I got a press release from the Boston Symphony, advertising live streams from Tanglewood. On July 15 (tomorrow, as I write this), Pinchas Zukerman will conduct the Mozart E flat symphony, and the BSO will stream the second and third movements.
Which seems lame. Why not the whole piece?
Let me say that — as I wonder about the streaming, and a bit further down, roll my eyes a bit at how part of the release is written — I don’t mean to single out the BSO. I see weak things from many classical music institutions. The BSO is no worse than many others.
But they all have to do better. And there’s no way to point that out without using a specific example.
More on the streaming later. I can guess why the BSO isn’t streaming the whole symphony. But even if there’s a reason, the limitation still comes off as lame (not just to me, I fear, but very likely to at least some part of the BSO’s wider public).
The other problem
And then…the limp way they talked about the music:
The Symphony No. 39 is the first of a set of three (his last symphonies) that Mozart composed in rapid succession during the summer of 1788.
Wow, a set of three symphonies. Composed in quick succession. Back in 1788.
Nothing there to make the heart beat faster. Or to awaken even a slight spike of interest in these symphonies, one of them endearing, the second anxious, and the third grand and powerful.
Why not try something like:
One long-ago summer, in a burst of inspiration, Mozart wrote his three last symphonies. One is intense, another one is grand. And this is the endearing one, warm, enriching music for a summer night today.
I won’t claim that this is ideal. But at least it’s a stab at saying something about the symphony that might arouse some interest.
About the streaming
I imagine that there are contract issues here. That the musicians’ contract only allows for limited free streaming.
Thus just two movements of the Mozart. And later in the summer, just one movement of Sibelius 2, one of Beethoven 7, two movements of a Brahms serenade, and two movements of La mer.
This really does seem lame. What next? Will the Red Sox broadcast just the third, fourth, and fifth innings of their games?
Maybe this is the best the orchestra can do right now, and maybe they figured (maybe even rightly) that it was better than not streaming at all.
But still. It looks lame. I stare at the press release, bewildered. Do they really want to come before the public like this? At some inconvenience to their listeners, by the way, because when the BSO starts streaming in the middle of a piece, they can’t tell us exactly when we should go online to listen. They can only give us what they warn are approximate times.
Whereas if they streamed entire concerts, they’d could tell us exactly when the streams would start.
Again, I can understand how they got to this silly place. But really, people! Which is more important — the future of the orchestra, the future of this art form, and of course your relations with your all-important audience? Or some sticking point in a contract (assuming my guess is correct)?
No doubt involving some issue that makes the management and musicians just look silly, if it leads them into such absurdity.
ADDED LATER:
My friend Peter Sachon explained it all in a comment on Facebook. He’s an experienced freelance cellist in New York:
The national musicians Union which controls all recording for union members in the U.S., the AFM, has taken the position that all legit recording and streaming is potentially a source of revenue, and so almost all contracts are structured as if there is a profit to be shared. The AFM’s position means that most American orchestras can’t stream, and when they do the content is only available for a limited time. This position on new media was largely the reason that Seattle (and others) have removed themselves from the national union.
Can someone with inside info about the BSO tell us what is going on there? It seems as though they either don’t know anything about classical music, or they do but want to keep secrets the public shouldn’t know. My only comment about their public relations is “Wow!” followed by a few head shakes.
It’s not just the BSO, but basically the entire field of classical music. We don’t know how to talk to people outside our bubble.
Agreed!!!
“Why not try something like:
One long-ago summer, in a burst of inspiration, Mozart wrote his three last symphonies. One is intense, another one is grand. And this is the endearing one, warm, enriching music for a summer night today.“
Greg, I think writing like that is something for a journalist – or, really, a program annotator or commentator or a marketing professional – to produce for the public, not something for a publicist to produce for a journalist to read.
A publicist should not need to convince a classical music journalist about the importance, or even the interest, of Mozart’s last three symphonies. About the importance of a particular performance by a client, perhaps, yes, but not of the music.
In fact, if I got a press release with that language you suggest, I might well consider it an insult to my intelligence and knowledge and just toss it.
Interesting that you think this release would be for classical music journalists, of whom there are very, very few. Most of the media outlets in the Boston/Tanglewood area don’t have classical music specialists.
And even at a big newspaper like the Washington Post, which has my wife as a superbly knowledgeable classical music critic, there are other writers and editors who deal with classical music in various ways — by assigning stories, or doing reporting on things that touch on classical music — who don’t know classical music at all.
So a release like this goes to people who don’t have your knowledge. And then two things happen. They read the release, and either decide to do a story about the streaming, or not to do one. If the release doesn’t communicate anything to them, they’re more likely to decide not to do one. Or, if there happens to be a classical critic on staff (though again, that’s very, very rare), they may resist the critic’s desire to do a story, and not think it’s worth doing.
Secondly, from getting many releases, one after the other, that don’t communicate, they form the idea that nothing interesting is happening in classical music. Which does our field no good at all.
So, bottom line here, if you focus on your intelligence being insulted, you’re acting as if the release exists only for you. That it’s about you. Maybe you could take another view, and say, “Well, I don’t need to know that stuff, but how good that they’re trying to reach the people who don’t know. That helps build a future for classical music.”
I remember that the New York Times once had a chess column, but I don’t recall seeing it for a long time; I don’t know when they stopped it. But obviously they concluded that hardly anyone was reading it, or even understood it, and needed the space for other things.
If the Times and the Washington Post still cover classical music, it’s because there’s a readership for it among the elite readers of those papers. So that’s something we can still be grateful for, I suppose. But in the journalism field in general, when I see or hear the word “music,” it’s not classical music that’s being referred to. To get journalists to pay more attention to classical music, the public will have to pay more attention.
But there is so much that is available to people to attract their attention, and that commodity is not in infinite supply. Now I keep hearing about something called “Pokemon Go,” or something like that, which I have no knowledge of at all. But it seems to be a huge thing that everyone is talking about all of a sudden. Classical music will have to make itself look more interesting to the public than this smartphone game, I guess. Good luck with that!
My wife points out to me that chess is still played in the real world; every time we go through the square near our house we see young people pushing the pieces at each other. But obviously they never read the Times chess column; they learn from playing each other. Perhaps we classical music fans need to proselytize more with non-fans, rather than relying on professional publicists to do the work. If a large enough critical mass of fans developed, a movement might take off. (Always keeping in mind that a lot more people play basketball or golf than chess.)
I love that you’re going down this road, Greg, but you might want to temper your expectations. Promotional copy for classical music organizations is dreadful because the people who write and publish it don’t know what they’re doing. Communications in the arts is a rigorously amateurish enterprise perpetuated by leaders who have no meaningful expertise and by staffers who must answer to less-than-competent bosses.
Effective communication speaks to people about things they care about in a language they understand. The people who write this stuff don’t know who they’re talking to, they don’t know what they care about, and they speak a language that outsiders don’t understand.
Can they do better? Absolutely. It’s the easiest thing in the world to fix. But it can’t be fixed if the people who publish it don’t know – and refuse to recognize – what they’re doing wrong..
Good post.
“What next? Will the Red Sox broadcast just the third, fourth, and fifth innings of their games?”
As a cellist in the Chicago Symphony, I would bet that the Red Sox get paid extra for the broadcast of their games, and a far sight more than the wonderfully gifted members of one of the world’s great orchestra.
I don’t know that this is true. That people on professional sports teams get paid extra when the games are broadcast.
But whatever the arrangements are, the audience is vastly larger for sports broadcasts than for classical music ones. Obviously! So the economics are completely different. The teams are paid by the TV and radio stations that broadcast the games, and the stations in turn make money selling advertising that would never be attracted to any classical music broadcast.
The athletes, meanwhile, are getting paid millions of dollars a year. The minimum salary in major league baseball is maybe three times the minimum at major orchestras, and established players (not just the stars) get millions each year.
So you, as a cellist in the Chicago Symphony, might like to be paid the way players on the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bears, and the Bulls are paid, but the money just isn’t there. Meanwhile, with the existing audience slowly fading away, it’s in your longer-term interest to develop a new audience. Which might mean allowing streaming and broadcasts (and recordings!) without getting specially paid for them, because, again — the money just isn’t there. But the need to get the music out in the world as accessibly as possible has never been greater.
No, I don’t expect to be paid anywhere near what ball players earn. They do a fantastic job, there is a huge audience, and they deserve what they can get. What I’m saying is, orchestra managements expect musicians to give away broadcast and/or streaming rights, because we’re not doing anything “different”, just playing the same old concert. The sports teams also are not doing anything different, just playing the same old game.
I’m not sure what the figures are, but I’m pretty sure that the recordings and radio broadcasts that we do now are paying us less than a third of what we were getting 42 years ago, when I joined the CSO. We’ve made many, many concessions in regards to this, understanding that it’s in our best interest to be heard.
And all this comes down to the absurdly warped and tangled, middle-man subservient mess we pass off as a copyright untellectual property protection system.
It limits reach of the artist. It restrains flourishment of the art. It prevents “discovery” ofbgreatness. It renders the immortality moot.!And it does these while claiming to reward and enhance all.
Composers who compose for joy, and artists who perform for joy must cut free from talentless, joyless, middle-men and get their seeds sown properly by proper husband men if they want their properly deserved rewards.
I am an intelkectual property attorney. But even I understand that “casting your bread upon the waters” really does pay dividends. Otherwise, you end up paying your bread to lawyers and union flunkies.
The Berlin Phil seems to have figured out comprehensively how to be a 20th century [sic] orchestra; you can subscribe to complete streams of concerts including archived concerts. The BSO seems intent on remaining a 19th. American symphony boards tend to the rich and the stupid. So why wonder that it’s all half-hearted and lame? Second reason: the AFM. An 18th century organization which refuses to evolve into the 21st. I’m a union man and always will be, but the AFM isn’t a union, it’s an insane asylum. Good for Seattle.
your observation and frustration are so on point!
It would seem this applies only to streaming video. The BSO already “streams” their entire concerts from Tanglewood via radio. But that is with the WGBH network (PBS), which, I suppose, pays for the ability to broadcast them (they also broadcast live concerts from Symphony Hall during the season). It would be interesting to find out what the costs of doing so are, and whether that revenue is then shared with musicians. Could something also be arranged for video (or is the market too small for classical music that would entice a station to do so)?