Solutions

• Billy Robin talks about the

  Northwestern University Music Marathon, a 26-hour concert

  of all kinds of music, classical as well as jazz, rock and other genres,

  attracting a diverse cross section of the NU campus population. It’s

  also a benefit for the People’s Music School, a nonprofit that provides

  free music lessons to Chicago’s underprivileged youth.  

• Margaret Crites talks about her

  experiences promoting the Ojai Music Festival.  She found that

  describing contemporary music as sound art got the most positive

  reactions from non-musicians.  

• We have

  trouble, in classical music, telling the rest of the world why it should

  care. But Schwalbe and Partners write gripping headlines on their

  press releases. When you get one of their emails, with the headline as

  the subject, you really want to click on it.

Updates 3/22

• David Ezer suggests orchestras build a

  loyalty program for their audience.

• Greg offered a proposal about music

  students giving concerts to reach an audience their own age. He’s

  talked about that before — it’s his project at the University of

  Maryland — but this is a useful summary of what the project means. He

  wrote it as background for a presentation he’ll give at the Yale School

  of Music. 
  

Update 3/14

• Composer Xavier Losada 

  involves his audience in the music making process by recording them

  playing sounds and then improvising over the recording during the

  performance.
  

• Greg’s project at the

  University of Maryland has taken off explosively, with

  students at the music school full of ideas about how to bring their

  concerts to a new audience of people their own age

• Greg

  suggests suggests new-media ways to promote new

  projects. Yes, you can do enticing things online, but what are they,

  and how do you get people to notice them? Including something very

  successful that the BBC Proms did, after they hired a 22 year-old

  musician (and digital expert) to advise them. 
  

• In a second post, Greg gave an example, to demonstrate

  what can be learned by using new media, even if you haven’t fully

  strategized what you want new media to do. You might well learn things

  by using new media that wil change your strategy!
  

Updates 3/1:

• Indie singer/songwriters Amanda

  Palmer and Ben Folds have performed arrangements of their music with

  symphony orchestras, diversifying the concert hall audience.  Palmer

  talks about her experiences in a terrific long interview on Sequenza 21.  Warning: some graphic

  images/language. Other pop people have played with orchestras, too, of

  course, and we’ll get some of them on this list as time goes on. For a

  start on other pop/classical encounters, see blog posts here about Christopher O’Riley playing Radiohead and Shostakovich

  together, and about an orchestra

  piece by Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist of Radiohead.

• Maria Choban created a spiced up

  program for Chopin’s first ballade entitled “Snuff Porn” which she used

  to engage at risk students.

Updates

• Composer Melissa

  Dunphy wrote a work called The Gonzales Cantata which placed

  the transcripts from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ Senate

  Judiciary Hearings in a baroque cantata format. The work had a wide

  appeal from different parts of the audience, including people who were

  interested in the political story, classical music fans, and music fans

  outside the classical world.

• The

  Metropolitan Opera used its large marketing budget to target niche

  groups when it produced a run of Philip Glass’ Satyagraha that would be interested in

  the opera’s unique story. Galen Brown talks about the plan on S21.
  

• In NYC, the Special Music School is a classical

  music magnet intermediate school that features a new music ensemble

  called Face the Music. Students at the school arranged

  some of their favorite pop songs for classical instruments.
  

• Adam Matthes, a violist participating in the Chintimini

  Chamber Music Festival, contributed two success stories.  The

  first was a performance of the piece Embellie by the

  composer/architect Xenakis for a group of architects. They’re not the

  standard new music audience, but they loved the piece, and even asked to

  look at the score, to see how certain passages they’d loved looked like

  in print. The second success story was a concept called “Classical

  Music Supernova,” which was a promotional event for the Chintimini

  festival, in which classical music was performed on every street corner

  in Corvallis, OR.
  

Earlier posts:

• Paul

  Gambill, with Orchestra Nashville, programmed the premiere of a

  piece with music by J. Mark Scearce and text by Toni Morrison,

  along with gospel music and poetry readings that resonated with the

  work’s themes.More details here.
  

• Howard Gooddall wrote a Requiem

  that involved an orchestra and choir with dance, increasing the audience

  potential. (The album’s website also has a great video showing listeners the

  artistic process)

• Eric Whitacre’s electronic opera Paradise Lost fuses

  classical music with electronic sounds that people more often associate

  with pop music.  Part of the piece was a collaboration between Whitacre

  and a musician from the rock act Linkin Park. (Youtube)

• In downtown NYC, the club Le

  Poisson Rouge often programs dynamic acts, presenting classical

  music in a bar setting and sometimes combining both pop and classical

  music on the same bill.

• The Rotterdam Opera

  Days Festival programs events in nontraditional venues, like a

  river. They also promote private concerts in the homes of audience

  members and other intimate locations so that small groups can interact

  personally with artists.

• Ian Peaston and

  Per Johansson under the name essens:1 program eclectic concerts on electronic

  violin, electric clarinet and laptops, mixing classical repertoire and

  pop music.  

• Opera Lafayette performed a

  semi-staged program of Gluck’s Armide and sold out a 2,000 seat

  venue by reducing ticket prices, donating tickets to schools, reaching

  out to the French community in Washington, and passing out leaflets

  after other performances.

• Marin

  Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra invited some “Rusty

  Musicians,” or amateurs with previous playing experience, to sit in with

  the orchestra for a performance. The BSO is also running an Academy

  where amateur musicians can improve their playing. BSO music director

  Marin Alsop says about the program:

  “This will be a little like a fantasy camp for people. I really believe

  we’re changing from a passive consumer society to a more active,

  participatory one, and people are looking for a real visceral

  participation.”
  

• Matt Huber performed a charity concert

  with free admission (donations were collected for the charity) that

  netted £6000 for the event and the only promotion was by word of mouth.  

• Eica Sipes put together a vocal recital

  with her husband that included visual elements and nature sounds

  between songs to help set the scene. More details are on her website.
  

• The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Orchestra incorporated visual

  elements and music by Ellington and Gershwin in a program entitled Kelley’s Blues.