As I wrote yesterday: There’s one thing that everyone should do. Look at who your fans are now, and find ways to bind them to you very tightly, and to increase their numbers. (The photo-- on the main blog page -- isn't my baby, by the way. You'll find it at the end of this post, where it shows how one of my students loved one piece of music. And how she thought she might find an image to communicate that love.) So -- continuing from where my last post left off -- how can you do this? Well, you’re going to start with whatever fans you … [Read more...]

And so -- resuming my October theme, of building our own audience -- how, exactly, can we do it? (Well, it's November. But of course my schedule was upended by our lovely baby: here and here.]  Let me start with some optimism. If you have any audience at all, you can make it bigger. If you believe in yourself, that is, and (of course) if other people want to hear your music. But don't assume they won't! You never know how big an audience you can have until you try to build one. And if you don't believe that anyone wants to hear you, why are … [Read more...]

In my last post, I got up on a soapbox and orated, about classical music -- in practice pretty much a lily-white art -- claiming special privileges (lavish funding, school programs devoted to it) in an age of growing diversity. That seemed ugly to me, and, in the long run, not sustainable. But there's a simpler, less polemical way to look at this. Yesterday, perusing the business section of the New York Times (and in the print paper yet; how old-fashioned of me!), I came across a column that started this way: "Advertisers are increasingly … [Read more...]

At the end of my last post, I asked why we're not finding ways to reach the audience of people just like us, who don’t happen to listen to classical music. And why, instead, we put so much effort into education and outreach (often to people not like us). My answer was that we don't believe we can do it. Or at least we're acting that way. We're acting as if we don't think there's an audience we could reach in direct and passionate ways. Which, in my view, condemns classical music to death, for reasons you can read in that previous … [Read more...]