Assorted

Good morning, starshines. Here are some miscellaneous marketing matters for a Monday.

Just as I’m sure journalists are frustrated when publicists pitch them a feature on an artist who was written up in their publication less than a year ago (etc.), publicists want to, in turn, tear their hair out when journalists request interviews with artists to preview concerts and have done zero-to-no research. “Research” is actually a bit strong, here: they have neither looked at the provided press materials nor spent three minutes on this little thing I, for one, have been calling “Google.” I have a new strategy, though, that I’d like all you publicists out there to join me in executing. This efficient new approach comes courtesy of my friend Ronen. The next time a journalist asks one of my artists something like, “Did you write the concerto yourself?”, this is what I’m going to e mail to them.

Further to my post on classical music’s lack of public competitions, I’d like to bring a couple of follow-up items to your attention. First is this, from Gawker, on how Americans suddenly REALLY CARE about hockey, and second is this, from commenter Cheri Trimble Miller on Olympic medals for the arts! From The Toronto Star:

Most of the world has forgotten, but when the ancient Olympics were
revived at the start of the last century, it was taken for granted that
if sport was the first pillar of the event, culture was the second.

From 1912 through 1948, arts competitions were held and 151 medals
awarded in many arts categories, including architecture, town planning,
sculpture, painting, drawing, literature and music. During those years,
Germany led the world with 24 medals. Italy and France won 14 each, and
Britain collected 10.

Canada lagged behind with just two medals: a bronze in 1932 to sculptor Robert Tait McKenzie, and the 1948 silver to [the late composer John] Weinzweig.

Who do we need to petition to get those bad-boys back??

And speaking of The Olympics, did everyone read Anne Midgette on classical music and figure skating? If you didn’t, go do that now, and then come back to me. I’ll wait. (Are you done yet?) I have two more questions about figure skating and The Olympics. The first is, didn’t they used to label the music at the beginning of every routine on the screen like MTV does with the music on all its shows? MTV actually goes the extra step and tells viewers where they could buy it (downloads of the music from each program on the NBC website?). These NBC announcers rarely even mention what the music is now, which strikes me as odd from just a casual-viewer-perspective and not necessarily a classical-music-publicist-perspective. My other question is, why don’t the skaters ever have works commissioned for them? Then, they could easily have cohesive pieces that fit the programs’ time constraints without all the choppy editing. JEREMY ABBOTT: CALL ME if you want to talk to Gabriel Kahane, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, or Chris Thile. And also if you’re single and straight.

Lincoln Center sent me and presumably thousands of others an e mail this morning announcing some kind of “coffee happy hour” at the new(ish) Lincoln Center Atrium:

‘wichcraft Happy Hour

Every day from 3:00 until 6:00 pm, come to ‘wichcraft at the David Rubenstein Atrium for a 50% discount on all coffee drinks! Make ‘wichcraft your destination for half-price coffee and stick around to enjoy a full a list of reasonably priced wine, beer, and cocktails alongside a selection of small bites.

I will go check both this and the plug situation at the Atrium out this afternoon and report back.

And one last thing: when we were hanging out after The Dirty Projectors American Songbook concert on Friday night, Nadia Sirota told me that the Los Angeles Philharmonic was opening for the band and Alarm Will Sound in LA this weekend.  So it’s like, the Mother Goose Suite…and then The Dirty Projectors. Which is perfect, really.