Saw some promotion from the Utah Symphony, with this about La mer:
Allow yourself to answer the siren call of the sea with music that is so realistic you’ll want to ask for a life vest.
Ooof! When I posted this on Facebook, people had fun thinking of things equally clunky. Because, obviously, La mer — evocative, sensual — doesn’t make you feel like you might drown! So this, from Susan Larson: “Tristan n Isolde, so sexy you’ll want to run out and commit adultery!”
(And, by the way, there aren’t any sirens in La mer. They’re in the third movement of another Debussy piece, Nocturnes.)
Then I found another one on the Utah Symphony website, about Tchaikovsky:
He (or his brother) dubbed his final symphony the “Pathétique,” which translated from the Russian means passionate.
Ooof again! That’s French, not Russian, and it means pathetic, full of pathos, not passionate.
One FB commenter tried to excuse the Utah Symphony because they’re in Utah. Which gets the same national advertising we all see, gets Netflix and HBO, and (as you can confirm for yourself if you Google a bit) has businesses that present themselves in sophisticated, up to date ways.
So the problem here…
Is classical music, not Utah. I wrote a piece a few years ago for Chamber Music magazine, called “Who Is Our Competition?” In which I said something that seems obvious to me, that when we look for a new audience, we’re competing with everything in their world.
They’re seeing major league advertising and promotion, some of it of course silly (insert the annual ranking of Super Bowl ads), but all or most of it sophisticated. From local businesses as well as national and international ones.
So if we ourselves play in the minor leagues, how can we compete?
And don’t think it’s just smaller institutions
The New York Philharmonic, back in the ‘90s, started a group for teen fans, saying something like “Let us show you classical music can be as much fun as classic rock.” Not knowing that classic rock was what the teens’ parents listened to.
This past holiday season, they put up a video of their percussion section playing “Sleigh Ride” — a blank, almost aggressive performance, without even a hint of holiday joy. [Change made 2/10 – added link to the video, changed the wording to make what I’m saying more clear.]
The National Symphony, at its opening gala last year, showed a video, with thick black wires hanging in front of the screen (used to hold microphones, so they could stream the performance live).
Deborah Rutter, president of the Kennedy Center, introduced a hiphop initiative at a press event by saying she looked forward to introducing Washington, DC to this wonderful art form.
That’s just what’s on the top of my mind. The list could go on. We can’t play in the minor leagues!
I don’t really know anything about the ad biz, mainly because I don’t respond to most advertisements on TV, the internet, etc., at all. (When I want to buy something, I know what it is and where to get it, so what is the point of blasting ads at me?) But I sometimes think that classical music groups should fire all their ad agencies. Even the “sophisticated” ones mess everything up.
I don’t think you can describe La Mer in such a way that you will move people who have never heard it or anything like it to pay to go to a performance of it. Maybe ads for ocean cruises work, but that’s a completely different thing. If I wanted to go on a cruise, maybe an ad would give me a url to go to to find a company that runs cruises. But if someone just never gets a hankering to hear an orchestra play Debussy, no ad is going to arouse it in them. Orchestras, opera companies, etc., are just wasting their money hiring advertising professionals, IMHO.
The Phila. Orch., which I keep singing the praises of, does something that they describe in their concert program: sending their members into the local schools to work with the kids (something that the school boards themselves quit spending money on long ago). That’s one practical way to get kids into the world of classical music; the orchestra even provides instruments to kids who can’t afford their own. As the description in the program notes, it also provides repairs to the instruments, because, as it points out, kids tend to break things.
Of course, other orchestras in the country do this too. Instead of wasting money on ads, they should do more things like this to make music-making an active part of young people’s lives.
I think they might do better if they really had ad agencies. Mostly I think they write their promotions in-house, and they’re not really skilled at doing that. Plus, they may not test the results, the way commercial companies test their advertising, so see how people respond to it.
And I do think you can describe La mer and other pieces in a way that will make people want to come. Or, more broadly, you can describe what goes on at a classical concert. Which includes the pieces.
One very successful bit of advertising I know about. There’s a marketing consultant with an impressive skill. He’s good at picking the exact moment of a classical piece to put in a radio ad. The moment that makes people say, yes, I’ve got to hear this! So there’s an example of advertising that seems to work. Or did some years ago, when I heard about it. I know the Cleveland Orchestra had this consultant do this, and it worked for them. Times may be different now, but at least a decade or so ago, this radio trick worked.
I did think, after writing that comment, that most of these little squibs are probably written by people on the orchestra staffs, who probably should quit wasting their time on that and be assigned tasks better suited to their talents.
I think more and more that the big problem is that pop music fits into the way most people live much better than symphonies and concertos do. In the days of Warner Bros. cartoons that incorporated brief excerpts of the classics, did they encourage people to really get into classical music, or just give folks some catchy tunes to hum?
The many classical music excerpts in those old cartoons…they were there because people knew the classical pieces. Classical music was much more popular then. A much larger proportion of the population listened to it. Why else put it in the cartoons? Cartoons were a popular artform. They weren’t about to give any heavy emphasis to things that people didn’t know.
I think a large reason for the fact that people knew the cartoon classical excerpts was that immigration from European countries was in the recent past–people’s parents and grandparents actually grew up in Italy or Germany or Russia, and passed that family tradition on to the first U.S.-born generation.
Obviously that’s no longer true. Perhaps you have mentioned this fact before.
That was more true in the early years of the 20th century, when a large proportion of symphony musicians in the US, and the symphony audience, was German immigrants. I doubt Italian immigrants were common in the opera audience in those days, because Italians were so much looked down on, and wouldn’t have felt welcome in opera houses.
By the time those cartoons came out, the classical audience was much diversified. And even earlier, the accounts I have of the classical audience wouldn’t seem to be about immigrants. Take, for instance, Harvard students in the first couple of decades of the 20th century disrupting Boston Pops performances with demands to hear the Academic Festival Overture. They surely weren’t from immigrant families! Not at Harvard, not back then.
Or the teenagers, described in the NY Times as debutantes, who mobbed Geraldine Farrar’s farewell performance at the Met. If the Times writer is correct, and many of these girls really were debutantes, in the high society sense, they couldn’t have been immigrants. Not in New York capital S society! They would have been native-born WASPS.
I could multiply these examples, and among other things cite scenes from a few movies of the 40s through 60s in which classical music is taken for granted as a normal part of middle-class life. No sign in these scenes that immigrants are involved.
Or Life magazine, maybe the most popular magazine in the US, doing a big piece in 1962 about how much loved the piano was in American life. Even commissioning a piano piece from Copland, for readers to play! Not a single mention of immigrants. A lovely piece about a small-town piano teacher treats her as a central American institution, to be found in towns throughout the country, including in rural locations. Not one word in that loving article about immigrants.
So now we criticize the press releases? The goal is to reach their audience. It’s likely they know how to do that better than you, don’t you think? Do you want to encourage people to listen? It’s not about us.
Laura, I’ve been criticizing press releases for a long time. And getting private communications from those who write the releases and read my criticisms, asking for my help. Because they know they’re not reaching people. Not giving any plausible reason for anyone to go to the performances the releases are publicizing.
The releases, I think, only accomplish one thing. Informing the very few people left in the media who already know what classical music is about, who’s who, what’s what, and who already care that the XYZ symphony is doing a Brahms festival.
One of our biggest tasks now, with attendance at concerts dropping for years and funding imperiled, is to attract new people. The standard releases don’t stand a chance of doing that.