All In The Timing

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.

Into the wild

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!!

Air Lang Lang

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...

Forest for the Trees

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.

The Mahler Problem

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...

Who you callin' minor league?

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...