Eternally up-and-coming

Last week, I saw the extremely funny What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling in previews at The Atlantic. The show is being billed as “an absurd musical satire that charts the career of eternally
up-and-coming (and fictitious) musical theatre composer Jacob Sterling”, and, while ostensibly about a guy who can’t get a break (SPOILER ALERT: his Broadway debut is pulled because of September 11th), it’s actually about a guy who just writes bad music, and thus “can’t get a break” (”  “).

There were (are) many talented artists at IMG when I worked there, but maybe fifteen out of about one hundred and sixty were classical superstars, guaranteed to be booked with all the top orchestras, opera companies and presenters. Perhaps at every management company, there is a group of artists who are constantly labeled as “the next generation”, “stars of tomorrow”, “young artists”, or, to borrow from What’s That Smell, “up-and-coming”. Is an artist considered “up-and-coming” because he or she cannot get a break or doesn’t have the monetary
means to achieve a break, or is it because he or she is simply just not
as good as the superstars? And if you’re, say, 25, can you still be billed as a “young” artist, or are you just billed that way because your career isn’t where you/your manager wants it to be? Yes, 25 is young, in the grand scheme of things, but are you really a “young artist” at 25 if you’ve been playing since you were 4? Most importantly, when does an artist cease being “up-and-coming”, and why or how?

Something I’ve noticed is that young artists are often inconsistent (I never worked on the management side at IMG, so this is simply based on personal observation at concerts): said “next generation” artists would deliver an out-of-this-world performance one night and a scattered performance the next. Who can blame them, they’re young, after all! From what I can tell, the child prodigies who made it big were the ones who were solid every time: no distractions, no mood swings, total focus.

But even if an artist is focused and has, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a star, how does he or she get there? Step one, they’re represented by a top management company. But they don’t have recording contracts, and they can’t afford publicists.  The artists who can afford publicists don’t need them (well, they do but they don’t – you know what I mean), and the artists who can’t, do. The same artists who can afford independant publicists also have the in-house publicist at their record label at their disposal (cf. yours truly for Renee Fleming, Lang Lang, and Anne-Sophie Mutter, at the moment), as well as the means to produce great websites and marketing materials.

So where does that leave us? Should the “stars of tomorrow” simply wait for a major cancellation and hope for the best? Of course they’re not just waiting around…they’re working hard and presumably improving performance/press/exposure-wise with every concert, but is that enough?

Would a free publicist help? Before I took the label day-job and started blogging my little heart out, I had planned on asking for applications and offering a season of free publicity for the artist who wrote the best essay on how to save classical music or whatever. There would have to be requirements: the artist has x number of concerts per year, makes under a certain amount of money, has a manager (so the publicist wouldn’t become the default manager), has an interest in bettering the industry as a whole…I hadn’t thought it all through, but you see the direction. Then I would have a committee ((my friends)) from the management and presenting arenas help select the candidate. Now, however, I’m thinking that for next season, 09-10 (gah!), it might be interesting to recruit other publicists – all the classical music publicists in New York, for example – to each take on a pro bono client for a season, and also serve as the selection committee. Artists would be selected and then assigned to the publicist who best fit their needs.

It’s hard to get press for classical musicians, even for the superstars, so I’m not sure this will work. But every little bit helps, right?  Publicists of New York, Unite!