{"id":294,"date":"2010-05-17T16:07:09","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T16:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=294"},"modified":"2010-05-17T16:07:09","modified_gmt":"2010-05-17T16:07:09","slug":"the_revolution_will_be_blogged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2010\/05\/the_revolution_will_be_blogged\/","title":{"rendered":"The R\/Evolution Will Be Blogged"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today the League of American Orchestras opens the doors on its Orchestra R\/Evolution site<\/a> which, in the weeks leading up to their conference in Atlanta in June, will be looking at the classic “How do you solve a problem like the state of the symphony orchestra?” question. The kindly folks over at the League have invited me to kick in a few ideas, so if things get a little slow over here it might be because we’re having too much fun throwing sand around over there.<\/p>\n

I actually got in the mood to chat about the orchestra world last week when a couple of pieces of online promotional material floated my way. To start, I want to give props to the folks over at the New York Philharmonic. On Thursday morning I received a mysterious email from “nekrotzar527” that contained a short note and a link to a YouTube video: “SPOTTED: Alan Gilbert with a shady character traversing the Upper West Side: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/breughelland”.<\/p>\n

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The video is short and charming–a little bit awkward, a little bit adorable. I was impressed that such a large, pro organization had embraced the lo-fi format and developed an appropriate idea for it, and that their fearless leader had rolled up his sleeves and was willing to play silly for his audience. While I didn’t feel the need to forward it to all my friends, I did both click through from the email and watch all three related videos on offer immediately, so it was a solid marketing score in my opinion and I look forward to their next production. <\/p>\n

Over in Cleveland, they also tried their hand at some online marketing buzz, but this effort I found less successful. To begin with, I’m not sure that an organization that dubs its own video “viral” in the headline without the matching page views understands the medium well enough yet. The video is also more than two minutes long and plays for 10 seconds before it even fades in and gets going. When it does, I feel like the musicians are faking it (in their sentiments, not their playing, obviously). Maybe they really do care about LeBron and the Cavs and want to cheerlead for their home team–that would be awesome–but I don’t buy it in their delivery and so I think this piece backfires. <\/p>\n

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I know Cleveland is abuzz with LeBron drama and so the underlying concept isn’t a bad one, but for me the execution and expression didn’t rise to the challenge of engagingly communicating it. Cleveland may be a world-class ensemble, but somehow it’s actually this musical love letter<\/a> to LeBron that gets the job done in a much better, if slightly off pitch, way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today the League of American Orchestras opens the doors on its Orchestra R\/Evolution site which, in the weeks leading up to their conference in Atlanta in June, will be looking at the classic “How do you solve a problem like the state of the symphony orchestra?” question. The kindly folks over at the League have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-294","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}