Sell! Sell! Sell!

In response to Amanda’s question (James: to what extent do you feel knowing about your clients’ both
musical and non-musical pursuits helps you pitch them to presenters?
What prepares you to defend their uniqueness, or sometimes, is
uniqueness not what a presenter is looking for?), I have to start with my favorite dodge away from oversimplification: it depends.


On the most basic level, greater knowledge of what my artists care about
is always helpful to me.  It helps me talk to them, it helps me talk
about them, it helps me get through the day by reminding me what we’re
all after.  However, beyond that most basic level, it gets far more
complicated, because they all care about different things; of course
they all care foremost about making beautiful music, but every factor
that goes into that process has different priority and preference for
each of them.  Maybe the most important thing is to focus on the
specific repertoire they are most excited about playing at that time,
and all else is secondary.  Maybe the most important thing is to work
with the conductors and collaborators they most enjoy, and the
repertoire can be chosen slightly more broadly.  Maybe the most
important thing is to build a schedule around a certain project that
takes up a lot of time both in its preparation and its execution, and
the simple logistics of scheduling cause that to be the most important
factor.  &c.


The bigger and further complication is, as Amanda suggests, that in
addition to each artist having differing priorities, each target that
we might be pitching to also has its own set of priorities.  I’m
sobbingly grateful to the booking agents that I work with, as they are
able to keep track of the huge range of possibilities much better than
I can; some presenters (more at the moment than I would hope for) must keep their costs as the primary concern and book based
on that, others have a very specific audience they’re targeting, others
have an individual taste based on which they make their decisions, others
want to try to be as broad as possible in terms of
styles/instruments/repertoire over the course of their seasons.  &c.


So in an attempt to find activity for a particular artist, we try to
match up everything we know about that artist or that they want known about
them with everything that the pitchees are looking for.  Obviously.  Now you know why managers get the big bucks.  But I hope I’ve reasonably summarized why this is not as simple as it sounds.  Although I always feel that I could talk for days about what
makes each artist unique and why they are doing the things they’re doing
(musical or not), sometimes the other end of the phone or email might
not be interested in nearly that much information.  It may be that I’m
speaking to a concert presenter about a younger artist who is not yet
on the radar of that presenter, and although there are many
interesting and potentially relevant points to discuss, that presenter only has a certain amount of money to spend in their budget and just needs to know
that they can find a pianist for that fee.  Or they need a female
violinist to play Bach as part of a season-long festival that is
weighed too heavily towards male performers at that point.  In these
cases, knowledge is always power, but only some of the knowledge might be relevant to the situation.
 

And to look at Jonathan’s question for a moment, about (in brief) the
kind of special created by a performer acting as a sort of invisible
vessel vs the kind of special created by a performer who remains
very… um… present? in the act of performance and of everything else
they do: this to me is related and part of what I was trying to say in my initial
post about trying to separate “special” from a dichotomy.  I think
(hope?) that we can all name right now multiple performances that have moved us and fall into one or the other
category, and maybe we demonstrate a certain preference in the
balance.  But when it comes to the commercial implications of this, it
seems to me that it does not sort any more simply than it does in my
personal experience– there are performers who are terrifically in
demand about whom we know practically nothing of their lives outside of
performance and who do not bring that kind of potentially-obstructive
personality to the stage, and there are commercially more-than-viable
performers who have chosen to make their persona an open book in
everything they do.  With each of these performers, and I’ve heard a
lot of it directly, there are people who CAN’T STAND what they do. 
Perhaps it comes down to the very sensitive and individual matter of
the emotional conveyance that has been discussed here– in the end, it
is impossible to argue with what people feel, try as I might, and
although I may violently disagree or be mystified as why a listener may
not feel that an artist I work for is special even if I do, the only
way to “win” that “argument” is to hope that they experience the same
artist again with a different result.  No amount of talking will do it.