James Egelhofer: January 2010 Archives

In response to Amanda's question (James: to what extent do you feel knowing about your clients' both musical and non-musical pursuits helps you pitch them to presenters? What prepares you to defend their uniqueness, or sometimes, is uniqueness not what a presenter is looking for?), I have to start with my favorite dodge away from oversimplification: it depends.

On the most basic level, greater knowledge of what my artists care about is always helpful to me.  It helps me talk to them, it helps me talk about them, it helps me get through the day by reminding me what we're all after.  However, beyond that most basic level, it gets far more complicated, because they all care about different things; of course they all care foremost about making beautiful music, but every factor that goes into that process has different priority and preference for each of them.  Maybe the most important thing is to focus on the specific repertoire they are most excited about playing at that time, and all else is secondary.  Maybe the most important thing is to work with the conductors and collaborators they most enjoy, and the repertoire can be chosen slightly more broadly.  Maybe the most important thing is to build a schedule around a certain project that takes up a lot of time both in its preparation and its execution, and the simple logistics of scheduling cause that to be the most important factor.  &c.

The bigger and further complication is, as Amanda suggests, that in addition to each artist having differing priorities, each target that we might be pitching to also has its own set of priorities.  I'm sobbingly grateful to the booking agents that I work with, as they are able to keep track of the huge range of possibilities much better than I can; some presenters (more at the moment than I would hope for) must keep their costs as the primary concern and book based on that, others have a very specific audience they're targeting, others have an individual taste based on which they make their decisions, others want to try to be as broad as possible in terms of styles/instruments/repertoire over the course of their seasons.  &c.

So in an attempt to find activity for a particular artist, we try to match up everything we know about that artist or that they want known about them with everything that the pitchees are looking for.  Obviously.  Now you know why managers get the big bucks.  But I hope I've reasonably summarized why this is not as simple as it sounds.  Although I always feel that I could talk for days about what makes each artist unique and why they are doing the things they're doing (musical or not), sometimes the other end of the phone or email might not be interested in nearly that much information.  It may be that I'm speaking to a concert presenter about a younger artist who is not yet on the radar of that presenter, and although there are many interesting and potentially relevant points to discuss, that presenter only has a certain amount of money to spend in their budget and just needs to know that they can find a pianist for that fee.  Or they need a female violinist to play Bach as part of a season-long festival that is weighed too heavily towards male performers at that point.  In these cases, knowledge is always power, but only some of the knowledge might be relevant to the situation.
 
And to look at Jonathan's question for a moment, about (in brief) the kind of special created by a performer acting as a sort of invisible vessel vs the kind of special created by a performer who remains very... um... present? in the act of performance and of everything else they do: this to me is related and part of what I was trying to say in my initial post about trying to separate "special" from a dichotomy.  I think (hope?) that we can all name right now multiple performances that have moved us and fall into one or the other category, and maybe we demonstrate a certain preference in the balance.  But when it comes to the commercial implications of this, it seems to me that it does not sort any more simply than it does in my personal experience-- there are performers who are terrifically in demand about whom we know practically nothing of their lives outside of performance and who do not bring that kind of potentially-obstructive personality to the stage, and there are commercially more-than-viable performers who have chosen to make their persona an open book in everything they do.  With each of these performers, and I've heard a lot of it directly, there are people who CAN'T STAND what they do.  Perhaps it comes down to the very sensitive and individual matter of the emotional conveyance that has been discussed here-- in the end, it is impossible to argue with what people feel, try as I might, and although I may violently disagree or be mystified as why a listener may not feel that an artist I work for is special even if I do, the only way to "win" that "argument" is to hope that they experience the same artist again with a different result.  No amount of talking will do it.

I'm going to admit something while I'm laying on this pillowy expanse of interweb and not having to look in the eye any of my esteemed colleagues from all corners of the music world: I myself have argued both sides of every state-of-the-industry debate I can think of, at one time or another, and I suspect that many others have done the same.  For me, the need to do this arises from how quickly I find myself zooming in and out while looking at "the picture" in front of me--

-pondering one moment the effectiveness of a single piece on a single program by a single artist; then the ability of that program by that artist to grab the attention of an audience in a certain city;
-then the ability of that program by that artist to grab the attention of a group of audiences in a group of cities over the course of a concert season;
-then how that program by that artist in that season plays into the live performance career of that artist over several seasons, as it is experienced by both people within the industry and those outside of it;
-then how the live performance career of that artist fits into their career as a whole, including whatever other parts of it are relevant at that time or may be in the future;
-then, for me the most interesting and most daunting vantage point, how that artist's career as discussed and planned and worked at all of these levels interacts with other artists' careers, audiences, perceptions of music, and the art form itself, which loops me infuriatingly back to the beginning and the attempts to understand a concert experience piece by piece.  I think that this surveying is done by everyone who is involved in the process of making music happen, although the angles may be different. 

From each of these positions, I feel the push 'n pull.  This artist is fantastic, and therefore must do what feels right and inspires him or her, and all else will fall into place.  This artist is fantastic, and must be experienced by more people, and we need to decide how to make that happen.

One thing that stops me from drinking myself to death in this self-made spiral is the fact that there seems to be room for both ends of the push 'n pull to co-exist at all times for all artists, as long as no one is getting caught up in framing it as traditional vs progressive or old vs new, or, more importantly, thinking too narrowly about what this idea of "career" is.  This may be more true now than it has been in the past; it feels more true to me now than it did even in the dark ages of the mid 2000s when I first started pondering such questions.  If, as Amanda proposes, we take it as a given here that Artist under discussion is indeed fantastic (and Artist definitely is, trust me, I'm a manager, which is why I'm talking about Artist as if this were a contract), then Artist can decide that for a certain period of time, Artist will apply Artistself wholly to playing music that has been around for hundreds of years in formats that are familiar to everyone (recital, concerto, chamber), and Artist will be able to make a career out of this in the sense that there will be some people (concert presenters, record labels) who will pay Artist to do so because some other people (audiences) will pay those people to see and hear it.  It may not be as many people as Artist envisions in wildest Artist-dreams, or maybe it will.  It depends on the Artist-dreams.  And when the period of time governed by this application of Artist's abilities is up, Artist can decide to do it some more.  Or Artist can decide to play the same music but try to talk more about why and how Artist does so, or to play music that will be written just for Artistself and doesn't yet exist, or to play music with someone who has no relation to or experience with the familiar formats in which Artist has recently been found, or to write a book about Mozart and give a particular perspective on him, or to start a foundation and raise money for aspiring Artists, or any combination of these, or anything else. 

None of these decisions in themselves will guarantee a change in how many people will experience Artist, for better or worse.  Nor will these decisions make Artist "special" in an abstract sense, because anyone could be making the same decisions, and many are.  To me, the responsibility that artists have is not to make any particular decision about their work in this regard, but to make any decision with the understanding of why they are making it and what will be involved in an attempt by all of us who have a stake to turn that decision into action.  And by probably needlessly-stated extension, the responsibility that we all have, anyone who works with the artist in any way, is to create that action as best we can.  Sometimes we will be pushed along by the way the resulting music-making fits into existing systems of dispersion into the world, whether booking dates or planning a season of concerts in a venue or publicizing performances; and other times we will need to pull the system apart and find the bits that are relevant and helpful.  Sometimes both at once.  Sometimes on multiple zoom levels or every level.  Sometimes it will not work, or not right away.  It's not algebra, and though I occasionally want to cut off my limbs to make things more linear, in the end I'm grateful for that.

The pull to this push about push-'n-pulls is a lingering feeling that everything is a compromise, or that everything has to be deflated to be "realistic".  I hope we collectively can find a way not to get caught up in this.  It may be that we will always feel like things could be going better, and that there is more to do.  I have never had a day when I have not felt so as I lie in bed in a Groundhog Day-like sequence, lit by the glow of an improving series of handheld email-checking devices.  But the ability to actively and genuinely choose our own music adventure and work towards enacting it, as long as we realize that's what we're doing, ensures that "special" does not have to be kidnapped and co-opted into a two-sided argument.