There's been a bit of an industrykerfufflegoingon in Orchestra World lately over a new marketing campaign launched by the Philadelphia Orchestra. I'm not going to get into it, partly because I have a number of good friends in that orchestra and it's the band I grew up listening to, so I'm hardly objective; and partly because I think it's silly to get so worked up over a slogan.
But one of my favorite ArtsJournal bloggers, Molly Sheridan, wrote a post earlier this week that went beyond the trashing of a slogan to address the larger issue that some American orchestras still aren't very good at making the audience feel welcome. That Molly makes the point by relating a personal experience in which she was made to feel welcome makes the post all the more effective:
"I think being open to and engaged in hearing much of the orchestral repertoire in 2010 hinges on fostering that connection between the mass of performers on stage and the audience members out in the dark of the hall. Without it, the most transcendental musical experience has an uphill fight on its hands."
It really can't be said much more succinctly than that. Times change, and though the music we're playing might be timeless (I said might,) the social trappings and crowd etiquette that go along with any public event evolve from generation to generation, and orchestras tend to be horrifically bad at noticing this. My pet theory is that this is because orchestras (especially major ones with venerable histories) prize Tradition so highly, and are therefore slow to accept any change, for fear that even a small adjustment in the proceedings will snowball into a wholesale devaluing of that Tradition.
That's why I'm not surprised that the orchestra that gave Molly such an unexpectedly pleasant night out was the Baltimore Symphony. The BSO is a major-league band, to be sure, but in the hierarchy of big-time American ensembles, Baltimore, like Minnesota, fits comfortably into what I think of as the "upstart" category.
Upstarts generally perform at a level comparable to more famous orchestras like New York and Philadelphia, but toil in unglamorous mid-sized cities that the New Yorkers who write the rule book of cultural fame tend to overlook. This can be annoying if you're an upstart band trying to find a permanent place on the mythical list of Great American Orchestras, but it's never going to change, so it's best just to accept it.
Besides, the upside to being an upstart is that you're probably less shackled to the whole Tradition thing than the hidebound ensembles at the top of the meaningless GAO list, so innovation is easier to achieve. And because residents of midsized American cities tend to be less likely than your average jaded New Yorker to interpret friendliness as a sign of weakness or stupidity, you can buy an awful lot of goodwill from the public just by smiling a lot and telling concertgoers how much you appreciate them coming out to the show.
Of course, I rarely experience an orchestra concert as a customer, so my view of things may be somewhat skewed. So I'm throwing this one open to all of you who buy tickets and slog through the winter snows to hear us play: give me your best/worst customer service experiences with an orchestra. Who does the little things right, and what is "right" to you? And most importantly, what's the one thing an orchestra can do, other than playing great music well, to make you want to come back?
So, this past Friday night, a big group of MN Orchers made our way to the Walker for the annual celebration of salesmanship and corporate artistry that is the British Television Advertisting Awards.(For those readers not from the Twin Cities: I know. Sitting and watching 90 minutes of TV ads sounds ridiculous, and not like something a major American museum should be promoting. But you'll just have to trust us. It's awesome.) I've been going to the BTAA show for several years now, and I have to say, 2009 was one of the best reels I've seen. Very few clunkers, several amazingly poignant ads, plenty of laughs...
...and then, about midway through the show, there was this, which had everyone in the theater baffled right up to the very end...
If there is a better way to market grand opera in 2009, I don't know what it would be. And if you ask me, this is exactly the kind of thing orchestras need to be doing more of. Opera companies have gotten very good in recent years at reinventing their image, making their performances seem like not-to-be-missed events, and generally making themselves seem like the cool corner of the classical music world. And that, by extension, makes orchestras the decidedly uncool corner. They're exciting, we're sleepy, they're hip and fresh, we're stuffy and tuxedoed, they're simulcasting their biggest shows live to your local movie theater, we're stuck in a mid-20th century universe pretending that the internet doesn't exist.
You might point out that it's easier for an opera company to market itself on a visual medium like YouTube than it would be for an orchestra, but I'm not buying it. The stories behind symphonic music, even non-programmatic stuff like a Shostakovich symphony, are easily as riveting as your average opera libretto. It's just a matter of finding the part of the narrative that's going to grab people, and then retelling it in a creative way and getting it out there where people can see it. It's really not rocket science, and orchestras need to get a whole lot better at embracing that sort of idea, even if it means changing some longstanding elements of our business model...
As I've mentioned before, a lot of the time between Inside the Classics concerts is spent gathering and analyzing data from people who attend, or are thinking about attending, our series. From the beginning, ItC was conceived to be something of an incubator for new orchestral ideas, and it does us very little good to be throwing new concepts at the wall unless we have a way of measuring which ones are sticking. Thus all the research, and the pleas for feedback, and our virtual obsession with who is coming to our concerts and why.
To that end, we're currently working with a great Chicago-based company that specializes in such research and has been running polls and focus groups for us to measure the effectiveness not only of what we do on stage, but also the various posters, flyers, ads, and mailings we put out to try to generate interest. It's always fascinating to read the diversity of opinion that gets offered up in these situations - in a room of 7 or 8 people, you're likely to have 9 or 10 opinions. (This is why we use professionals to analyze it all - they've seen it all a thousand times before, and they're expert at picking out and explaining the trends that are hiding in the mass of data.)
This past week, we had a big meeting to go over the latest focus group data, and as usual, my favorite part of the morning wasn't so much reading about the larger trends that we'll actually look at as we form our future concert seasons, but the individual comments and quips from audience members. For instance, it's abundantly clear from all the research we do that Sarah's name and identity are firmly lodged in the mind of everyone who's ever seen an Inside the Classics show. When it comes to me, however...
...not so much. It could be a function of years of pre-conditioning of audience members to make the conductor the primary focus of their attention, or it could be that I actually say Sarah's name several times over the course of any given ItC show, whereas mine might come up only once. It could even be (gasp!) that Sarah is simply a more memorable onstage presence than some dorky violist with a microphone.
But whatever the reason, the research is clear that, while people tend to be very complimentary of the role I play in our concerts, and say very nice things about the onstage chemistry between Sarah and me, they seem to have a very hard time remembering my name. Which doesn't actually bother me in the least - I'd much rather they remember the music they heard, or the fact that they want to be sure to return the next time Sarah's conducting - but it has led to my acquiring some interesting nicknames among the ItC planning team.
One woman in the most recent round of audience research referred to me as "The Other Fellow." Another went with "the character." Yet another said, "I was very intrigued when a viola player got up... because they don't get to speak very much!" (This person has clearly never seen the Minnesota Orchestra viola section in rehearsal.) And my favorite: one gentleman, after struggling to remember my name mid-sentence, finally went with "Viola Boy." (This last one so delighted our Marketing VP that she immediately dashed off an e-mail to inform me of my new nickname.)
As I say, I could actually care less whether anyone remembers my name, so long as they remember that they liked the show. And I have to admit, I've started looking forward to reading whatever new noms de spectateurs I'm graced with when new research data arrives. Not sure anyone's gonna top Viola Boy, though. I might need a superhero costume to go with that one...
Because the Inside the Classics series is meant to be something of an incubator for new ideas, we tend to do an awful lot of audience research, and we spend a lot of time discussing things like how to attract newbies to Orchestra Hall, how to be responsive to audience concerns without completely turning the series over to the tyranny of public opinion, and how to balance the needs of one concertgoing demographic against another.
Orchestras (or at least, the staff and managers who run the off-stage part of the operation) have these discussions all the time, but as a musician, it's been a new experience for me to be involved in that side of the business. At first, I found it somewhat off-putting, not because of the occasional negative comments I had to read about what Sarah and I were doing, but because I just didn't understand the point of constantly asking audience members about every little aspect of the concertgoing experience, when all we really needed to know (or so I thought) was whether they'd had a good enough time to buy a ticket to the next show.
What I was missing, of course, was that, despite the fact that symphony orchestras are the ocean liners of the arts world (massive, unwieldy, and glacially slow at changing direction,) you can make a big difference in the quality of experience you give your customers without making massive, systemic changes. Little improvements can have a big impact, but only if you know which little improvements people want. And you won't know if you don't ask.
Still, it can be difficult to parse the data we get when we do ask. For instance, every time we do an ItC concert, we always get a few comments that go beyond simple dissatisfaction and border on quivering rage at the talk/play format of the concerts, or the purposefully casual tone we've cultivated for the first half. And while those commenters are entitled to their point of view, there's really not a lot that we can do for people who just hated everything about the experience, other than to point out that the Minnesota Orchestra plays close to 200 concerts every year during which I don't say a word. (I'll admit, I find it a little bit funny that some people manage to get so worked up about a series that takes up approximately 3% of our annual concert schedule.)
Other times, we'll get comments about aspects of the experience that we literally have no control over. Probably the most frequent one of these is people who find parking in downtown Minneapolis to be inconvenient and expensive. Since we don't own, operate, or control any parking ramps, and the city of Minneapolis doesn't care about our opinion on such things, all we can really do is sympathize, and point out that certain concert subscription packages come with parking vouchers. (And actually, I'll toss in an extra tip: the underground lot at the Hilton hotel on 11th Street, right across from Orchestra Hall, will run you about half the cost of all the city-owned lots during evening hours...)
But even if we have to wade through a raft of comments that aren't terribly helpful to us in planning the next concert, we usually happen upon quite a few that are. And from my perspective, individual comments tell me less than the trends that emerge across all our audience feedback. For instance, every time I interview a member of the orchestra on stage during an ItC show, a bunch of people tell us it was their favorite part of the evening, which is why you're seeing it more often now than you did in our first season.
And when a whole lot of you told us after season one that you wanted more contextual music and less of the featured work on the first half, we made a point of trying to do that. (Though judging by some of the comments we got last weekend, we're still not quite nailing that balance - rest assured, we'll keep working on it.)
All of which is to say, thanks for allowing us to pick your brains after all our concerts, and for understanding that we can't possibly respond to every suggestion we get. (Quite frankly, a lot of your opinions cancel each other out.) The constant tweaking and adjusting that we do in this series is one of the really fun parts of putting it together every year, and we hope that it keeps the experience fresh for you as well.
There's never been a shortage of people anxious to tell those of us who work in the arts that we're a) hopelessly behind the times, b) in desperate need of making our "product" more relevant to the next generation of consumers, and c) on the verge of complete irrelevance if we don't become more cutting edge and daring right this very minute. In the orchestra business, these people are usually consultants or media pundits (frequently the same people,) and in recent years, they've become shockingly good at getting their alarmist message wide distribution within the industry.
For the purposes of civility, I'll leave aside the question of how ethical it is for someone who runs a consulting business for orchestras to double as a pundit and editorialist forever claiming in whatever publication will have them that orchestras are in crisis and need someone (someone professional... you know, to consult with) to help turn them around. That's a topic for another day. My major beef with a lot of the "future of the industry" analysis I come across (and I read a lot of it, believe me) is that it tends to be awfully long on diagnosis and awfully short on cure.
For instance, it's become almost a religious conviction on the part of some in the orchestra business that the union rules governing recording, broadcasting, and other media are antiquated, and orchestras are being terribly hurt by their continued existence. (I'm starting with this issue because I don't entirely disagree with its premise. Our media rules are antiquated, and I defy anyone to say otherwise.) So you hear a lot of noise from the consultant/pundits about how fast the media landscape is evolving, and how desperate the situation is, and how if we don't wake up and change everything, like, yesterday, we're doomed to the same fate as 8-track tapes and Betamax video.
But even assuming they're right, where's the solution? Our media agreements are a nationally negotiated rule book that individual orchestras usually don't have the right to change even if we want to. (Also, these rules are agreed to by both musicians and managers, so blaming the whole thing on the union is disingenuous and wrong. Last I heard, a new set of more progressive media rules had been tabled because a certain crucial CEO walked out of the process.) And while the consultants are great at pointing out the finish line they want you to get to, I've yet to meet one who's found a way to navigate the tangle of individual interests that stand in the way. Or, for that matter, one who's even tried.
Another supposed truism you hear all the time lately is that orchestras have just got to invest major marketing bucks in social networking. Facebook and Twitter aren't the future, they're the present, and we're missing an entire generation of potential fans by not marketing to them where they live online! I recently read an entire newspaper article by a local Minnesota entrepreneur who wants to hold symposiums to teach arts leaders how to set up Facebook groups.
Now, here again, I don't totally disagree. I've been on Facebook for years, and I even finally signed up for a Twitter account this summer (mainly because Sarah bullied me, and also because someone told me I'd get the NHL entry draft news fastest there.) Social networking is an undeniably useful way of keeping in touch with large numbers of people, and that's obviously alluring to arts groups looking to build the 21st-century equivalent of word of mouth.
But honestly, when's the last time you responded positively to a company trying to solicit your business on Facebook? Hell, the Facebook universe practically exploded when they started running small ads on the site, and flamed up anew when the rumor went around that the company was going to start using your profile info to decide which ads to show you. And last year, when Sarah and I started creating event pages for our ItC concerts and sending them to everyone we knew (as well as asking y'all to invite people for us,) the response was, quite frankly, underwhelming. I'd be shocked if we sold a single extra ticket as a result. These days, the Minnesota Orchestra's official Twitter and Facebook pages mainly link to our blog entries and offer occasional concert come-ons and ticket discounts, which I suppose is better than not doing it at all, but which I doubt has resulted in much of an uptick in sales.
Again, I'm not saying that orchestras and other arts groups don't need to face the new realities of the entertainment world head-on, or even that the arts punditocracy is wrong to be constantly chanting their Change mantra. (As Sarah is fond of saying, if you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less.) But as this awful recession drags on and the ranks of those who seem to think they have all the answers for our industry grow by the week, I'm getting a little tired of reading condescending screeds full of lofty pronouncements but no specific ideas for how we might achieve the end results that the authors are so certain we need. Quite honestly, it's making me grumpy (as you can probably tell.)
Basically, what I'm saying to the ever-expanding universe of arts consultants and commentators is this: if you're so smart, kindly pick up a hammer and jump in, rather than standing around the edge of the foundation talking about how grand it will be if we just stick to your vision. Thanks.
Postscript: I'm aware that I didn't link to any offending articles in this post, which may seem to undermine my point for those who don't spend their free time reading consultants' reports and browsing arts blogs. Trust me, these people are out there - I didn't link them because a) I didn't want to boost their page views, and b) I don't really care to hear their responses.
Okay, here's the deal, people. We don't ask for a lot around here, aside from the occasional intelligent comment (which y'all have been excellent about providing) and your continued willingness to take an interest in what Sarah and I do for a living.
But we're looking for a bit of help here. Times are tough, as you know, and any arts organization will tell you that getting people out of their houses and into a museum, concert hall, or theater is darned tough in the month or two after Christmas, even in the best of economic circumstances. But the fact is, we've got an Inside the Classics concert coming up at the end of the month that we're awfully excited about, and if you were to push me, I'd confess that I'm pretty sure it's going to be the best show we've done yet in two years of putting these things on at Orchestra Hall.
So here's what we're asking. We've thrown up an event page over at Facebook, with a basic description of what we'll be doing on the 28th and 29th, and invited everyone we know who might be in the MSP area on those dates and doesn't actually play in the orchestra. But we need more invites, so if you're a Facebook type (and we know for a fact that some of you are,) please take a couple of minutes to head on over to our page and invite literally everyone you know in the Twin Cities metro. If you wanted to add a note telling them about past ItC shows you've attended, more power to you. But even just spreading the word would be a tremendous help to us.
Even if you're not a Facebooker, we want to do everything we can to pack the hall for these shows, and you'd be amazed how a little word of mouth can make a difference. So if you were already planning on attending, first of all, thank you, and secondly, would you consider asking a few friends to come along? And if you've been perusing this blog or any of the rest of the MN Orch web site and wondered why the heck we're not using Proven Viral Marketing Technique X to attract people to the hall, chime in down in the comments and let us know what we ought to be doing! We're always looking for new ideas...
The fallout from the Boston/Rozhdestvensky debacle last week is continuing, in the press and the blogosphere, at least, and Boston Globe critic Jeremy Eichler advanced the conversation in what I thought was an interesting way in Sunday's paper:
The incident also shed light on a deeper problem of the orchestra condescending to a potential audience. If the BSO had the artistic vision to bring Rozhdestvensky to its stage, it should have had the marketing courage to stand behind its reasons for doing so.
Now, if I'm running the Boston Symphony, I have an easy rebuttal to that: artistic courage is all well and good, but are we really serving the public if we intentionally market ourselves in a manner that we know from past experience will either confuse people or put them off the music we're offering? How can we introduce people to an extraordinary conductor if they're not in the concert hall to begin with, and why should they come if our advertising implies that they're morons for not already having heard of one of the performers, especially if there's another performer on the program who they do know?
But Eichler fleshes out his argument in compelling fashion...
The plight of classical music in a free-market economy has never been an easy one, especially in this country... Yet the ace in the pocket of orchestras and performing arts groups is that they are selling an experience that is simply not interchangeable with anything else. But it is easy for that message to get lost as marketing strategies increasingly come to mimic the techniques of the entertainment industry at large. Is there really no other way?
Well, there might be. And I like Eichler's focus on the singular experience of live music in a great concert hall as the product we ought really to be promoting, rather than semi-famous guest conductors and soloists. All of this, of course, goes back to a problem we've discussed here in the past: programs that marketers believe will sell poorly if marketed honestly (regardless of their artistic merit) are increasingly being sold to the public as something other than what they are. (Exhibit A would be that Mahler 8/Schubert Unfinished incident from last spring that upset a number of you Mahler fans. It happened again this fall with Sarah's subscription concert debut, when a program of Lutoslawski and Shchedrin concertos for orchestra was advertised as "Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante," which was clearly not the centerpiece of the evening, and wasn't the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante most music fans would have assumed it was, in any case.)
Eichler sums it all up better than I could:
When the BSO chooses to present innovative programs, that approach should be trumpeted, not seen as a reason for apology... Ultimately, the easiest way to market classical music is to have something genuinely exciting to sell.
Whenever marketing types sit around a table and start talking about ways to attract a wider range of concertgoers (by which they generally mean "people under 40,") the subject of concert start times is bound to come up. Why does everything have to start at 7:30 or 8pm, they moan? Why, if only we played a few shorter concerts that started just as all the younger folk are getting out of work, and maybe served some food and drinks as well, why, we'd be beating off the youth demographic with a stick!
To me, this sounds dangerously close to dinner theater, which is to theater as Ashlee Simpson is to music. And I used to play in an orchestra that tried something like this, even offering up free booze themed to the program du jour (vodka for an all-Russian slate, champagne for French fare, etc.), and the whole thing went down like a lead balloon. Granted, the 20 or so people who bothered to show up for these concerts did appear to be younger than the average symphony crowd, but I'm not sure that made up for the fact that we'd spent more money on alcohol than we took in via ticket sales.
What I've rarely heard anyone talk about is shifting our concert times the other direction, which, if you're trying to attract a demographic that is basically defined by its interest in going out late at night, would seem like an obvious idea. The major reason for this is that most orchestras (ours included) have specific prohibitions in their union contracts against concerts that go on into the wee hours, or at least prohibitively expensive overtime scales designed to accomplish the same thing as an outright ban. And most arts professionals who have spent time running a shop full of union workers are well aware that it's rarely worth banging your head against the concrete wall of a Collective Bargaining Agreement if you don't absolutely have to.
But there are ways to massage these things, and a few groups are making the effort. London's Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment recently launched a series of 10pm concerts aimed squarely at the city's young professionals, and guess what? They're apparently turning out in droves. (Part of the appeal appears to be that the audience is allowed, nay, encouraged to drink during the show. No word on whether the orchestra gets to imbibe as well.) In this country, the groups that have tried late-night concerts are generally smaller ensembles unburdened by strict CBAs, but anecdotal evidence suggests that these, too, have been successes.
So, if you're part of the ridiculously coveted 18-to-40 demographic, what about it? Would you be more likely to show up for a casual, dressed-down, late-night concert than a starchy, formal, early evening one? If we suddenly started doing an Inside the Classics show at 11pm on a Friday night, would you consider starting your bar crawl with us? Or are we really better off looking at the dinner theater option?
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On another note entirely, guess what, you guys? We've got our first Inside the Classics concerts of the season coming up next week! (And we haven't said a word about it on the blog yet, which I'm guessing is driving our marketing department batty.) We're talking Mozart, featuring his Jupiter symphony, and trying out a bunch of new ideas to keep the series fresh. (The script isn't 100% finalized yet, but I can confidently guarantee that an adorable child, a patented Sarah Hicks Fugue Takedown™, and a green garden hose will all feature prominently. As will, y'know, Mozart.)
I know money's tight for everyone right now, so here's what we're doing. If you head on over to our subscription sales page, you can get a ticket to all three of our 2008-09 ItC shows for 50% off the normal price. That's less than $14 per concert, if you subscribe before November 20. And if you're not into planning ahead, we've dropped our single ticket prices for all our November concerts to a maximum of $25. ($10 for your kids.) That's right - the best seat in the house is $25. It's normally $83. Get you some. Transmission ends.
Well, not really, I'm heading up to Maine and Vermont to festival hop with my husband (a rare pleasure, as we seldom get to travel together, and I've taken time off this summer to do just that). I'm not sure what internet connectivity will be like, so posting will be spotty for the next few weeks.
I leave you with this:
The opening ceremony of the Olympics was stunning, immensely impressive and cinematic in scope; but what really struck me was Lang Lang's presence in the middle of it all, a testament to the rise in popularity of Western classical music and to Lang Lang himself. A lot of food for thought there, that I'll hopefully get to before too long.
Hope everyone is enjoying some time off this summer!!
MN Orch marketing chief Cindy Grzanowski pointed me to this fashion blog post from April, featuring a soon-to-be-released celebrity-branded sneaker, in attractive black and gold, retailing for a fairly reasonable $85. The celeb in question? Um...
Yeah, that's piano superstar Lang Lang, there on the heel, and his signature just next to the third, um, racing stripe(?) on each shoe. Not only that, both the man himself and NY Phil music director designate Alan Gilbert were seen sporting the limited edition sneaks last week at the big Central Park concert. The mind boggles. The new Dudamel Dog in LA and Staccato's long-running Osmo Cosmo are one thing, but this seems like a whole new level of vanity marketing for our sleepy little genre.
So what's next in the brave new world of classical product placement? A Marin Alsop-themed pantsuit? A Joshua Bell line of high-end hair care products? The Nathan Gunn Ab-Master? The world may not be ready...
As a general rule, musicians tend to be suspicious of marketers, agents, and other PR types. It's not that we think we can do without their services, of course, but we're taught from the first time we pick up an instrument that the music we play is deeply meaningful stuff, and selling it to the public like its a case of beer or a football game seems somehow wrong to us. Throw in the fact that people who work in music and people who work in PR each tend to speak in a very specific insider language, and that they aren't the same languages, and the gap widens.
The best way of explaining it might be to say that musicians harbor a deep-seated fear that the people who market us would be happiest if we agreed to drop all the Mahler and Stravinsky and just play the 1812 Overture and an assortment of Beatles arrangements every week. And on the other side of the coin, the folks who dedicate their professional lives to making our performances seem like something the public should spend its money on are frequently exasperated and baffled by musicians' seeming disinterest in (or even outright opposition to) any effort to make what we do more accessible to the people buying the tickets.
All of which is to say, it's an uneasy partnership. Everyone's on the same side, really, but not always on the same page. And as a result, a lot of marketing techniques that the for-profit world of commerce takes for granted never really get tried when the product being pitched is an orchestra (or a theater or a museum, for that matter.) So I'm always on the lookout for the obvious sorts of ideas that those of us in my business frequently miss while we're too busy worrying about being taken seriously.
Here's one now - promoter/agent Amanda Ameer, blogging about just this sort of thing over at ArtsJournal, points out that retail marketing has become so sophisticated and subtle that just this week, she walked into a clothing store she had no need to go into, just because it was inviting (by design.) She then compares the techniques employed by the store to those employed by Carnegie Hall, just down the block, and concludes that Carnegie isn't even marketing in the same ballpark. Forget the stock posters that ring the building, says Ameer - why isn't there music playing from just inside wide-open doors, or a video display touting upcoming concerts? Why should the public take an interest in what you're selling if you don't seem terribly interested in offering it up?
This is the kind of thinking that led the Minnesota Orchestra a few years back to adorn the entire front and sides of Orchestra Hall with giant pictures of Osmo, the orchestra, and even a few audience members. At the time, it was supposed to be a one-year thing, just to get people talking and spruce up the look of our 30-plus-year-old facade. It worked - we got plenty of press coverage out of it (my favorite write-up was from local writer Christy DeSmith, then of The Rake, who described Osmo as sporting "a slightly dopey smile, as if he had just bumped his head,") and the "wrap," as we call it, leaves no doubt about what our building is, and what you'll find inside. There's no longer any thought of going back to the unwrapped look.
The music world is so wrapped up in itself (by necessity - doing what we do for a living requires a ridiculous level of single-minded devotion to purpose) that we frequently forget that the rest of the world doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about Beethoven symphonies and the new Grapes of Wrath opera. And when we do remember, we tend to look for ways to make the general public as obsessive about music as we are, rather than finding ways to draw in the casual listener, or even random people who have no idea that they might enjoy the concert hall experience. And that's a shame, because - as Ameer's blog post demonstrates - it's not that hard to make people want to walk in your front door.
We're playing Mahler's ginormous 9th Symphony this week with one of my favorite guest conductors, Mark Wigglesworth. Which is interesting, because it's entirely possible that you could be a regular visitor to the Minnesota Orchestra web site, could even be planning to attend this concert, and be unaware that there's any Mahler on the program.
The headline on the website for this concert is "Schubert's Unfinished Symphony," which is, to be fair, also on the program. The same description appears on the concert tickets themselves. The thing is, the Schubert, lovely though it is, is a 20-minute appetizer, while the Mahler is a 90-minute magnum opus, so it might seem a bit odd for our marketing department to be highlighting what is unquestionably the less significant work. But there's a reason that they do it, and it's one that musicians often avoid talking about: the concertgoing public just doesn't seem to like Mahler.
I should qualify that right off the bat by saying that, clearly, many people do like Mahler, and several thousand people will be joining us for the concerts this week to prove it. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if our overall ticket sales this week are among our lowest totals of the season. Past experiences with Mahler, in fact, almost guarantee it. And this isn't just a Minnesota problem - audiences across America are decidedly less enthusiastic about Mahler than we musicians are.
So what's the problem here? Mahler's symphonies have been a part of the standard orchestral repertoire for the better part of a century now, so it can hardly be a lack of familiarity that keeps audiences at bay. If anything, I get the sense that our audiences know exactly what a Mahler symphony is, and that it's that knowledge that keeps them away. A couple of years back, our piccolo player and I were talking about Mahler's 5th symphony at a Hallowe'en party (yes, we're huge dorks,) and her husband disgustedly broke into the conversation to explain, in great detail, that only musicians like Mahler, and that people who have to listen to it (rather than playing it) generally hate the experience.
And the thing is, he may not be wrong about that. There's no question that Mahler is generally a lot of fun to play, especially if you're lucky enough to play it with a really good orchestra, under a really great conductor. The music is hugely challenging for every instrument in the orchestra, contains plenty of melodic content for everyone, fits together like the world's most complex jigsaw puzzle, and is just incredibly visceral and raw in it's style. If playing Mozart is like baseball, all clean lines and perfect structure, playing Mahler is like rugby. It's brutal and draining and everyone seems to be piling onto everyone else at exactly the same time, but damn, it's exciting.
Of course, Mahler is brutal and draining for audiences as well. And on top of that, Mahler symphonies are loooooooooong. The one we're playing this week is 90 minutes, which isn't at all unusual for him. I think his shortest symphony is an hour, which is as long as Beethoven's longest. And when you consider that, in most Mahler symphonies, the drama, the pathos, the agony, and the navel-gazing start right off the top and almost never ratchet down, it's asking a lot of an audience. Most people aren't in the mood for that sort of thing very often, and a fair number of people never are. It's like asking people how they feel about Ulysses. Most will allow that it's a great work of literature, but they're not going to make an attempt to read it very often, because who has that kind of energy?
I strongly suspect that a lot of concertgoers get turned off to Mahler after wandering into a performance of one of his bigger works (the 5th, the 6th, the 9th, etc.) unaware of what they were in for. Mahler isn't a composer you want catching you off guard. If you're just looking for a nice, relaxing evening out, and you suddenly find yourself being assaulted by all the personal demons of a 150-year-old manic depressive Austrian in musical form, you're not in for a good night. It'd be like intending to spend a quiet night at the movies and wandering into Letters From Iwo Jima. Even though you recognize that it's an impressive work of art, it's not even remotely what you were looking for.
The reality is, too, that a number of Mahler's symphonies are arguably longer and more over-the-top than they needed to be. It's almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about this, however, because the people who love Mahler really love Mahler. And in the same way that people who love, say, Lord of the Rings, are not willing to hear a single word said against it, Mahlerians are prone to fly into fits of righteousness if anyone so much as suggests that, really, the first movement of the 9th does drag on a bit. So there again, we run the risk of alienating audiences who, encountering a passionate fan of Mahler, are made to feel as if they are just too dumb or impatient to understand the attraction.
All that having been said, a lot of Mahler's music is great stuff, and we're really not going to stop playing it anytime soon, much as our marketing department might like us to. So I'm curious to hear from our readers on the subject. Do you like Mahler? Hate him? Feel confused by him? Does seeing his name on a concert program make you less likely to buy a ticket? And if so, how did that aversion get started? Enquiring musicians (and marketers) worldwide want to know...
The professional orchestras of the world tend to spend an unseemly amount of time and energy trumpeting just how excellent we are. In fact, the tenor of such discussions frequently gets downright silly, as it did earlier this fall, when Marin Alsop began her tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony. In reporting on her historic debut, a number of national publications described her (accurately) as the first ever female music director of a "major" American orchestra, sparking howls of outrage from orchestras and listeners in cities like Buffalo and Denver who believe their local bands to be deserving of the label "major." The fact that a Major Orchestra is typically defined within the industry by factors like annual budget, endowment size, length of season, and musician pay scale was lost in the face of protests that "our orchestra is every bit as good as theirs!"
I once found myself on the receiving end of a similar protest when, in my role as a news editor at ArtsJournal.com, I wrote a blurb describing a medium-sized regional orchestra on the East Coast as just that, sparking an angry e-mail from the orchestra's PR chief, who demanded that we rewrite the blurb and identify her band as "major," even though their rank in all the categories I mentioned above places them in roughly the same tier as orchestras in Alabama, Columbus, and Louisville.
The protesters in these debates over the use of the word "major" may well have a point - Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote an excellent piece earlier this year about how much better second, third, and even fourth tier orchestras have become in recent years, and how narrow the gap between the top US orchestras and those considered to be beneath that standard has become. But the real heart of these sorts of debates is simple civic pride, and the wound that people feel when their city, state, neighborhood, etc. is defined by an outsider as being less than major league caliber in any way. Look at how quick arts groups are to trumpet phrases like "world class" as a way of supposedly impressing the local populace, and you'll see how important perception and rank are in the cultural marketplace. (The Minnesota Orchestra has been living high on the marketing hog for more than three years now through the power of a single line from a London newspaper, where a critic was kind enough to say of us that, "out of nowhere, the world seems to have gained a new superstar band with a maestro to match." I often wonder if that critic knows just how many times we've reprinted his words for our own purposes since he wrote them back in 2004.)
Still, I've long suspected that the bulk of our ticketbuyers could care less about national and international accolades, and are basically looking for us to provide them with an entertaining night out. Sure, it's nice to be able to say that your local theater troupe, opera company, or orchestra is among the best, if you care about that sort of thing, but since no one ever really tells you who's doing the ranking, it feels a bit silly to me.
Besides, tell me that the fans of Britain's Really Terrible Orchestra (and there are apparently thousands of them) aren't having as good a time at the RTO's concerts as the concertgoers in Baltimore, Buffalo, New York, or Minneapolis. Somehow, I don't think they're spending a lot of time worrying about where their band ranks among the world's best...
Yeah, that's piano superstar Lang Lang, there on the heel, and his signature just next to the third, um, racing stripe(?) on each shoe. Not only that, both the man himself and NY Phil music director designate Alan Gilbert were seen sporting the limited edition sneaks last week at the big Central Park concert. The mind boggles. The new Dudamel Dog in LA and Staccato's long-running Osmo Cosmo are one thing, but this seems like a whole new level of vanity marketing for our sleepy little genre.
