Lang Lang promo on the Harris's video screens. If it's anything other than eye rolling, chances are that musician is busy texting. Attempting to channel his inner Run-DMC with a pair of glistening black Adidas, the Chinese pianist's head is thrown back in a moment of perfectly staged, grotesquely self-involved ecstasy. It's not that classical music couldn't benefit from some image upgrades, but it's hard to see this as anything other than a product.

Not having seen it for myself in Chicago, I would guess this is the photo in question:

Armbrust goes on to write:

Fortunately, most classical superstars are more focused on the quality of their technique than on casting their eyes downward and mussing their hair. Susan Graham is one such artist.

...at worst, her publicity shots resemble your eccentric aunt from Santa Barbara.

...With her uninhibited navigation of the French texts and effortless movement among the cabaret, the salon and the grave top in these songs, the profundity is reserved for the concert, rather than the photo session.

It seems every time a classical artist gives themselves or gets that "image upgrade", they are criticized for it. Sure, glistening golden sneakers and a violin where a bra (or perhaps a shirt) should be may not have been the best photo concepts on the planet, but these artists are doing something different and presumably - for better or worse - accurately reflecting themselves. Lang Lang likes sneakers and that's how he plays the piano; truth in advertising, like the truth or not.

Susan Graham's "eccentric aunt" photos may have been her version of an image upgrade. An artist not wearing his or her glasses in a photo, or not sitting in front of a piano ("I play the piano, and to prove it, I will sit in front of one in this photo.") may be versions of upgrades.  But the drastic image changes, call them upgrades or even downgrades, are very quickly dismissed as distracting, as eye-roll generating. Susan Graham looking like your aunt in photos does not make her a great artist. She happens to be a great artist, but one thing has nothing to do with the other. 

Touring classical musicians are public figures, and with that should come a degree of image awareness and attention. Why then, when an artist has publicity photos that demonstrate an awareness of style, wears concert attire that he or she is comfortable performing in, or has a less traditional haircut, does it necessarily mean he or she is less focused or less committed to The Art? Anne-Sophie Mutter starts wearing strapless gowns and the press talks about it for a decade. Anna Netrekbo is style savvy and beautiful; surely that means she has a less powerful instrument.  But X Opera Star is overweight and hasn't taken a new press photo since 1976: now THERE's an ARTIST! Time spent shopping, at personal trainer sessions and at make-up consultations are not necessarily hours that could be spent at voice lessons. This Image Conscious v. Serious Artist debate seems exclusive to our special industry. Yes, an actor or actress may be criticized for a bad red carpet style decision, but that commentary does not extend to a discussion about his or her acting abilities or role decisions. 

Classical musicians are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Those who make new aesthetic decisions are criticized and mocked, while artists who remain aesthetically constant will garner complaints from - let's call it/us the "far left"; they're not reaching new audiences, they're catering to the old guard, they're boring. What I care about, as mentioned above, is honest reflections: if that photo/outfit/haircut is you, then go for it with the highest degree of quality you can, and pay no mind to the eye-rolls on either side of the divide.

What is even going on here.

I was reading my client Michael Gordon's Pitchfork review from 2004 to see if I deemed it worthy to put in a press kit just now, and I clicked on the 5 Gum banner ad in an attempt to send my friend James a link to the new "Zing" gum (he says "zing!" a lot, OK?). Instead of a Zing or a 5 Gum website, I got to this.


5 Gum's marketing campaign is just a super imeem page?? Fair enough: what could they possibly say about gum at this point? Might has well push Katie Perry and Lady Gaga associations and throw people off a bit. Also, The Brunettes, School of Seven Bells, and Fleet Foxes are actually cool; what the deuce kind of awesome marketing intern does 5 Gum have working for them??

This makes for a great argument for a complete lack of boilerplate marketing copy. When promoting a concert, why not just link to a playlist of the music? Actually, when marketing anything - a play, a dance performance, a museum exhibition - why not create a unique playlist? It's free and more interesting than any words you could possibly use.

5 has a playlist for each type of gum and is asking viewers to vote for their favorite playlists:

Solstice seems to be most squarely in my iTunes camp. I wonder what it tastes like. I guess I willl buy it and find out. Marketing logic dictates that if I like what it sounds like, I'll like what it tastes like, right?

For what it's worth ((nothing)), I'm declaring 5 Gum the Official Gum of Life's a Pitch. All three readers must now chew it exclusively.

Let them eat something else! Some sad Bastille Day news. Surely someone could have ponied up a mere 45 mill?

From Reuters:

The New York Times Co said it will sell its New York City classical music radio station WQXR for $45 million, in a two-part sale that will help the struggling newspaper publisher pay off debt.

The station will continue to broadcast classical music, something it has done for 73 years, but at 105.9 on the FM radio dial instead of 96.3 FM, the Times said in a statement on Tuesday.

Under the terms of the deal, Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Radio will pay $33.5 million for the 96.3 slot on the FM radio dial that the Times uses to broadcast WQXR.

This is Life's a Pitch: The Outward Bound Edition, as I'm in the lovely Berkshires. Other than the Biblical rain on Saturday night and the spider bite I seem to have acquired above my left eyebrow that has subsequently swollen and given me a not entirely unattractive kind of lazy-eyed Romulan-chic look, Tanglewood is fantastic.

Hearing - emphasis on the 'hearing' - three concerts at Tanglewood this weekend has made me think more about different outlets of experience, previously discussed here. I had written about live-blogging/live-Tweeting during concerts, unsure of which side to come down on, and my clients Hilary (Hahn) and David (Lang) weighed in with their artist perspectives. My conclusion after this weekend is this: it is not a presenter's job to mandate what an audience member's experience will be, but rather to offer as many different experience options as possible while both protecting the quality of each option they offer and maintaining artistic integrity.

On Friday night, my friends and I went to see Emanuel Ax rock out Beethoven 4. We sat on the lawn with snacks, wine and apparently not enough bug spray, and watched the concert on the big screens around the outside of the Shed. Three of us sat on lawn chairs and two of us lay down on the blanket. One of us got her face bitten off, four of us did not. Before the concert and during intermission, the screens flashed through upcoming performances and various Tanglewood initiatives, which was decidedly not-annoying and actually quite useful. I've often wondered why there aren't movie-type previews at performing arts centers, and at the very least highlighting upcoming listings on big screens seems like a good start. Again, you have a(n almost literally) captive audience; market to them.

Saturday, we had planned to watch Die Meistersinger from the lawn, but were scared off by the monsoon. I'm told the kind people at Tanglewood were able to squeeze most would-be lawn watchers into the Shed, but we didn't have the energy. So instead, we listened to the live broadcast on WAMC. The sound quality was great, and we actually started popped in the movie Grizzly Man halfway through. Totally weird, yes, but exactly what we wanted to do.

Sunday was What the Joshua Bell's concert at 2:30pm. We packed a picnic lunch and, while we were offered some box seats ("  "), opted for the lawn. It was a beautiful day, I had just purchased a floppy sun hat, and we were proud of our picnic fixins'. There are no screen projections during afternoon concerts, so we ate and lay in the sun, just listening. Well, listening, snacking, looking up Whatever Works movie times on phones, rolling our eyes about how boring the end of Dvorak 8 is. Actually, I think only I was eye-rolling, but you see my point. We weren't bothering anyone by looking up movie times, because we were in a space where that was acceptable. Would I have been playing with my phone had I taken the inside-seats? Of course not; the people inside expect a certain experience, an experience that does not involve my pink Blackberry. The people listening to a live radio broadcast expect one experience, and the people driving by Tanglewood with their windows down expect another, so on, so forth.  

Is it possible that our generation has become so absorbed with the Entitlement of Free that it will to refuse to pay $5 per month for The New York Times? Or is that so not the point. [Via Gawker.]

At long last, the New York Times may have figured out how to make money off its website: by charging for it.

Bloomberg reports that the NYT is floating the idea of charging $5 a month to access its website in a survey of readers. (It also asked if subscribers would be willing to pay $2.50 per month).

...If all 650,000 print subscribers paid $5 a month for the website, that would be an instant $39 million per year. More likely, many people would choose either only the print subscription (old people) or only the online subscription (non-old people). That means that the NYT could potentially sell many more online subscriptions than it sells print subscriptions. Its website is orders of magnitudes more popular than its print product already.

Also on Gawker today, the demise of the democratic comment system. Gawker: Encouraging People To Not Be Idiots Since 2009.

I was a little disappointed when I received my Time Out NY yesterday. "Jonas Brothers quit music*" reads the cover, and then "*for just a day. Meet Kevin Jonas, our new Music Editor".

In the elevator, I flipped right to the Classical & Opera section like I always do, and much to my chagrin, there was "Edited by Steve Smith" in the top right corner of the page. Now, I like Steve Smith very much, but come on, Time Out: don't tease a girl like that! If the JoBro are the Music Editors for the week, then they're the Music Editors! They have to do what Steve does. All of it. The feature's tagline says "the best-selling teen idols reveal their inner music geeks", so let's have it. Geek out with us. Would they go see "dashing musical-theater luminary Paolo Szot [light] up SummerStage"? I'm not sure they would. But we'll never know now, will we?

In all seriousness, I think this is a missed opportunity. I do want to know what classical music events in the city a 16, 19 and 21-year old would go see.  What (different?) demographic would read the Classical & Opera section during the Jonas Brothers' week? Would those people flip back to that section again next week? Maybe, maybe not.  But even just for one week, who knows what classical music offerings the Jonas Brothers could have pied-pipered the Youth of America to! I want to know how many copies a "Jonas Approved" classical disc would sell. I neither believe the Jonas Brothers aren't "smart enough" to handle the classical section nor do I believe having an opinion on classical music requires intelligence or music education. They also seem fairly well-rounded: I would bet they already have classical music on their iPods. 

Dear JB Publicist: ArtsJournal would be more than happy to host the guys' classical picks, any ol' time they'd like to share them.

I was out and about on the Lower East Side on Monday night and at one bar, my friends and I were greeted with promotional The Ugly Truth shot glasses and napkins.

[Yes, I was the girl taking pictures of shot glasses for her classical music PR blog at the bar. That is, in fact, how I get all the boys.]

Every time I see an expensive mainstream promotion like this I crack myself up thinking about how the same promotion would be applied to classical music (also how I get all the boys). For example, will Deutsche Grammophon be creating promotional Hilary Hahn Bach Arias shot glasses in January? One of my summer interns suggested King's Singers collectible shot glasses, each with a different guy's head on it (collect all six!). I told her that that was remarkably similar to my King's Singers bobblehead idea, which I'm still trying to sell to the team.

Shot glasses are so amazingly trashy, though, that coming across an A Flowering Tree at Mostly Mozart August 2009 one at some Lower East Side dive bar would just make my summer.

A journalist friend forwarded a press release earlier today that included this:

XXXX, the feisty mezzo-soprano from Kansas who was born to
play Rossini's equally feisty comic heroine, Rosina, fell and broke
her right leg early in act one of The Barber of Seville on Saturday,
July 4th, the opening night of an important revival at London's Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden.  She returned to the stage to finish the
evening's performance, and blogged into the night about her adventure
and its aftermath.  She then showed up on every operatic weblog in the
world.  The Kansas City trouper said "the show must go on", and she
plans to be back on stage in the sparkling production tonight
(Tuesday, July 7), as well as in subsequent performances on July 10,
13, 15, and 18.

Every operatic weblog IN THE WORLD??? In the world? The whole wide world?

Who counted?

Publicists - myself included - are notoriously over-the-top; I like to think it's part of our charm.  But this kind of melodramatic PR boilerplate really slays me: the best of anything in the world, the greatest anyone of their generation, the most unique performer/performance (which isn't even grammatically correct, because something can't be the most-superlative, but - no matter).

That's not to say that this isn't a fantastic story. (Sister is apparently going to perform in a wheelchair??) But I think in press release-writing and bio-writing we sometimes out-promote ourselves. Where the artist has performed, what he or she has accomplished, what the critics have said about him or her should be enough to "prove" that someone is "one of the greatest artists of their generation" without a publicist having to explicitly say it.

Of course then I remember writing my college essays: apparently, my first drafts were completely un-self-promotional. ("I'm pretty good at the harp." "I do some community service.") My guidance counselor said that everyone else was going to exaggerate their accomplishments in their essays, so I certainly shouldn't downplay my own for the sake of modesty. So if I never say my clients show up on every blog in the world, does that put them at a disadvantage?