May 2009 Archives

China, for various reasons, has been a topic of conversation in my life lately. And one question that always comes up is why, exactly, classical music is so prevalent in China -- though, it's important to note, nobody quite knows how prevalent it is. Prevalent enough to be notable, in any case, and to produce some terrific composers and astonishing young instrumentalists.

So why is this? Maybe it's linked to China's emergence as a world power, and to its blinding increase in wealth. Now we have more people with money. Classical music (much as happened in the US toward the end of the 19th century) gives them extra prestige. It's also a way for the nation to get more prestige, to show it has culture, as well as economic and geopolitical force. Maybe that's one reason why Chinese students, as I've been told, have an easier time getting into universities if they play the piano or the violin.

But I'd add another thought. Why, given the tremendous worldwide reach of pop music, wouldn't the Chinese encourage rock? The answers seem obvious. First, you can encourage rock all you want -- give preferential university admission to kids in bands (wouldn't that be fun?), or even give the best rock musicians stipends. But that's no guarantee that Chinese rock will make any dent in the world.

Of course that's partly, or even largely, because American and British rock acts dominate the scene. But it's also because rock songs are supposed to mean something. And meaning isn't something you can study. You have to embody it. China just might, if it tried, create some more or less empty chart-topping music, but another Dylan, or Springsteen? A Chinese Radiohead? It's bound to happen, give what's going on in Chinese culture, but nobody would know how to predict it, or who to encourage. It's listeners who decide which band means something the world is going to care about.

And there's one more inconvenient problem. Rock, again, has meaning. Which means it has content. Rock songs say something. So what if they say something the Chinese government doesn't like? We can almost guarantee that this will happen, in fact, if China develops a healthy rock scene. Rock always has confronted authority. Would it be rock if it didn't? And the same can be true in other pop genres, even dance music, which can be wildly subversive, even without any words.

Classical music, by contrast, has no such content. You can study Chopin, let's say, without much chance that you're going to explode on the scene playing his music in ways that threaten any government. You might threaten classical music purists, and that might even -- conceivably, anyway -- hurt your career. But you're not going to be a political threat. I'm not going to say that classical music has no content, or that it can't take on political meaning if it's played in the right circumstances -- after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance, or, arguably, in East Germany before the Wall fell, when classical music was an implicit form of escape.

Or of course in the Soviet Union, when in the hands of Shostakovich classical music assumed some of the edge that rock can have for many of us now. But nobody's going to pretend that Shostakovich has that edge now, or that the standard classical repertory -- whatever profound meaning it might have -- poses any threat to any government anywhere. That's one reason why the New York Philharmonic could go to North Korea. Their presence might have broken new ground, but when they played the New World Symphony, well, that was safe.

From writing this, I've discovered that -- whatever it means that classical music might be exploding in China -- I'd be more impressed if China had some edgy, challenging rock, not just underground, where I'm sure it exists, but right in the forefront of Chinese culture, with some of the bands playing stadiums. (If this is really happening, someone tell me! My ignorance might be showing.)

ADDED LATER: I want to make something very clear -- that the organization I'm talking about here is quite terrific, both artistically and in the way they're run. Which made me thrilled to work with them, even before the work began. I talk a lot in what follows about strategic planning, and about how not to jump into certain innovations until there's a strategic plan for the innovations to be part of. This organization, in my contact with them, does a better job with strategic thinking than some major institutions I've worked with or otherwise been close to, or at least they think more strategically about innovations than some major organizations have.

So when I cautioned them about holding back on certain changes, that wasn't because they were about to jump into deep water without any planning. I was just giving them advice. The innovations they did before I worked with them seemed like exactly the kind of thing you could safely do without strategic planning -- innovations that make sense standing on their own, and that don't commit you -- or your money! -- to any path you might later have to back away from.

I put forth a lot of theories here, and a lot of ideas. Some are based on experience, some are thoughts that haven't yet been tried out in action. So when I find myself working as a consultant, I'm in a fascinating place. When is it right to urge my ideas on someone else, as something they might  -- or should -- do?

Of course, nobody hires me as a consultant without knowing where I stand, so I can take for granted that there's interest in my ideas. But still that doesn't mean that every idea of mine would be appropriate for the group I'm working with, and it also doesn't tell me how, for this group, my ideas might be implemented.

Recently, in a consulting job, I found myself even urging the group to put on the brakes. Or at least to do extensive planning before they took action.

Here's the story, or some of it. I'm not going to name the group, or give any information -- where they are, what they do -- that might help identify them. That they worked with me is their own business, for them to disclose (or not) if they choose to. Not that it's any great secret, as far as I know. And not that the group hasn't already shown, by things it's done in public, that it wants to change. Still, discretion is the best policy.

So here I had a classical music organization that really did want to change. It wanted to be livelier, to make its audience less passive, to sell more tickets, and, conceivably, attract a younger audience. Already it had given a concert in which steps toward all these things were taken -- successfully, I thought, at least for an initial effort. The audience -- and, very important -- the board seemed to like what had been done. The board was behind these ideas. My job, it seemed, was to give some external validation ("it's not just you; other people have talked about the kinds of things you have in mind, and done them, often with success"), and also, if I could, to focus the group's efforts. What should it do next? What -- among all the ideas it had -- should its priorities be?

I met first with the group's artistic and general director, next with the director, the administrative head (who'd done some expert marketing), and finally with the board. One pregnant moment came at the start of the board meeting. "What should we discuss?" the director asked me. (Experienced consultants, and those who've worked with them, won't find anything new in what I'm about to say. But others might find it useful.) That was a crucial moment in defining my role. "I can't tell you that," I answered (or words more or less to that effect). "It's your organization. You should talk about what you think you need to talk about, and if I think I can be helpful, I'll join in."

That way, of course, I could (among other things) see where they were in their discussions, and form a much better idea of what they needed than I could if I took over. (Consulting 101.) I did give them a framework -- told the board (most of whom hadn't met me yet) a bit about who I am, and told some stories of initiatives classical music groups, including big ones, had taken to change the way the world looked at them. Not, I stressed, because these were paths I wanted this group to follow, but just to show them that what they'd been discussing had been done before. (And often in dramatic ways by very and famous groups. I told them, for instance, about the Hamburg orchestra's splashy Brahms performance, with the musicians scattered around the city and the conductor high up on a famous tower, with the whole thing mixed and presented on the web. Again, not because the group before me needed to do anything like that, but to show them that even a long-established German orchestra had taken a wild initiative.)

So one thing that emerged from the board's discussion proved very helpful to them, or at least I thought so. They'd described the new directions they thought they'd go in as a way of rebranding themselves -- "rebranding" being precisely the word they used. But what did that mean? They weren't sure. They started talking about it, exchanging thoughts about rebranding meant. And what emerged, to me was that in fact they did know. After listening for a while, I read back to them a list of words various board members had used in describing the rebranding -- "livelier," "more accessible," "more suprising," and other things along that line -- and suggested that in fact they knew the answer to their question. Since no one questioned these descriptions, the discussion, I thought, was really over. They'd answered question one, and could move on to implementation.

And this is where I began suggesting that the group should -- for the moment -- put on the brakes. Too often I've seen classical music institutions, including very big ones, launch an initiative without quite knowing why. Not that the initiative (which in some cases was something I got hired to do) might have been a bad idea. But it wasn't part of a larger plan, and wasn't launched with any thought about how to measure its success.

(Or, closely allied to that, how long the initiative should run before the intstitution should decide whether it was a success or not. For instance, suppose you luanch a new concert series, designed to attract a new, young audience. Suppose you decide on an informal measure of success. The series should attract 1000 people to each concert, and at least come reasonably close to break even at the box office. So now how many years should you reasonably take to reach that goal? Five years is surely too many, one would surely be too few. After two years you might review your plans, seeing if you'd sold more tickets and lost less money in the second year -- remembering, though, that your plans can only be tentative, because if you've never done a series like this before, and have few models in other institutions to look at, you learn about how the series actually works only by trying it out. Too few institutions, at least in my experience, think all this out in advance.)

So I suggested to the group I was consulting for that they make at least an informal plan, before trying anything new. Once they did that, they might get more ideas for new things to try. And, just as important (if not more important), they'd have some idea of what priority each new idea might have. For instance, if you think it might be fun to put a little pop music into your classical programming -- not necessarily something the group I worked with was thinking of -- should you do it right away? Maybe not, if the first step in your larger plan is to sell more tickets to your core audience. And if you want to program pop in part to attract a new, young audience, then maybe you want to wait until you''ve planned how to tell that audience about your group, before you program pop to reach them.

But on the other hand, if you're programming pop because the people in the group really likes the music, then maybe you want to do it now, despite everything I've said. And if you don't like pop -- this is a crucial point -- then almost certainly you shouldn't program it, no matter how good an idea it might otherwise seem. Only do things -- as you spread your wings in new directions -- that are close to your heart artistically! Otherwise you forfeit the entire reason for your existence.

My final suggestions had to do with the group's website. It needed work. Everyone agreed on that -- the director, the board, the administrative head, everybody. And people had ideas about what a new website might be like.

Even so, I counselled waiting. Again, the group should figure out, at least in outline, what its larger plan might be. That, once again, might tell it things about what should be on the website. And, again crucially, about what the priority might be for various things to put on the site, and also for the resdesign as a whole. Maybe you don't need to do it just yet. If your first priority is to sell more tickets to your core audience, then the website you have might be good enough for that, and you only need to redesign it when you're moving to attract new people. If you plan to personalize your group by featuring its musicians, then fill the site full of statements from them, and videos in which they tell the world who they are. But if this isn't your plan, or if it's something you're only going to do further down the line, then hold off on these videos and written statement, fun and tempting as they might otherwise be.

Which let to my final thought about the website. Redesigning the site could be a lot of fun, if the group had ideas, and a good designer. It also gives an immediate payoff -- there's our new website! We love it! But a harder, less immediately rewarding job is to get people going to the site. How do you do that, no matter how wonderful the site might be? And what's the use of having an exciting new website, if nobody visits it?

Maybe the plan to get people to the site involves doing new, surprising, attention-getting things out in the physical world. If that's the case, then figure out what those might be before you redesign the site, or at least concurrently with the redesign. And since attracting people to the site is very likely a more difficult discussion than the redesign, make sure to have that conversation -- and make those plans -- before the redesign, or (again) at least concurrently.

Those were some of my consulting thoughts. Much less exciting than many of the things I talk about in this blog, but just as important.

I'm available, needless to say, for consulting work with others. E-mail me to find out more. 

This is a footnote to my "Missed Opportunities" post, in which I urged music schools -- and music students, even if the schools don't take any action -- to promote student recitals, and in fact to develop a new audience (of the students' own age) that never came to these recitals at all.

Part of my plan, if the schools got involved, was to do video streams of every recital, and then to archive these videos on the schools' websites. But here I should have mentioned some inescapable issues with streaming rights. You can't just stream copyrighted works, or at least you can't without permission. Which means I've had to modify my plan, adding the following to my earlier post:

But of course there are rights issues here. A school might not be able to stream performances of copyrighted works, or even performances of older music in the public domain, if the musicians used a copyrighted critical edition. Of course, you could get permission to stream these pieces, but then you have two problems. First, it'll cost you. Second, the paperwork involved can be killer (as I've heard firsthand from a school administrator who deals with these questions.

So does that kill any thought of streaming? I don't think so. For one thing, these problems may work themselves out (just as orchestras have worked out with their musicians ways to make recordings, which for decades were impossibly expensive because the musicians had to be paid extra to make them). Once the idea -- even the necessity -- of streaming starts to spread, we might get momentum towards making streaming easier to do. Certainly composers and publishers of new works stand to benefit here. What composer wouldn't want archived videos of performances of her music?

And then I don't see why partial streaming wouldn't work now. Stream and archive everything in the public domain, while you only do short excerpts -- allowable, I'd think, under the standard concept of fair use -- of copyrighted works. Thus my idea could, I'd think, be put into motion right now, just as I've said, even while the rights issues still remain difficult.

I asked my students -- both at Eastman and Juilliard -- to invent a concert that might attract an audience their own age. And the responses have been fabulous. I've posted a couple from two of my Eastman students, Leah Goldstein and Kara LaMoure. Leah had a sparkling idea for a concert with music partly by the audience, and Kara designed an enticing concert, with some important notes on what people her age like and don't like.

And now Kathryn Eberle, one of my Juilliard students, came up with an idea for an American Idol-style competition for classical musicians. The idea itself isn't new. The Cincinnatti Opera, for instance, just announced an American Idol-style competition for hopeful opera singers. But Kathryn's presentation seemed more vivid than most, and it also got me thinking.

Kathryn thought the event might be held in a club. And that made me think that it could be held in a club very inexpensively, if the club made the space available. In fact, I think anyone could organize this just about anywhere. What would you need? Enough contestants to make the contest interesting, which could mean no more than four or five. And then professional judges, but maybe no more than two, and maybe even just one, if you picked the right person. The judges would score the contestants, and of course would also make tasty (and helpful) comments. And then the audience would vote on who went home each week.

So you'd also need an audience. But that, I'd think, would take care of itself, once you got the shows going. Anywhere there's enough of a classical music community to find the contestants, there are people who'll come to watch -- friends and colleagues of the people competing, just for a start. And once word got around, I'd think many other people would show up, too. Or at least they would if the shows were fun.

And that's really it! If you had the space, the contestants, and the judges, you'd be ready to go. Well, OK, seating arrangements, microphones for the judges, and some good, sharp planning to shape the dramatic flow. But none of that costs anything much. So -- as I said -- anyone could launch this, just about everywhere. You could do it weekly, until you had a winner, maybe a sensible plan, since interest could build over a month or more, and a club might want to host the show on whatever night got the lightest attendance for other things. Or you could do it on successive days, which makes more demand on your venue, but -- at least if you already had interest -- might build excitement even higher.

So there's a plan. Another way to pique interest in classical music. And also for classical musicians to have some fun. And to learn how to excite an audience. The combat of instruments -- and voices -- could be fascinating in itself. Violin vs. marimba! Soprano vs. laptop! And, shock of shocks, a really sharp violist runs off with the prize.

On Twitter I met Josh Newton, a composition student (older than most) at the University of Southern Maine. Josh has many interesting things to say, and gave a talk not long ago to a group of non-music students at his school. 

I started by asking how many of the 15-20 students had been to a concert at all within the last few years, how many of those were art music (after translating for them), and then how many would attend concerts that were free.  Surprisingly, at least to my face, more people would be willing to attend free concerts than I thought.  When I told them that there were 8-10 concerts every week at the School of Music that were free to students, or cheap ($3-5), the gasp was audible.  They got angry, they wanted to know why they didn't know about them.

After talking a little about how the campus newspaper doesn't really pay us any attention, I went into sort of the institutional issues that the modern art music movement has - orchestras don't reach out to youth unless it is in an effort to educate, they don't reach out to college students because they have no money, the classical and rock elitists still think they are better than each other, and don't reach across the aisle for the common ground.  

The kicker here comes in the first paragraph. Some of the students Josh talked to would be happy to go to classical concerts, as long as they didn't have to pay too much. (Some of my Juilliard students feel the same way.) And when these students were told that free or very cheap concerts were available -- now I'm just repeating Josh -- they were angry!

My Wall Street Journal piece on In C, that is -- about the triumphant Carnegie Hall anniversary celebration. Which I loved. But beyond that, I found myself getting wistful, wishing that the '60s had changed the classical music mainstream. Doesn't matter, in the long run. Change is coming anyway.

The 1960s didn't do much for classical music in America, or at least they didn't change the major concert halls. Musicians didn't grow long hair, and the same familiar masterworks went on being played.

But outside the mainstream, a classical-music counterculture did develop...

To read the rest of it, go here.

A friend of mine in the marketing game -- in the performing arts, but not in classical music -- got called into a meeting. "What's your media strategy?" his bosses asked. And he tells me he answered: "What media?"

What he meant ought to be clear enough. Traditional media are fading. Newspapers are slipping away, and also covering the performing arts less, a decline that includes notable cuts in classical music coverage. Network TV has a shrinking audience. And, maybe most important, old media might not do very much for performing arts attendance. Asked how they decide what events they might want to go to, people now largely answer, "Word of mouth." That's especially true of younger people, but from one study I've seen, it's true of older people, too, though not as strongly

That same study (a private one I don't think I'm free to name) also shows people relying on user comments on websites. Newspapers rank very low. Just over 10% of people say that newspapers help them decide what to do at night, compared to more than 60% who cite word of mouth.

So what should marketers do? I know I'm not the first to address this question, but I'll try to give some answers specific to classical music.

Obviously, marketers now have to address their audience -- and their potential audience -- directly. I asked my friend how he planned to do it, and he said, "Direct mail," which I know has worked very well for him before, at other jobs. But then direct mail is also, in its own way, old media, and can seem very impersonal, compared to what's possible online. Besides, we all know what we think of junk mail in our mailboxes, not to mention e-mail spam.

(What especially worked for my friend, on one occasion in the past, was direct mail to people who'd never been approached by the organization my friend worked for, one they would have heard of, but maybe thought they'd never have contact with. The response was surprisingly warm, but you can't repeat the same surprise year after year.)

One classical music publicity firm has an answer, or so I've heard. They realize their traditional outlets are drying up So many newspapers now don't cover classical music that, if you're trying to publicize an American tour by one of your artists, placing stories in local papers -- which is traditionally what classical music publicity firms have done -- just isn't much of a strategy.

So what has this company decided to do? Social networking. And that might really be the start of an answer. Social networking lets you contact people directly. You can develop a list of names of people who really do care about you (your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends). Because these people might talk about you to their online friends and followers, you start to go viral. You're gettring word of mouth.

Or at least that possibility exists. But how do you cultivate it? How do you keep people interested, keep them talking about you? Here, I think, is where many classical music organizations -- maybe most of them -- don't quite get it. They use social networking to send more or less the same messages they send to newspapers. They send, in effect, tiny press releases (on Twitter, really tiny ones). They're giving a concert. They're playing Rachmaninoff. Their soloist this weekend is really good. They're selling cheap tickets. They're having a contest.

All of which is fine -- for people who already care what the institution does, know Rachmaninoff, and -- in the case of the soloist -- are credulous enough (sorry) to believe anything the institution tells them.

But social media don't really work like that. What makes my Facebook and Twitter time worthwhile is that I make personal connections. People who might have been just names to me now get faces, profiles, tastes. I learn what books they read, how much they love birds, what they noticed on the street today, how frustrated they are (this is an oboist, of course) making reeds. And I find out what they care most deeply about in their work.

All of this can make me more interested in any performance they might give. It's a familiar phenomenon -- we all know, in classical music, how effective it is to have a composer get up before a performance to tell the audience about his or her work. It puts the audience on the composer's side (assuming that the composer seems at all sympathetic). Now they want to like the piece. Social networking works like that, except that it's online -- and, best of all, you can keep doing it seven days a week, and even reach people who haven't heard of you yet.

But you have to be personal. How do you do that? Probably in as many ways as there are people. On Twitter, for instance, the BBC Music Magazine (@BBCMusicMag) makes jokes about how messy some of the desks in its office are. Hilary Hahn (@violincase) sends out messages from her violin case (though she doesn't do it often enough to make much effect). The Museum of Modern Art (@MusuemModernArt) talks about art, not just about its own shows, sometimes mentioning things happening in other places.

So that's the challenge classical music now faces. The publicity firm that wants to embrace social networking -- how many people do they have working on that? How many people are maintaining the Facebook and MySpace pages, and (I hope) the Twitter streams of all the firm's clients? I'm guessing the staff is too small. To do the work well, they need, ideally, one person working full time on social networking for each client.

Does that sound extreme? I don't think it is. Because, ideally, you need to do more than just be personal. You need to be responsive. You need to talk to your fans. You need to know who they are, where they live, what they like. So when your artist goes to Kansas City, you know who the fans in that area are, who came to performances before, who lives nearby, and who needs to travel a bit, so maybe needs more encouragement to come to the concert.

And maybe you can set up events beyond the performance. Visits to schools, visits with community people, private sessions (within reason) with music students. One publicist and I once thought a noted soloist might like to give short masterclasses to students on her instrument, when she went somewhere to play. These could be put on video, and circulated, thus making friends for the artist, and -- very important in the dawning age of word of mouth marketing -- creating buzz.

And yes, this is much more work for everyone, the artist included. But how else does anyone think they're going to get people interested, in the emerging new era? Besides, the possibilities are tremendous, far beyond anything the old kind of media strategy ever offered. Which sounds better, getting an article about your artist in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (while it's still in business), and hope people read it, or build up a lively list of people in the St. Louis area whom you know follow your artist?

And of course these people have something to talk about, when they talk about your artist, because they don't just know that she's coming into town to sing Schubert. They know what she feels about Schubert, which songs she loves most, which are the hardest to sing, and which passage, in particular, is the most difficult, the one that poses the strongest challenge when she's out on stage singing? Not to mention which Schubert song strikes a particular chord with her personal life. And all the trouble she's had this month, training her new puppy.

So the work pays off. And, increasingly, you'll simply have to do it. One issue here is whether artists themselves do the work, writing their tweets, and answering messages from their fans on Facebook. Some artists like to do that. Others don't. Really famous artists will find it impossible. They can't possibly answer everyone. So then maybe an assistant does the work. But is that impersonal? Or else fake, if the assistant pretends online to be the artist?

 

These are serious questions, which we'll all have to work out. For now, maybe what works is for the assistant (or maybe assistants, plural) to do much of the online communication, but in their own voices, showing their own personalities, speaking about and for the artist, but also for themselves. And then the artist shows up periodically, to say something direct from the source.

Enough for now. This is a challenge for the future. Are we up to it? Should music schools be teaching about it? Already they're concerned that old-style career opportunities are shrinking, so musicians will now have to make their own careers. This -- everything I've talked about here -- is one way you do it.

 

And those who don't catch on may end up like Kodak, which underestimated (to put it mildly) the impact of digital photography, and found itself elbowed aside by companies that understood.