Early this month I got crazy email from the Met Opera. They were promoting their new season, opening with a new production of Bellini’s Norma.
That opening happened two nights ago, but this doesn’t concern me here. What concerns me — one thing that was crazy — was three links at the top of the email (one for each of the first three operas they’re doing this season), brusquely titled “Photo galleries.”
That, I thought, wasn’t a friendly way to invite me to see what the productions looked like. But I wanted to see how Norma looked, so I clicked.
And was taken to a web page that asked me to enter a password!
That’s crazy, I thought. How am I supposed to know the password?
Confused, I went back to the email. Oh, wait…right under the links…they gave me the password.
But still that’s crazy. Why should there be a password at all?
Maybe they first put the photos on a protected page, to keep outsiders away. But when it was time for public display, they couldn’t make a new, unprotected page?
Again, that’s crazy. Amateur stuff.
And that wasn’t all. Later in the email, describing the character one of the Norma lead singers plays, they got the story of the opera wrong.
Amateur night again. The Met Opera, with a circa $300 million budget, falls on its face doing easy things.
(It takes a while to explain the mistake with the story, so I won’t interrupt myself to do it here. I’ll put it at the end of this post, for anyone curious.)
Why this matters
As I’ve said here before, classical music institutions don’t always function in what I’d call a grownup way.
Or at least they don’t in their relations with the rest of the world. Back in the spring I found the Kennedy Center promoting a concert on which a piece by Mason Bates was played. And failing to mention that he’s their composer in residence.
And saying in the same promotion that composer Caroline Shaw would make a “special appearance.” Without telling the full and much more interesting story, which is that she’d play the solo part in her own violin and orchestra piece.
Then there’s the Kennedy Center’s website, which makes it hard to find out what time performances start. For instance here, a page for some National Symphony events, which you’ll read (in boldface type) when the preconcert talks start, but not when the concerts do. (Until you scroll way down to buy tickets, when you finally see the starting time, in fine print.)
I don’t mean to pick on the Kennedy Center, but since I live in DC, they’re my home team, and I see their stuff. But I’m also puzzled by the San Francisco Symphony,, which keeps sending me emails, greeting me as “Mr. Sandow.”
When in today’s business world, companies use first names. To my bank, I’m “Greg.” (And how does the orchestra know if we’re women or men? If my name was Dana, would I be Mr. or Ms.?)
There are many more examples.
A quote from Casey
Which brings me to the title of this post. Casey Stengel, a baseball legend, managed the Yankees from 1948 to 1960 and won the world series seven times.
Then at the end of his career he found himself managing the NY Mets, an expansion team in their first year, who were terrible. At one point they lost 17 times in a row. Leading Stengel to famously ask: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”
I ask myself that, when I see how badly classical music people often address the outside world. Not knowing the culture around them. Not clear on who they want to reach. And (sorry to be blunt) making bonehead mistakes.
Next post: mistakes at the National Symphony’s opening gala last Sunday. Just to be clear: I enjoyed the concert. The music was pretty much a delight. But the presentation stumbled.
What the Met got wrong about Norma‘s plot:
In the email I mentioned, introducing the opera’s cast, they said Joyce DiDonato (the superstar mezzo) would play “Norma’s archrival.”
But that’s not right. Norma (the soprano lead) is high priestess of the ancient Druids. They’re at war with the Romans. But, shock, Norma has a secret Roman lover. (Double shock, since as a priestess she’s not supposed to have any relations with men).
And yes, the mezzo, too, is seduced by a Roman. By Norma’s lover!
But the opera doesn’t show us the women as rivals. It shows them as victims. By the end, singing one of the most famous of all operatic duets, they love each other like sisters. And the great confrontation in the piece comes between Norma and the Roman.
Whoever wrote the email didn’t seem to know that. Or didn’t understand what it means to call people archrivals. Likewise whoever approved the text before it went out. #can’tanybodyhereplaythisgame?
I’ve been feeling a lot of this lately. It reminds me of a recent episode on Facebook, where a friend posted asking for thoughts on how his orchestra might reach out to minority and under-served communities. The responses ran the gamut from the usual sorts of suggestions to some that were more novel and creative. But after 80+ comments I noticed that not a single person had said the most obvious thing of all: If you want to know what minority and under-served communities might like to get from the symphony, *why don’t you ask them*?? (I finally posted just that, but my comment was ignored amidst the sea of suggestions.)
I see this as related to your post because they boil down to the same problem: a *supposed* desire to reach an audience that nevertheless remains in the same institution-focused mindset we’ve been seeing for decades. It’s just lip service — and, as you point out above, often poorly-executed lip service to boot!
I so much agree. These are related issues. You want a new, more diverse audience, but don’t understand what that means. Especially the part about people not like you being not like you, so you’d better get to know them. Classical music institutions are especially bad at this, I’m sad to say.
It’s not just the classical music world that is all screwed up with the Internet, Greg. I sympathize very deeply with you. In my own line of work, in which computers and the ‘net are extensively used, it’s just as bad.
Many of the sites I go to in the course of a day just don’t work the way one expects them to. Or at all. They are very confusingly designed. Buttons and things you need to click don’t do anything, or they scoot you off to the wrong link. Over and over, there are error messages which say “Sorry, there has been an error,” but don’t give you a clue about what the error is or what to do about it.
In my line of work, it’s now customary to go by first names, too. But that doesn’t bother me so much; it gives an informal tone to the proceedings, and I suppose people can guess my sex all right from my name. But it looks as though the brave new world of computing machines is extensively broken, and we can’t do anything about it.
My diagnosis is that everybody is now convinced that the Internet is absolutely necessary to do everything but tie your shoes (and soon I know that there will be an Internet of Things app to do that, too). But no one has time to sit down and learn enough so that they can use the ‘net or their own computers properly. We are all in a mad rush to do–what?
Sympathy back to you! I run into problems on the web, too. I’d suggest, that the classical music problem is a different story. A very large communication and presentation failure, of which the Internet is one aspect, but only one. So when the Kennedy Center doesn’t cleary tell you what time performances start, I understand how that could be categorized with Web fails outside classical music. But I see it as one of many related fails by that institution. See my next post for more of them.
Well, sure, it’s inexcusable to put a password on a public-facing page. At best that’s just goofy. That said, let me elaborate on a trend I see in online media. You identified it, using more words, but the (your) key phrase is “Amateur stuff.” And you refer to (not) functioning in a “growup way.” Certainly so.
Look, this is behavior I see all the time, as an online developer. Let me speak in generalizations – NOT about the organizations you have cited. Many marketing managers believe that “social media” are the province of a younger generation. And they want to recruit younger people to their audiences and events. So they’re going to seek a “younger” vibe in their communications through their staffing process. Young people may be very smart, and they use online tools lots more, but they are less experienced than older people. They pay less attention to detail. They -know- less detail, and they can’t fix details they don’t know about. In the online world, there is a cult of “Make a lot of mistakes and you’ll learn from them.” When one says this, one glorifies mistakes. Probably a mistake in itself, especially for big-budget orgs. But if you turn over your promotion, especially your online promotion, to people with less experience, you’re going to get gaffes and slip-ups and errors in what you send out. (There’s also the fact that online things get more and more complex, and it’s easier and easier to miss some little – or big – detail, such as a password.) So this could be more of an issue of not paying attention to your customer-facing media, by not assigning people who know and catch all of the details. And, yes, someone experienced needs to read the big releases before they go out. (This also can involve what I call a “test mailing.”)
So let me emphasize, the problem is a system problem – someone needs to be minding the details, and this need not be an overwhelming or suppressive or chilling presence – just someone needs to check what’s going out before it goes out.
And I can hear the developer saying “But the photo-sharing service REQUIRES a password.” Perhaps they’ve never heard of changing suppliers.
Yes, a big budget organization must attend to detail. (Just as any performing musician must attend to detail.)
Typing says “growup way” – probably autocorrected – the correct quote is “grownup way.” You can probably edit that while moderating, and should. And then delete this correction. -Sky
Thanks! I’ll leave your correction here. I tell my students and my almost six year-old son that everyone makes mistakes. Don’t want to pretend I’m immune.
Here’s one from outside of the classical music world that’s as head-spinning as that Met email: a tweet from the Detroit Jazz Festival thanking Wayne Shorter for his “amazing, smooth jazz!” “Amazing” is bad enough, so overused as it is, but “smooth,” Wayne Shorter? The funniest part is that most jazz fans and players – I think of Pat Metheny’s rant against Kenny G and Richard Thompson’s ditty “I Agree with Pat Metheny” – hate “smooth jazz.”
The amateurishness and downright vulgarity of the writing at some of America’s greatest arts institutions is astonishing. This season New York City Ballet is offering 61 “dynamic” ballets – as opposed to dull, static ones, I guess. They will “salute Jerome Robbins’ centennial” – how about saluting him instead, on his centennial? But this is mild by their standards; somewhere, Lincoln Kirstein is on a rant. I get the impression they’re writing not for balletomanes, but for the causal fans they’re hoping to draw, and they think they have to write down to them. Did I not already love the art form, it would put me off.
Until we look at these issues within the ecosystem of P-12 and higher education and professional and amateur presenting organizations, we’ll see no change. The “big boys” continue to shoot themselves and the field in the foot, and foundations like Mellon keep asking all the same traditional institutions to consider innovative ideas, of which they have few. Disruptive innovation is going to be grass roots, and it’s happening in regional and local organizations in ways the most famous institutions haven’t even begun to consider. Suddenly DEI is a big deal and Mellon invests in Philadelphia for a program that is largely about convincing ourselves that foisting Western European assumptions and idioms on people of color is a viable way to diversify the field. El Sistema is not analyzed critically but considered to be a model for tying kids up in hours upon hours of classical music endeavor not unlike the “Music Man” approach to Pool Halls. As Jeff says, when will we dialogue, listen, and find ways to share our values of MUSIC writ large that reduce or eliminate the boundaries and barriers once and for all.
I’m very much with you on all of this. Including what you say about El Sistema. It’s very much about teaching Them to play Our music. Which is naively assumed to have universal value. (“Naively” is a kind way of putting it.) I’ve often contrasted El Sistema to hiphop. In El Sistema, We teach Them the glories of our culture. When hiphop developed, that was Them developing their own art form, and developing it into a multibillion-dollar worldwide business. Which is more important? Which is better for Them? (Yes, the established record business helped with the development of hiphop as a business, but the kids making the music played a big role.)