Resuming my blog after a gap…
I’m sorry that I said some provocative things about the SHIFT festival in DC, and then fell silent.
I hadn’t planned that. But life intervened, taking me by surprise, when my schedule got crazy.
My bad. I apologize.
And I also apologize for something off-base I said in my SHIFT post:
Special note for the Kennedy Center: Mason Bates has been your composer in residence for two years. With no disrespect to him or his music — he’s someone I’ve known cordially for years — you might ask what it means that the concert featuring him drew the smallest SHIFT audience. Something maybe isn’t working in your composer in residence promotion.
Yes, the performance by the North Carolina Symphony did sell fewer tickets than the other SHIFT concerts (by quite a lot). And they did play a Mason piece.
But wrong to suggest that Mason’s name didn’t sell tickets! How could I know that? Maybe sales would have been lower still if his name hadn’t been on the program.
Apologies, again, for going off track this way.
But there’s another issue
Why — in all the PR I’ve seen for that concert — wasn’t Mason billed as the Kennedy Center’s composer in residence?
This is crazy.
Here — from the joint Kennedy Center/Washington Performing Arts web page for SHIFT — is the PR blurb for the North Carolina concert:
The orchestra offers an innovative program, deeply evocative of North Carolina, represented in particular by four composers with ties to the state: Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Mason Bates, and Robert Ward.
Caroline Shaw gets props (as she should) as a Pulitzer Prize winner. Mason gets nothing. He’s just a name on a list.
Even though he’s the Kennedy Center’s own guy! Personally chosen (I’d assume) by K Center president Deborah Rutter, after the success she had with him as composer in residence when she ran the Chicago Symphony.
Crazy.
Don’t they want to give their own guy props?
Don’t they want to be courteous to him, and mention that he’s an important figure at the place where the concert will be given?
Wouldn’t they hope Mason’s name might sell some tickets, if they reminded people in DC that he’s on the home team, a composer whose music they maybe have heard and liked?
Crazy.
And it gets worse
In promo emails for the concert, from the North Carolina Symphony and also from Washington Performing Arts, there’s also not a word Mason as composer in residence
Aren’t those groups collaborating with the Kennedy Center?
The orchestra writes a longish paragraph about Mason, praising him as the second most performed living composer in the US. But doesn’t say he’s composer in residence.
WPA gives a special nod to Caroline Shaw. Pulitzer Prize winner! She’ll make a “special appearance” at the concert! Mason’s name isn’t even mentioned.
(And, for even greater craziness, the email doesn’t say that Caroline’s “special appearance” will be as a violin soloist, playing her own piece. Sorry for the emphasis, but…they didn’t think to publicize Caroline as soloist? Nor did they on the SHIFT webpage, which I quoted above. What word would you use for that?)
How could this happen?
These look like silly mistakes.
But maybe there’s some deeply overthought reason for not mentioning Mason’s DC title.
“Let’s see…if we give him props for his K Center work, we’re putting the K Center ahead of WPA and the orchestra, because he’s not composer in residence for them…”
Which might just possibly make sense at 3 AM, to people with deeply furrowed brows. But then you fall into something else that seems wrong, promoting Caroline more than Mason. And you look bad to any informed observer on the outside.
In the past, I’ve blogged that the classical music field doesn’t do PR very well. (Or here, or here.)
I fear this is one more example.
Footnote
Did Mason’s name sell tickets to the North Carolina concert?
I’d think the Kennedy Center would want to know. Would want to know what impact their composer in residence has in their city. Selling tickets isn’t the only way to measure that, but it’s one way.
And, more generally, I hope they and WPA did audience studies for all the SHIFT concerts. What made people choose which one to go to? What made them want to go to SHIFT at all?
Having that data would — to put it mildly — help WPA and Kennedy Center plan the continuation of the festival next year.
A journalist once said the me ” If there’s a choice of explaining something as a conspiracy or a f-up, bet on the f-up every time”. My guess is that the omissions were carelessness, perhaps by an inexperienced writer.
And I couldn’t agree more about the value in audience data. Tessitura, which most halls and presenters use, allows for collection and analysis of great amounts of nformation but I’m not sure who is using it fully.
Well put, Ken. And good to hear from you! Hope you and Liz are well.
I didn’t mean to suggest that there was a conspiracy. I can certainly see the omissions as careless, or clueless. Though I do have this problem — you omit basic things like the ones I mentioned, maybe because you have an inexperienced writer, as you say. But now you have people who supervise the inexperienced writer, and who sign off on the PR. The people in charge of it, at two major US classical music institutions, the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts.
So then the question is — if an inexperienced person made a mistake, why wasn’t it corrected by more experienced people higher on the food chain? How high does the inexperience (to use what in a larger context is perhaps a kind word) go?
I’d imagine that the Kennedy Center uses Tessitura, or has other sources of data. For SHIFT, I think they need something not at first easily quantifiable, the kind of thing you might get from through surveys with some open-ended questions, or from focus groups. Namely: how did the people attending SHIFT choose which concert to go to? Not sure Tessitura can supply that information, though I’m sure you know more about what it can do than I do.
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m usually just enjoying coffee and morning papers, but I had an early meeting, so that shoots the day! I’m just pondering off the cuff and wonder if small ticket numbers for the NC orchestra had anything to do with all the negative political news that’s flowed from that state for the past couple of years. One has to wonder how offering a concert “deeply evocative of North Carolina” is going to attract an audience, especially when that state is seen by many to be home to some of the ugliness plaguing our Republic.
Yes, this may be far-fetched, but it may be a possibility, particularly with all the on again-off again boycott of that state by large corporate events, the NCAA, etc.
That’s a very cogent thought, Brian! Well worth considering. It hadn’t occurred to me that “deeply evocative of North Carolina” could have some immediate negative vibes. But of course it could!
I wonder if savvy corporate marketers, facing something similar, would have done focus groups to determine if there was resistance to North Carolina in the target audience for whatever they were selling. And if there was, what kind of marketing might overcome it. In this case, maybe (a guess off the top of my head) some language talking about long-standing, admirable North Carolina things (culture, landscape, whatever). Implicitly shifting (no pun intended) the thinking from anything contemporary.
But then, since contemporary music was the heart of the concert program…where there people in the target audience thinking, at whatever level of consciousness, that maybe the Kennedy Center shouldn’t have invited the North Carolina Symphony, or that the composers involved should have withdrawn their work?
Not inconceivable, in some areas of life a little more worldly than classical music. Thanks so much for suggesting this! Well worth considering.
Ward had a Pulitzer, too, from 1962, for Crucible.
Great point! So two Pulitzer Prize winners on that program, but only one of them identified as that.