August 2009 Archives

At the ends of weeks, I post interviews with people who know a lot more about aspects of the proverbial business than I do. Two weeks ago, theater blogger Jaime Green told us she would blog professionally if given the opportunity. This week, we have Jerry Yeti, who blogged at Yeti Don't Dance for just about three years before (sort of) giving it up, possibly for good.


On November 8, 2007, you posted that you would not 1. become a blogger blogging about not blogging and 2. that your blog, Yeti Don't Dance, was not dead. There are six posts after that, from the same day, from November 12, 2007; December 5, 2007; January 28, 2008; December 31, 2008; and March 10, 2009. Have you officially called time of death?
 
Is this a deposition?  Every once in a while I still get a delusion that I have something to interesting to say and that people other than my mom want to hear it.  Like most, I started blogging because I had perspectives about things but no outlet.  One of my first posts (pre-music)  I blogged was about this medieval toilet you could buy, and as an architect (during the day) I dreamt about specifying that someday for a client.  If I ever design a castle, I know the perfect throne.

I eventually became over conscientious of my audience.  What killed my blog in the end -if it is indeed dead- was self-doubt.  I began to feel that people didn't care what I had to say.  The response I had during the blog's heyday was that people did care, but somewhere along the line I myself no longer believed it.  I was like Tinkerbell, but it was me who failed to clap for everyone else.


Let's do this interview like The Notebook and flash back to the very beginning. Why did you start writing a music blog in 2005? Your first post reads, "As reported in Pitchfork today, LCD Soundsystem will hit Webster Hall (cringe) on June 10... but without M.I.A. I guess. I wonder why?". You really jumped right into the content there, didn't you? No "I'm X and I'm starting a music blog now" introduction? Do you think readers cared who you were and why you were doing this, or is content and access to information all that really matters?

I didn't need an introduction because no one was reading.  I was trying to emulate other music blogs and in order to rise to their level, I had to exist as if I always had existed.  Maybe I started blogging in 1996 and simply deleted the archives?  In fact, yes, that it what I did.  I'm the oldest music blog in existence and no even realizes this.  And that is why it continues even in its state of suspended animation.  It's waiting to go to the fu-ture.  What's the Notebook?


What's your day job? Was blogging an escape from the day job? A supplement to the day job? Something you hoped would some day become the day job?

Architecture.  Blogging was supplemental to expand my social life, discover new music, and meet new people.  I knew the love affair would only last a couple years.  One day I'd wake up and be burnt out and move on to something else.  My current obsessions are training for a marathon and solving puzzles like Rubik's Cubes and higher order cubes.  Neither of these things is conducive to a social life.


What, if anything, did you do to promote the blog when you launched it?

Really complex marketing strategies like commenting on other websites by leaving on-topic thoughts and including a hypertext link in my name.  Everyone loves to post anonymously on BrooklynVegan nowadays, but people are missing out on some serious traffic.  Back when I was a blogger, we posted our names proudly next our comments, and called each other names to our faces.


Can you explain the "indie rock" blogosphere to us? Does everything filter down from Pitchfork? Or does no one care about Pitchfork. From Brooklyn Vegan, maybe? Are bloggers generally friends/ly or are there Blog Wars?
 
It's a network of friends really.  Everyone knows everyone because you all go to all the same shows all the time.  Are they friendly?  All but two. 

Nothing filters from Pitchfork other than nonsense.  People pay attention to it because it's there, like the weather.  It fills a vacuum. 


Even though you write about a lot of New York-area shows, did you find you had readers from all over the country? Is there a more national focus to a broader indie rock scene, or do bloggers tend to focus on bands from or who come to their area?
 
NYC is the cauldron to boil in if you want to make it .  We have the highest density-per-capita of music bloggers of anywhere, maybe.   Indie rock is local in that we get to see out favorite bands repeatedly, but the love for the music transcends state lines.  New York State demands sales tax on music love acquired from out of state, but that's a single line on form IT-150.


In your opinion, how relevant are printed music magazines like Rolling Stone, Paste, and Spin today?

I still think there's a place for printed music reviews in newspapers and places like Reader's Digest, but definitely not dedicated music periodicals. 


Why did you stop blogging?

1. Self-Doubt as explained above
2. I saw over 220 concerts in 2006, and even more bands.  I was burning myself out.
3. Already seen most bands I liked - some many, many times each.
4. It's a lot of work.  Finding new music, going to shows, reading blogs. I prefer to be lazy.
5. Too many emails from publicists - I couldn't filter what was good
6. Finally got a girlfriend -unlikely, but true
7. Got a Metafilter account.   I saw how smart and funny people over there were and I immediately felt dumb and humorless.  Much like how I stopped playing guitar after 10 years when I started going to indie rock shows.  The last time I played guitar was a song for my Grandma's funeral. 

Have your Twitter and Tumblr accounts replaced the blog, or are they completely different? I hear you signed up for Twitter before anyone knew what Twitter was. Do you feel vindicated or annoyed that it's so popular now?
 
Twitter is easy because it's so brief.  Yet, even there I have to concentrate hard on what I have to say and not sound trite.  I started it as a joke with reports on BMs (very high level of concentration), but I quickly saw the merits of it beyond that.


In the heyday of Yeti Don't Dance, how often were you pitched by bands and publicists to cover shows?

About as much as I get now.  They don't seem to care I haven't blogged regularly in years.  It boggles my mind.


What's the most annoying thing a band or publicist ever did?
 
I've been contacted on instant messenger to follow up on the dozen or so emails I ignored.


How often do you still get pitched?

I got 45 emails from bands and publicists today alone.  35 of them went directly to my spam box, and 10 of them I had to delete personally.

I was walking to the 1 train after a meeting today and saw this:

Then this:

And I thought, I wonder where more New Yorkers are going to spend their hard-earned American dollars.

My sister just sent me MTV Video Music Awards "VMA Side Story" trailer. If the West Side Story currently on Broadway was 1/100th as accessible as this, we'd really have ourselves a revival. Wait through the little ad and then watch:

From Gawker:

According to "art community consultant" Patrick Courrielche, who supports those Obama Joker posters, the NEA organized a recent conference call to assemble an army of artists who will maybe possibly (hopefully?) use their work to inspire service in key social arenas, such as health care and energy.

...The call's participants were "encouraged" to use their myriad mediums to concoct "creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country." Now, it's not unusual for the government to use art in times of economic need. Long ago, the New Deal's Works Progress Administration set up the Federal Art Project, which had artists beautify the Depression-pocked landscape and remind them of essential needs, like good dental care. But the WPA and NEA are different beasts, and Courrielche worries that the NEA, which offers grants to artists and often drums up even more money for grantees, will use this initiative to pick and choose ideologically motivated artists.

First-ly, "Art Community Consultant"? Oh come on now. I was told from Day 1 in this business that "consultant" meant "unemployed" in the arts. And kind of everywhere, right?

Regardless, it's interesting. Of course artists should be involved in politics and educational outreach.  Whether it would be/could be a government propaganda "machine"? Don't know. Sure, people are stupid and might vote for whomever/whatever The Jonas Brothers tell them to, but is that any different than the myriad of people who said they'd vote for Hillary Clinton because they recognized her last name? You have to work with what you've got! Read on at Gawker.

Classical music concerts and recording projects are planned years in advance, so cultural relevance is like Russian roulette in our industry. "Fingers crossed something happens to make that Bartok relevant in St. Louis in 2013."("Or not, we don't really care.")  One might argue that certain pieces (certain plays, musicals, books and visual art) will always be relevant despite what is going on in any given time period; precisely the reason they are shown, read, and performed for generations beyond that for which they were created. A driving desire for up-to-the-minute relevance is why art didn't simply stop production in the 1740s, 1840s, 1940s. ("That'll do it! Let's just coast on The Trial and West Side Story for a while.") Assessing what determines relevance, however, is highly dependent on what makes a work of art significant to the beholder. This is obviously a broad topic, but I've recently been thinking about one slice of it: are pieces of art more relevant when you've discovered them for yourself or when forces of your generation pressure you to come to them?

I saw Rent in previews with my mom. I remember her calling for tickets from our landline in the kitchen, muttering about getting them "before the damn thing wins all the Tonys." Having no idea what to expect, we left my younger sister at home, though to this day none of the three of us knows what most of the drug references mean, so Aliza hardly would have figured it out at age 11 ("no you cut the paper plate"??). Sitting in the second row of house right just under a speaker, my mom and I didn't think we were going to make it through when the song "Rent" blasted out at us, but by "Today 4 U" we were completely sold. I saw a lot of musicals growing up (including unmitigated disasters like The Red Shoes, as well as the Andrew Lloyd Webber parade, Les Mis, Miss Saigon and my beloved The Secret Garden), but this was the first I could really relate to. Relate to for no one reason in particular, since growing up in New Canaan, Connecticut hardly prepares one for life in Alphabet City in the 90s, but relate to completely nonetheless. We did go again with Aliza just after Rent opened, not wanting her to miss out on what we were sure and continue to be sure was the most culturally relevant piece of theater we would see in our young lives. To this day, I can sing the entire musical through without the music playing. It's not what I would call a "pleasant" "listening" "experience", but I can do it start to finish. Next time you see me at a meeting/concert/party, just ask. Or don't, actually.

One of the most obviously meaningful things about seeing Rent so early on was that the cast was still crying over Jonathan Larson's recent death. My mom and I had the overwhelming sense that we were seeing something so fresh that it would become increasingly less raw with every performance, so while the work itself would remain powerful, seeing it after it became a hit would somehow make it less dynamic.  Many years later, I saw Spring Awakening in previews by myself. I know about as much about adolescent date rape and failing out of school in 19th century Germany as I did about AZT and "trisexusals", but as with Rent I had this sense that, due to the style of music, the choreography, or the untried spirit of the performances, I was seeing something that was and would become important when our cultural history was written.

Avenue Q opened on Broadway in July 2003 and spoke to a generation of young adults - many of whom probably wouldn't consider themselves "theater people" - like Rent did and Spring Awakening would. I saw it for the first time last week, and on August 18, 2009, it did not speak to me. I don't know why I didn't see it when it sooner. I distinctly remember saying that I didn't want to see a musical "with puppets and no dancing". This is odd, of course, because Rent doesn't have so much dancing, and I am very much in the Jim Henson camp; I grew up watching Sesame Street (as I'm sure most Avenue Q superfans did), I own two seasons of The Muppet Show on DVD, I was one of the few people who actually watched Muppets Tonight when it was on TV, I've seen all the Muppet movies, and Emmet Otter's Jug-band Christmas is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time. But I really had no interest, even when Avenue Q won the Tony (over the much-hyped and extremely flawed Wicked, which was an amazing moment in Broadway history), even when non-artsy friends would reference "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", even when it was discounted on TDF for months.

At the end of June, it was announced that Avenue Q would be closing, at which point I thought, "I've been told this is an important musical. I need to see it." Of course at that point it was no longer on TDF or TKTS, so I plopped down the $70 and up to the rear balcony I went.

I wanted to see Avenue Q before it closed because I knew it was relevant to my generation. I knew exactly why it was relevant to my generation, in fact, and I knew which moments made it so. When one of the puppets is outed by his roommate ("  "), I knew he was going to sing a song about his "girlfriend" "who lives in Canada". When the song, "It Sucks to Be Me" started, my friend leaned over and said, "this is the YouTube clip that's always forwarded around." I knew the puppets were going to have sex. I knew the main character was named Princeton, and that he would lament what he was going to do with his English major. I had never actually heard any of these songs, but knowing they were coming conjured an even stronger effect of meaningless-ness. 

A similar dichotomy occurs in classical music, though over many more than the six years it took me to come to and reject Avenue Q.  Some audience members like myself are so obsessed with seeing works that are Of This Moment that they are too quick to dismiss performances of Beethoven, say, as culturally irrelevant. Maybe though, the soloist or orchestra or conductor had a reason to perform that Beethoven now and brought a new, contemporary perspective that would have been "so 2009". On the opposing team, we have audience members who will only attend concerts (plays, musicals, art exhibitions; read books) that have been proven as Important Things to them by buzz, media coverage, awards and longevity. I saw Avenue Q because I felt I should, and surprise of surprises, it meant nothing to me. Audience members want to see Mozart because they're sure it will be good, and again, not surprisingly come away completely bored.  Or they know it's important and that's enough reason to love any performance. Or they just actually love it and can relate to it, like hundreds of years worth of audience members have done before them. I could and hopefully will see and read hundreds more plays in my lifetime, and I really don't see anything knocking Twelfth Night out of my top three.

Epilogue: Lucy Slut, the bad-girl puppet from Avenue Q, is on the cover of Time Out New York this week. I was with a friend when I got my magazine in the mail, and exclaimed to him in a self-satisfied tone, "Ah-hah! I just saw that. And before Time Out told me to!"

#   #  #

Choose Your Own Adventure, Blog Edition: I wrote another version of this blog entry that went something like this. I don't know if it's more or less interesting - relevant? - than the above. I saw Rent for a third time a few years back because my friend was playing Angel and also saw the movie version when it was released. In both instances, watching Rent as a period piece was truly unsettling.  When something is written for one generation and promoted that way, how can it be publicized and marketed when it becomes something else, even a few years later? If we promote new works' capacity to speak to audiences in a way that theater or music pieces from the past cannot, then what is left to say about them when the their cultural moment is over? Is the ability to market to one generation inversely related to promoting a piece in later years; the more relevant is was, the less relevant it will become?

Other sub-topics I left out in the interest of not making this a book:
If my future children asked me to take them to a Rent revival, would I take them? My dad saw the Hair revival with my sister recently, and at intermission told her, "I'm really enjoying this, but when your mom and I saw this the year we graduated high school we were all sitting in the audience wondering if we were going to be drafted." AIDs could have a cure by the time I have kids, and then what would Rent be?

And, though I did not find Avenue Q relevant on the whole, I did buy the song "There's a Fine, Fine Line" the next day and have been listening to it for a week straight. I call those songs "audition songs", that is, songs that people will use in auditions for the Rest of Time. "Corner of the Sky", "On My Own"...you know the type. So how and when does one song - or even one movement or musical phrase - continue to be relevant long after its source is not? 

I was en route to Molyvos last night and, even though I was extremely late and exceedingly hot, I stopped to look at the striking, massive images lining Carnegie Hall's 7th avenue wall. Just one other thing in the four years I've lived in New York (two of which were spent working next to Carnegie Hall) has stopped me outside that building, and that was when I was inexplicably, over-the-top attracted to one of Thomas Adès' press photos. Oh, here it is:

(I sleep with a copy under my pillow every night.)

Carnegie has been running a "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" ad campaign around the city this summer (most notably on subway platform walls), and frankly I'm thrilled to see them hemorrhaging money on such a worthy endeavor. The ads are eye-catching, contemporary and aesthetically appealing while not compromising Carnegie's existing image and what the institution stands for. Now, they've blown up the performance shots used in the campaign for the 7th avenue Zankel wall, and it really looks fantastic. Wallking by the building, you actually get a sense of what goes on in there, which is as it should be. Great things do go on in there! Great things that are not so much expressed by press shots of pianists in front of their pianos.  It's not TV screens or music, but I'll take it.


From the Hilton Corridor of Penn Station:

At 5:12pm Mozart was on the homepage of Google News. He's in the - let's say "diverse" - company of Brett Favre and Michael Jackson's doctor.

After trying to dodge the thing Frogger-style, I finally read the (third? 700th?) George Steel profile in the Times. All I will say is that in the piece, he's compared to The President of the United States of America, "another newcomer to a tough job in a time of crisis." I wonder when publicists will start comparing artists to Obama in their press releases. I'm sure it's already happened.

I was forwarded an e mail about a new classical music gossip site called The Cereal List. Despite the fact that my readers did not seem to get behind Pitch Snitch, ahem, I remain convinced that more gossipy blogs - notably OperaChic and Parterre Box - are some of the best things in the industry. Unfortunately, the introduction e mail to The Cereal List included a fake teaser about Cecilia Bartoli hooking up with Joshua Bell, calling it "an Ashton and Demi thing" (Mmm...Google it: Bartoli is about one year older than Bell). Additionally, this intro e mail was sent from the super secret aspiring gossip columnist's Personal E mail Address, which is really amazing. These big little initial missteps don't inspire much confidence, and I'm not entirely sure how (if?) they're going to fact-check, but take a gander and decide for yourselves.

Not unsurprisingly, One Hundred people forwarded me the news of the Streisand Village Vanguard concert a couple weeks back. First, it's genius because I actually thought you had to pre-order the CD to enter to win tickets, but there's small print that says you don't. Point is, had my sister not corrected me, ~17 copies of Love is the Answer would have arrived (for different names) at my doorstep. That is some good, trixy marketing. However, my intern Nate took a close look at the rules (and nooo, I did not make him do that as part of his job) and found this oddity: Any potential winner who resides in Canada will first be required to correctly answer a skill-testing (arithmetical) question as a condition of winning.

What now? I mean, how's that?

Something like this, maybe:

A cruise ship sinks in the Atlantic and half of the survivors make it to a desert island. There are enough copies of The Way We Were to last 14 people 2 weeks. 4 days later, the ship sent to rescue the survivors also sinks, drowning 6.5 crew members and 33 Color Me Barbra records, leaving an additional 7 people stranded on the island to now share the 1 copy of Streisand Superman. The Art obviously has to be re-rationed, but everyone is now on half of the original ration, so how many days in total from the day of the original sinking would it take for a shipment of Yentl DVDs to reach the island?

Happy Friday! It's not raining and I actually have an interview to post!  This week we have Jaime Green, Literary Associate at MCC Theater in Manhattan and blogger of 5 years. Below she discusses why she started blogging, while she'll keep blogging, and whether or not There Will Be/Should Be Blood in the theater blogosphere. Err..."theatrosphere". Additionally, this marks the first mention of lolcats on this blog.


Jaime Green is a freelance theatre producer and dramaturg, as well as Literary Associate at MCC Theater.  She is Artistic Director of Temporary Theatre Company which, true to its name, is now in hibernation.  She often considers leaving theatre to teach/garden/become a nutritionist/have a podcast/hide under the covers, but it hasn't happened yet.  In addition to her blog, Surplus, she has written for Cheap Healthy Good and Program Notes, the blog of the National Performing Arts Convention.  She is a contributing writer to Spezzatino, and would sell a kidney to write for The Awl.


When and why did you start writing a blog?

I started writing a blog before they were even called blogs (at least that I know of).  In college some folks had "web journals," and I started one of my own, which I told no one about.  I spent more time teaching myself html and perfecting the layout that writing, but I did post one rather fine story about finding a spider in my dorm room.

I started Surplus in August of 2004.  I'd started reading some blogs in college, and this was the summer after graduation.  I was probably feeling the lack of writing and creativity in my desk-job life, but the conscious reason is in the title - I had (have) a lot of extra ("surplus" - aha!) stuff knocking around my head: daily anecdotes, thoughts, opinions on just about everything.  My friends were probably starting to get sick of it, and there was a free blog platform, and I suffer from the delusion that what I have to say is interesting.  


Who did you expect to read it?

I didn't really think about that at first, but I was hoping for a similar wide-ranging readership as the blogs that I read - personal blogs (oddly often parents') that were entertaining and engaging, little windows into people's lives.  The stuff that gives blogging its narcissistic bad name, but what actually makes it, to me, something special.  So, basically, I was hoping it would be read by strangers.  Millions and millions of strangers who were fascinated to read about this fake engagement ring I accidentally acquired.


Who ended up reading it?

Well, some strangers, but I've yet to break the millions-and-millions mark. Some friends, though not all of them.  Some people I know through the theatre world, which is always at once cool and totally terrifying.  The time an actor I know through work introduced me to someone as a blogger.  That was scary.  But also, "Wow, she reads my blog?"  My sister reads it, but I don't think my mother does.

In case we need further proof that we are a video-obsessed culture, we now have live television embedded in the mirrors of THE BATHROOMS at the Time Warner Center.

Maybe it will encourage more people to wash their hands?

I tell you what, though: the day I'm made to pitch Public Restroom Exclusive Content, I'm switching jobs.

I have this thing about those Tide stain pens.  I see them on the TV and think nothing of it, but then I'll inevitably be in a Duane Reade later that week, a line of them will be hanging by the paper towels, and I'll think, "Yes! That is exactly what I need." Then I'll use it maybe once, lose it, and start the cycle anew the next month.

My point is that I don't hop on the interweb while the commercial is on and order one right then. I have to see it on TV, probably see it in a print ad, maybe see someone using one in real life, and then see the physical product in the store, at which point the $3.99 is spent. This is one reason I don't think traditional advertising for physical classical CDs works anymore. You may see a television or print ad, and you may even think the CD looks interesting, but if you never see that album in the proverbial flesh you probably won't buy it. And you're not going to see it in the flesh/(plastic), because there Are No Record Stores Left and The Book Sellers Don't Care.

Last Friday, I went down to South Street Seaport to see the cute and good Norwegian band Casiokids. Because the performance was in a touristy area, because it was a Friday night, and because the concert was outdoors, a lot of people stopped to listen who had probably never heard of Casiokids. Perhaps they were in the neighborhood enjoying the culinary delights of the Pizzeria Uno,

...or perhaps they were chillin' on the parked pirate ship.

Either way, they were not there for The Norwegians, but many, I'm sure, were pleased to encounter a new band.

Unfortunately, if they missed the band's verbal introduction, they had no way of knowing who the musicians were. There were no signs, no banners  - nothing that said "Casiokids" from the band or from River to River, the presenting organization.  This led me to think back on the outdoor concerts I've seen this summer and saw last summer. The SummerStage concerts in Central Park are well advertised, but there's no signage around the park, where you can certainly hear the concerts, about whose music you're hearing. Maybe you won't go into the bandshell area, but if you passively hear or see something you like, it would be great to know what it is.

The only time I've seen a band with a sign was at All Points West last year, when the band CSS brought their own. Even walking around that same festival this year, I didn't know what bands were playing unless I looked at the schedule and locations on my phone. The CSS sign from last year was also their logo, and it's very clearly still in my mind today.

My point about the Tide stain pens and Casiokids is that we sometimes encounter things we like in the physical world. In music, however, we're often prepared by advertisements to encounter physical things (like CDs) and we never do, or we encounter the physical (outdoor concerts) and are never told what we're encountering. The Tide pen wins, then, because it both prepares us and we encounter it in our natural lives.


Update, 11:45pm: As irony would have it, I did see fairly good signage at the Yeasayer concert tonight. Granted, I only saw one sign, but I least it was in full view of street traffic, clearly directed people to the concert on the pier, and told passersby what they were hearing. My friend and I wanted to check out The Highline at night, so we left before the encores. You could still hear the concert from The Highline, so it is too bad there weren't signs there. But again, the presenter - River Rocks - certainly gets more credit than All Points West, SummerStage or River to River.

Because 1. no one wants to read about The Life and Times of Amanda Ameer every day and 2. because there are many, many people out there who know more about publicity and marketing than I do, every week I try and post an interview with someone else in the field. Usually, I do this on Fridays, but that clearly didn't happen last week. Or the week before.  But TODAY we have a continuation of the critically-acclaimed (for realz - a few critics e mailed and said they liked it) Life's a Pitch feature Better Know a Publicist. See the Interviews column to your right for the other publicist interviews. Now here's Glenn Petry from 21C Media Group on Publicity 101.

Glenn Petry has worked in the music scene - both promoting and performing - for more than 15 years. He co-founded 21C Media Group in January 2000 and has been the Director of Public Relations since its inception. He developed his interest in promoting classical music while touring the US with the experimental rock band Drunken Boat, after which he became a consultant to the classical music industry for a dozen years. Working with both record labels (such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips) and artists (such as Cecilia Bartoli, Renée Fleming, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Gil Shaham, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and many others), he expanded the reach of classical artists beyond the specialist press into the mainstream media.

On the marketing side, Mr. Petry pioneered new ways to present classical music to the public (from CD packaging to music videos) and forged innovative partnerships that created synergistic successes on behalf of classical music, while maintaining his deep involvement in many other musical genres, including jazz, reggae, electronica and world music.

What is the purpose of a press release? And what, in your opinion, is the most important aspect of a press release? How does that element accomplish the purpose?

The purpose of a press release is to provide information that is of essential interest to its readers. In our case this means vital and accurate information about upcoming performances, new recording releases and any artistic activity that resonates with the reader and piques his or her interest.


Similarly, what is the most important aspect of an artist biography? How long should a bio be, ideally? Should it include press quotes? Why or why not?

An artist's biography should tell the story of the artist as interestingly and briefly as possible. Paragraphs listing the various venues where an artist has performed become unnecessary when the artist is well established. Quotes can be helpful if they bring color to the artist's story; they can add both credibility and eloquence to an artist's reputation.


How far in advance of a CD release or concert do you send/e mail press releases? How many times do you usually follow-up journalists after sending the release?

We typically send out initial information about 6 weeks before a concert, tour or recording release (sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the size and complexity of the project), and then we follow up with one or two 'reminder' or 'tune-in' press releases in the lead-up to the event. As far as following up with individual journalists goes, this is done very much on a case by case basis, again depending on the journalist or outlet being pitched.


In 2009, what do you consider successful coverage for a client's concert? How has the definition of "coverage" changed since you started working in PR? For example, do artist's personal blogs/websites/Twitter feeds count as media coverage?

The definition of success has unquestionably changed in the last 15 or so years since we began working in the classical music industry. There is less 'expert coverage' overall, and more importance is placed on "buzz", general awareness, and word on the street; organic, everything-counts multimedia coverage - including discussion on blogs and social media networks - is vital to the success of any concert today.

Why does Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart love men SO MUCH?

Look them all!  There is not one female featured artist all summer!

Another possible solution to the problems with programs (earlier thoughts on the subject here and here):

The Fourth Wall seems to have left the tristate area.  Every show I've been to in the past few weeks has had some kind of performer/audience interaction.

The streak started on July 25th when I went to see my friend Dan Tepfer (interviewed here) play with Lee Konitz at 11pm at Birdland in midtown. About halfway through the set, Lee opened his mouth (without a saxophone in it) and addressed the audience for the first time. "Any questions?"  he asked. Someone in the front row said that he "enjoyed the counterpoint in that last piece." Um, thanks dude? I got the impression, though, that if someone had asked a question - any question - Lee would have actually answered it.  He wasn't playing during a piece a few minutes later, so he just went and sat down in the audience and watched, which totally cracked me up.

Three days later, my sister took me to the Green Day concert at Madison Square Garden. She gave me the tickets for my most recent birthday which, along with the spare laptop battery my dad got me, confirmed that my tastes mirror those of a 15-year-old boy.  More wall crumbling: the lead singer, Billy Joe Armstrong, jumped into audience right and practically sung an entire song there, faux-exorcised a 12-year-old boy on stage, and pulled three kids from the audience to "start a band". The new bassist was so impressive that the actual bassist gave him a bass to take home. That in addition to the usual "hey-o" calls and responses and a whole lot of "New York is the best effing city in the whole world" shout-outs made for a very interactive evening.

(Here's someone in the audience with an "I Play Guitar" sign, who obviously had heard about the Build-a-Band from the concert the night before:)

(Here's the new band-in-training - cute overload:)

(And here's the "exorcism" - cute again but a little creepy:)

Last Friday, I got soaking wet at All Points West in Jersey City, where - again in addition to all the bands addressing the audience at one point or another - Matt Berninger of The National took his plugged-in mic into the audience and sang "Mr. November" in the pouring rain, completely surrounded by fans. 

I (finally) saw Billy Elliot on Sunday, during which the Michael character, after singing the poor man's version of "Dress Has Always Been My Strongest Suit" (one wonders why Sir Elton didn't just plop that song in rather than trying to recreate it), plays off the audience, encouraging us to clap more as he shakes and shimmies. Multiple characters exited and entered from the audience.

One more! On Monday night, I went to the Béla Fleck/Toumani Diabeté concert and film screening in Central Park.  Béla told the audience that he flew into the city on Sunday night, and as the plane was landing he started chatting with the woman sitting next to him. "What are you doing in New York?" she asked. "I'm playing a concert in Central Park," he answered. "Oh!" she said. "Are you playing with Béla Fleck? We're going to that concert!" After the laughter subsided, the woman, who was sitting on a picnic blanket house (lawn) left, stood up and waived at Béla on stage.

Last night, I did my laundry and watched Law and Order: SVU. All walls remained intact.

This series of performances led me to think about the times when the fourth wall was broken during classical music concerts. I wrote about one extremely positive experience - Gloria Cheng at (le) poisson rouge - here. Mostly, though, the musicians don't interact with the audience except maybe during encores, and when they do, it usually annoys me to no end.

One example I always come back to: David Robertson conducting the New York Philharmonic in December 2006. I was in it for the Kaija Saariaho premiere, but there was Debussy on the program as well. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe people clapped after the first movement of La Mer, at which point - and this is quite clear in my memory - Robertson, with his hands still up, turned around and said to us, "I always want to clap after that movement too."

!!!

It really bothered me, but in retrospect, I don't quite know why. Was it his patronizing tone? Smug smile? (He did look smug.) Interuption of the music more than any missplaced applauding could have? Calling attention to the audience misbehaving? Or was it, I wonder, that I just wasn't accustomed to conductors addressing the audience in the middle of pieces. Yes, it LuPone-style ruins the moment a bit, but bands stop and start over all the time and no one really minds; singer-songwriters talk over instrumental sections and the performances are usually more entertaining for it.  Was it simply his way of connecting with the audience? As far as I know, it could have been successful. Whereas I go around saying, "This one time David Robertson ruined a NY Phil concert", others may very well have gone home and said, "The concert was so great; the conductor said he wants to clap between movements, too!"

A little client update for you all, so we're perfectly clear that they're my people when I start yammering about them on (le) blog. This July, I started working for soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and composer Julia Wolfe. I'm also doing some consulting work for Chamber Music America, and am handling the PR for Cecilia Bartoli's next album, Sacrificium, this fall. I told my colleagues at Decca that it really warmed my heart that they thought of me when an album about genital mutilation came along.  We all have our special things.

Few things entertain me more than when publicists don't tell people who their clients are. You're the publicist: you should be putting your clients' names out in the world as much as humanly possible! When I worked at IMG, I asked one publicist why his clients' names weren't on a website. "We want people to think our clients are getting all the press they're getting on their own," he answered. I almost see his point, but then...what the what? Is it some great badge of honor for an artist to get things on his or her own? Would an audience care if the artist they were seeing at, say, McCarter got to that stage without a manager? When I read a newspaper profile I don't think, wow, good-on the publicist. Well actually I personally do think that, but that's only because I'm PR-obsessed. The average Jane/Joe reading the Arts + Leisure section surely doesn't care, they're just presumably glad the piece happened.

Of course, as evidenced from a year of this blog, I don't think anything should be kept secret, so perhaps I'm not the most unbiased person to speak on the subject.

I'd never seen This is Spinal Tap before last week. Judge me __here___. My friend and I were chatting as the credits were rolling and out of nowhere he goes, "Wait - pause it. Rewind. Does that say Jane Covner??" Obviously my friend works in classical music, or else he probably wouldn't have recognized Joshua Bell's publicist's name.