Last week, in my Juilliard course on the future of classical music, one of my students asked about art and commerce.
Where do they fit in classical music’s future? What roles will they play?
Questions like that often come up in my work. They’re often asked — though not, I think, by this student — with some suspicion. Art is good, commerce is bad. Art is pure, commerce is, well;, commercial.
Or, as another student said in this week’s clas
s, often things that aren’t so good succeed because they’re marketed.
Which of course is true. Though it’s also true that wonderful music can just as often go nowhere — meaning that hardly anyone hears it — because it’s not marketed well.
The circle
Taking this question seriously, as it deserves to be taken, I said we could picture art and commerce as a circle. Art on the top, commerce below.
You start with art. You’ve got wonderful music you want to make.
But no one knows about it! Nobody knows who you are. How do you get people to hear what you do, to come to your performances? How can your art make some income for you, so you can start to make a living from it?
Enter commerce
That’s where commerce comes in. That’s where you (of someone working with you) needs business skills. That’s how you generate interest in your work. If you’re giving performances, that’s how you sell tickets. That’s how you generate income. So that, cross your fingers, someday you can make a living from music.
But now we go back to the top of the circle. Let’s say you’ve got great business skills. You’re getting known. People are paying attention.
So now your art has to be good! You can’t let people down. Entice them to hear what you do, then disappoint them.
If they’re disappointed, they’ll come once, but never again. And maybe they’ll take about you, tell others that you do bad work.
Back to art
And so now — now that you’ve got an audience — you work even harder on your art. Keeping it good. Making it better.
And then back down to commerce. While your art stays strong, your commerce has to stay strong, too, You want your fans to keep coming back. You want new fans. So it’s commerce again. You can’t slack off.
And now, again…
…back up to art. You’ve got new ideas. You want to do new kinds of music. Or you want to expand. Do more performances. Perform in more cities. Collaborate with other musicians, with people in other arts.
You want to do things that you’ve never done.
So back down to commerce!
Now, even more, you need business chops. To do more things — do new things, bigger things — means doing more business work. Selling more tickets, raising more money.
Which is especially true if you move into new areas, do things you’re not known for. You’re a performer, but now you compose. Your string quartet gives concerts, but now you want to do multimedia.
You’ll need to attract new attention. Get your fans to try your new stuff. Find new fans, people who might like the new things, even if what you did before didn’t interest them.
And your new projects might be expensive. Another reason for working harder on business.
Around and around
And that’s how it works. Art needs commerce, commerce feeds art. You keep them both going, to keep your music alive.
Great post Greg. I think about this a lot since before I quit my DSO position. Sadly, the label entrepreneur is very misleading: REAL entrepreneurs attempt to multiply money for their investors, usually agreeing to sell the business after 5 years, ideally for millions. An enterprising musician can indeed acquire new skills, fundraising among them, but they can hardly promise a financial return with artistic products and services… unless those products and services effectively fill something that has been sorely missing in the larger market: something so HELL YEAH, that seemingly millions of people might become “addicted” to it and ever need to repurchase it. It would have to be replicable by others, protected by copyright or patent, and scalable across the country: perhaps as a franchise or sorts. Even in that unlikely case, it is very unlikely that the original artist, sorry, INVENTOR would walk away from something they worked so hard to build.
Consequently, CutTime® has the potential to build such a franchise; one that employs classical musicians for “a commercial classical” that anyone can use anywhere and anytime. It’s natural to hear laughter at this point, which is one sign that we’re on the right track. Since I’m already later in life, I’ll be ready to walk away from it in 5-10 years. The point is, there are plenty of needs to be met by classical music when your students are willing and able to hold the many paradoxes of classical music and commercialism in a progressive balance. Learning about systems theory (Fritjof Capra) can be very helpful in this regard.
Very interesting, Rick. Wonderful way to take what I said to places I hadn’t thought of!
I’ll confess to having very modest thoughts about how far my suggestions might take anyone. I thought mainly of making a success of some musical endeavor, but probably not on profit-making terms. Just how you get it off the ground, and how you sustain it. The promotion and marketing of something might not be too different in the for-profit and not for profit realms. But of course the financing is quite different! I maybe wasn’t clear about what I meant by business and commerce. These were, in my mind, the sum total of everything you do outside your art to stay afloat. So even if this isn’t a conventional use of the word, I meant “commerce” to include nonprofit fundraising. Should have been clear about that!
Everything you said is really good, whatever you took my meaning to be. So useful to think along the lines you suggested.
When you come to believe in your own press you come to this ……….
What if “your own press” happens to be right? Backed up by decades of data even?
We all subscribe to some form of artistic propaganda… Some of us even create it.
Then we fight it out and history decides. That’s evolution at work.
But one-liners that don’t even advance a counter argument can hardly bend the arc of history. You’ve posted several times now, and we have an idea what you DON’T like, but what do YOU believe in? What does YOUR version of artistic propaganda say? What call to action will YOU advance? Or do you like things the way they are?
Ariel believes in trolling. Period.
I think the suspicion of marketing and appealing to audiences is the root of all our problems. Lack of respect for the audience is THE problem. No wonder they think we’re stuffy snobs. We kind of are.
So true! Good branding begins as bold improv… Then you fine tune after feedback.
But classical purists have been on a crazy mission to BREAK that feedback loop for decades!
And why? So they can elevate themselves ALONE to the cognoscenti, that’s why! That explains how they can look around the half-filled concert hall and feel GOOD about it… Proves their rare intellect in this day of (insert stuff old people hate here).
My only quibble is that you shouldn’t lump yourself in with the snobs (“we”). Hearing you hype the crowd live while absolutely KILLING IT both rhythmically AND structurally… WOW! Literally tears of joy as I listened (www.gogosymphony.com).
Wow Classytroll, thanks for the compliment! Even sweeter coming from someone whose comments I truly admire. 🙂
THREE STEP EMANCIPATION: 1) Balance Sheet; 2) Income Statement; 3) Interest.
The “circle of art and commerce” merry go round is exhausting… Having lived it “successfully” for about 10 years, I can say it is like walking a tightrope between skyscrapers… Sometimes in a hurricane… But it CAN be done.
Still, we should recognize (as Mr. Cut Time notes), that real venture capitalists take huge risks expecting huge returns (and it goes without saying that you’re signing away your baby to them). Entrepreneurship in the arts means something different… And although chasing corporate sponsorships has its own dark arts playbook, when targeting individuals and foundations at least, it boils down to begging.
I didn’t see it that way at first. At 22 when I landed my first whale (a self-made Ayn Randian industrialist whose name was already chiseled into the local concert hall’s granite in BIG FONT), I was sure I’d found my personal Mad King Ludwig… My new Wagnerian “Total Art” was sure to follow. And it did… In several big venues even…
But I forgot how hard Wagner had to beg to make it work. I forgot that, despite not really being a pianist, he had to play for every stupid dinner party at Ludwig’s ridiculous fairy tale castles. That it would still take 20 years to properly craft his masterpiece even with nearly infinite funding. And that his soul would be fully corrupted by the dark side in the end.
I also willfully ignored, at age 22, that you might have trouble navigating your own path if you’ve harpooned a whale from a rowboat. That you could be dragged wherever the whale wants to go… Including down to the depths. So how can an “entrepreneurial” artist protect themselves while engaging in the necessary evil of dancing with the dark side?
THREE ESSENTIALS: 1) Balance Sheet; 2) Income Statement; 3) Interest.
If you are willing to walk the windy tightrope, the interaction of your personal and/or organizational balance sheet with your income statement defines EXACTLY how much time you have to get to the other side (and how big a wind gust you could withstand). We never teach this in conservatories, but it is just as important as scales and arpeggios.
Now, if like me, you are no longer willing to walk that tightrope, you must understand interest. Everyone you might go begging to HAS figured this out. It is the simple mathematical trick that every rich person uses to stay rich. Many of our conservatories and foundations were launched by trust funders whose ONLY accomplishment was mastering interest. This allowed them to hold court sitting on the throne of their family’s pile of money… Potentially in perpetuity.
As long as their pet projects only skimmed off interest, the pile would remain to keep generating more interest. And most of our industry IS somebody’s pet project. I think we’d do ourselves a big favor by admitting that. We are NOT the hardcore entrepreneurs that go on Shark Tank hoping to sell their baby to the highest bidder. And we shouldn’t be.
We are something more than that. Or at least we used to be… For a thousand years, reverb chambers 300 years in the making were erected to glorify OUR work. For a thousand years, WE were the bait that lured the masses into the stone monuments that bound together most of western culture. No Ayn Randian capitalist could ever compare.
So how might we recapture our former glory?
It starts with understanding EXACTLY what you are getting into when you dance with the dark side. Capitalism, which has largely replaced religion, is essentially mathematical social engineering… And you must understand the math part. If you can’t glance over ten years of income statements and balance sheets while interpolating the underlying data trends on the fly, you are just as helpless as a wannabe orchestral violinist who can’t sight read. It is THAT critical.
If we taught capitalism in conservatories, we’d at least be prepping our kids to speak the language of their funders. But we might, rarely, accomplish much more. Every now and then, a few might figure out how to play the same rigged game that our “funder class” mastered long ago. A few might preserve the integrity of their souls while playing said game. And a few might achieve a lifetime of artistic independence, with the ability to provide their own seed funds to worthy projects.
Imagine if Leopold had taught Amadeus THAT! Arguably our greatest genius… Dead at 35 for lack of health care… And then dumped in a pauper’s grave… SHAMEFUL! And have we made any real progress since then?
With great delight I’m picturing empowered conservatory students who can get a step ahead of their funders. And, no small thing, speak their funders’ language, so they know how to make their projects enticing to fund.
We’d also cut out a lot of bullshit if this happened. When you’re teaching “entrepreneurship” (especially in the nonentrepreneurial form in which it’s often taught, where you learn how to write press releases and grant applications) you can still think you’re a very pure artist.
But if you were taught to be a capitalist — ooooo! Ugly! Not artistic!
Except that now you’d have a shot at something big.