In response to Amanda’s question (James: to what extent do you feel knowing about your clients’ both
\nmusical and non-musical pursuits helps you pitch them to presenters?
\nWhat prepares you to defend their uniqueness, or sometimes, is
\nuniqueness not what a presenter is looking for?<\/b>)<\/b>, <\/b>I have to start with my favorite dodge away from oversimplification: it depends.
\nOn the most basic level, greater knowledge of what my artists care about
\nis always helpful to me. It helps me talk to them, it helps me talk
\nabout them, it helps me get through the day by reminding me what we’re
\nall after. However, beyond that most basic level, it gets far more
\ncomplicated, because they all care about different things; of course
\nthey all care foremost about making beautiful music, but every factor
\nthat goes into that process has different priority and preference for
\neach of them. Maybe the most important thing is to focus on the
\nspecific repertoire they are most excited about playing at that time,
\nand all else is secondary. Maybe the most important thing is to work
\nwith the conductors and collaborators they most enjoy, and the
\nrepertoire can be chosen slightly more broadly. Maybe the most
\nimportant thing is to build a schedule around a certain project that
\ntakes up a lot of time both in its preparation and its execution, and
\nthe simple logistics of scheduling cause that to be the most important
\nfactor. &c.
\nThe bigger and further complication is, as Amanda suggests, that in
\naddition to each artist having differing priorities, each target that
\nwe might be pitching to also has its own set of priorities. I’m
\nsobbingly grateful to the booking agents that I work with, as they are
\nable to keep track of the huge range of possibilities much better than
\nI can; some presenters (more at the moment than I would hope for) must keep their costs as the primary concern and book based
\non that, others have a very specific audience they’re targeting, others
\nhave an individual taste based on which they make their decisions, others
\nwant to try to be as broad as possible in terms of
\nstyles\/instruments\/repertoire over the course of their seasons. &c.
\nSo in an attempt to find activity for a particular artist, we try to
\nmatch up everything we know about that artist or that they want known about
\nthem 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
\nmakes each artist unique and why they are doing the things they’re doing
\n(musical or not), sometimes the other end of the phone or email might
\nnot be interested in nearly that much information. It may be that I’m
\nspeaking to a concert presenter about a younger artist who is not yet
\non the radar of that presenter, and although there are many
\ninteresting 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
\nthat they can find a pianist for that fee. Or they need a female
\nviolinist to play Bach as part of a season-long festival that is
\nweighed too heavily towards male performers at that point. In these
\ncases, knowledge is always power, but only some of the knowledge might be relevant to the situation.
\nAnd to look at Jonathan’s question for a moment, about (in brief) the
\nkind of special created by a performer acting as a sort of invisible
\nvessel vs the kind of special created by a performer who remains
\nvery… um… present? in the act of performance and of everything else
\nthey do: this to me is related and part of what I was trying to say in my initial
\npost about trying to separate “special” from a dichotomy. I think
\n(hope?) that we can all name right now multiple performances that have moved us and fall into one or the other
\ncategory, and maybe we demonstrate a certain preference in the
\nbalance. But when it comes to the commercial implications of this, it
\nseems to me that it does not sort any more simply than it does in my
\npersonal experience– there are performers who are terrifically in
\ndemand about whom we know practically nothing of their lives outside of
\nperformance and who do not bring that kind of potentially-obstructive
\npersonality to the stage, and there are commercially more-than-viable
\nperformers who have chosen to make their persona an open book in
\neverything they do. With each of these performers, and I’ve heard a
\nlot of it directly, there are people who CAN’T STAND what they do.
\nPerhaps it comes down to the very sensitive and individual matter of
\nthe emotional conveyance that has been discussed here– in the end, it
\nis impossible to argue with what people feel, try as I might, and
\nalthough I may violently disagree or be mystified as why a listener may
\nnot feel that an artist I work for is special even if I do, the only
\nway to “win” that “argument” is to hope that they experience the same
\nartist again with a different result. No amount of talking will do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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