Outreach -- ouch!

From my faithful correspondent (and former student, and pianist, and movement teacher) Eric Barnhill comes this:

Your columns on City Opera reminded me of a nice opportunity I had several weeks ago to talk about City Opera's marketing with a couple of early-30s women who have no interest in opera, although as former dancers they both were very connected to the arts. One of them brought in the mail while I was over and they had a postcard from City Opera, that was in imitation of a personals ad section.

I thought it was cute and asked them what they thought. They agreed it was a good idea but said it "screams outreach". Ouch. That was due partly to the actual text on the "personals" part of the card, and partly to something on the other side of the card that really killed it - a slogan along the lines of "Classical can be fun!", which I have forgotten.

I commented at the time that though City Opera comes up with some clever ideas, they need someone to execute them who a) regards this not as "outreach marketing" but just "marketing" b) someone whose specialty is not opera, but hitting the audience they want to hit.

How often do classical music organizations test their marketing strategies? How often, when they want to talk to younger people, do they get younger people involved in the effort?

I've had the same experience Eric had. Some years ago, Gil Shaham made a music video, in which he played one of the "Winter" movements from Vivaldi's Seasons, mixed (oddly, I thought) with footage of winter in New York City. Deutsche Grammophon (who'd released a CD of Gil playing the piece with Orpheus) produced the video, which was directed by a guy who'd also made a video for R.E.M. As I remember, this effort eventually aired on the Weather Channel (I'm not making that up; DG couldn't place it elsewhere).

As a sidebar, so to speak, to the video, Gil was filmed talking about the music. Please don't take what I'm about to say as any criticism of him; he's just stellar in every way, and I've found him irresistible when he talks, live or on film or video or TV, about what he does. He picks up his fiddle, and it's like an extension of himself. When he plays to illustrate some point, it's just another way that he's speaking. And there's never anything remotely like a lecture in what he says.

But this sidebar to the weather video didn't quite come off, at least if it was intended to reach that new audience we always talk about. At one point, Gil quite naturally illustrated how Vivaldi depicts the winter cold, and the winter wind. I showed the video to a woman I was seeing at the time, a graphic designer in her 30s, and she said she was insulted. "I can hear that! Nobody has to tell me that!"

What happens, I think, is that we get a little carried away by the wonders of classical music, and then also we don't, many of us, have enough contact with people in what I can only call the outside world. So we imagine that classical music is so special that even something elementary -- Vivaldi making music imitate the wind -- needs to be explained and illustrated. We don't realize that the people we're talking to are smart, and have plenty of contact with music of other kinds, and with art and media generally. In fact, they're far more media-savvy than we are, and they know far more than we give them credit for. We have to meet them where they actually are, and not speak to them on the level either of a music education text of the 1940s, or else of the kind of hype they reject in four and a half seconds when it comes to them in normal advertising.