Why I’m writing these posts about SHIFT *a festival featuring orchestras from around the U.S., coproduced in Washington by the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts, with all tickets affordably priced at $25):
Because the festival wasn’t marketed well, wasn’t promoted well. And will come back next year, so a look at its problems could be helpful.
And because the mistakes are instructive. Others can learn from them.
Four lessons:
Think!
Use common sense.
Think really hard about how your marketing will look to your target audience.
Plan your marketing when you plan your programs. Not because you only want to do popular programs, that will sell tickets easily. But because you need to know where you stand, how many tickets the programs you plan are likely to sell. If you don’t like the answer, you can adjust the programs, adjust their marketing, move performances to a smaller space, or — if you can afford this — accept fewer ticket sales.
But at least you’ll know. And you’ll have a chance, long in advance, to set things up as strongly as possible.
In an earlier post, I asked if SHIFT was a success or a failure.
Looking only at the concerts, and leaving aside an assortment of community events, this is what we saw. Four orchestras played. One nearly sold out the more than 2000 seats in the Kennedy Center concert hall. Two filled about half the seats. And the fourth sold way less than half.
That’s not a success, even if half-full houses seem to be the norm in DC these days. But if one concert nearly sold out — and the audience cheered — then there’s hope!
So call SHIFT a work in progress.
One thing that failed
And this, I fear, is a biggie. There was no advance buzz. As far as I can tell, people in the Washington, DC classical music world weren’t excited. They weren’t talking about SHIFT. If you asked them, they’d say they’d go to the concerts. But there didn’t seem to be much interest.
Worse than that, there was, if anything, a kind of anti-buzz — skepticism about the festival, doubts that it would succeed.
The reason for the anti-buzz was very clear. SHIFT was positioned as a continuation of the Spring for Music festival in New York, which brought orchestras from around the country to Carnegie Hall, with all tickets $25.
And which was perceived as a failure.
So why continue the failure in Washington?
More on that next week. About how it was a promotional blunder to link SHIFT — or let it be linked — to Spring for Music. And how that could have been avoided.
But there was another reason SHIFT didn’t get much buzz
And that’s because — quite apart from any Spring for Music link — it wasn’t conceived clearly, and it wasn’t promoted well. Starting with its name, SHIFT.
What does that even mean?
Contrast Nissan’s famous “Shift” ad campaign. I’d see their commercials, and the meaning of shift was always clear. It was used in many ways. Like “Shift the way you move.” I get that. This was a car commercial. Nissan has changed, the commercial implied. Now it has great new cars. So if we drive one, we’ll shift — drive differently, move through life differently.
And then of course there’s a subliminal reference to something we all do when we drive, shifting gears.
But “SHIFT: A festival of orchestras”? What does “shift” tell us there?
Nothing that’s immediately clear.
Deciphering the word
I think I know what “SHIFT” is trying to say. Orchestras have changed. They’re energized, vital, doing new things. They’re alive in their communities.
Or, in other words, they’ve shifted, and we should shift what we think of them.
But how does SHIFT, as the name of a festival, without any further context, tell us that? There’s a thought process going on, but we don’t know what it is. We have to guess on our own.
So of course the festival didn’t generate buzz. We didn’t know what it meant, what it was supposed to accomplish. Or why we should care.
Which would have been easy to fix! Just tell us what’s going on. In direct, lively words we can all understand.
A modest suggestion
For instance — as I said in my earlier post — they could have called the festival “Orchestras Unleashed.”
Let’s not argue over whether that’s a great name. Or whether it described what the SHIFT producers had in mind.
Just consider its virtues (or the virtues of another name like it).
It’s clear. It promises something. Promises something we might like to see. People in the DC classical music world, I think, could have gotten behind it.
Plus, special bonus — it might have helped WPA and the Kennedy Center plan their festival more sharply. Much easier to build on a clear idea than a vague one.
Next, the buzz killer — linking SHIFT to Spring for Music.
Re the SHIFT idea:
Maybe WPA and the Kennedy Center wanted to do the kind of hip marketing Apple is famous for.
But Apple’s ad campaigns are simple, and hit home very strongly. Take what I think is the most famous one, “Think different.” When it launched in 1997, anybody buying a computer knew what it meant. “Be different — buy a Mac! Everyone else has a PC.”
Not that those words ever had to be used. The message didn’t have to be spelled out. And was reinforced by photos of artists, thinkers, and social figures — people like Maria Callas, Einstein, and Gandhi — who really did think different(ly).
There are many great points in here. However, I don’t believe that Spring for Music was an outright failure. I live in NY, and greatly enjoyed those concerts. There was tremendous buzz about them, great press, an important partnership with WQXR that made those concerts accessible to those OUTSIDE of Carnegie Hall or NYC, and huge excitement from the home audience of each orchestra. Most of those concerts sold well, too.
Now, ultimately, the model wasn’t created with finances in mind. That part, perhaps, failed. But, I wouldn’t generalize the entire idea or endeavor as “failed.”
Eric,
I’m glad you enjoyed those concerts!
I had good information from inside the project, and what I heard was that tickets weren’t being bought in any great numbers by New Yorkers. Certainly when I went during one of the later seasons, the presence of people from the orchestra’s home city was palpable. Waving banners with the orchestra’s name on them.
Then I heard more recently from a good source that ticket sales to New Yorkers had picked up. They were never very large, but they did grow.
As a general point, it’s good to have hard numbers to back up any visual impression we form at a concert.
Greg – All good points, though I still don’t believe it was an outright “failure” and for the reasons I outlined, which weren’t about ticket sales directly. It was known that some nights didn’t bring in a local audience. And I heard that as the series continued year over year, the ticket sales from local audiences increased. But, again, I don’t think it was an outright failure because of that. I think the series was created with a number of objectives, and though ticket sales from local audience didn’t always hit, it did deliver on other areas.
Why are you apologizing for the failure? It’s unnecessary. It failed because it promised one thing: a celebration of ” vitality, identity, and extraordinary artistry” but it delivered up the same menu of composers serving the public the same stale aesthetics. In your apologia you proposed that “People in the DC classical music world, I think, could have gotten behind it.” Why should they when only NY hipsters from certain institutions were represented? If you want people in DC or others from the broader classical musical world to get behind this then they be represented in the programming. The narrowing of aesthetics is worrying to me, and the gatekeepers from New Haven CT, Cambridge MA, and Princeton NJ, all who seem to live in Brooklyn NY, need to loosen their grip a little and allow for more diversity. Perhaps choose from outside their small circle of alumni? This might bring in the vitality that is much needed.
There’s definitely what I sometimes call a New York echo chamber. In which there are composers who get heard on the New York new music circuit, and then reviewed by the NY Times and Alex Ross. These reviews are read nationally, and maybe — with no disrespect to the critics — the reviews give the composers national fame. It’s understandable that NY-based critics might not be hearing so much new music from places outside New York.
I’m from New York myself, born and bred, and only after moving away from the city in the late ’80s (to LA) did I come to understand how provincial New York can be, how everything that happens there can be taken to be a national or even world norm.
But on the other hand, the classical new music scene in New York dwarfs anything else in the US, and a lot of what goes on in it is genuinely good and important. Certainly Washington DC, where I live now, has nothing that can remotely come near it.
And some of the NY composers are nationally and internationally active. Take the Knights concert at SHIFT. Music by Lisa Bielawa and Aaron Kernis. I believe that Lisa started her major career in New York, and I know that Aaron lives (or used to live) there. But they get commissions from all over the place, and their music is widely played.
Plus, at SHIFT, there were pieces by three composers on the Boulder program who have no NYC profile at all, as far as I know. The Atlanta concert was only one piece, by Chris Theofanidis, who’s had commissions around the country and to my knowledge has no NY presence. I first knew of him as the winner of the Masterprize competition in London, with a piece that I then heard with the Pittsburgh Symphony. And then I heard a large oratorio he wrote for the Houston Grand Opera.
Mason Bates — who was on one of the SHIFT programs, and is Kennedy Center composer in residence — has a master’s degree from Juilliard (where he took one of my courses). But I don’t believe he has a New York presence as a composer, and may never have had, after his student days. He came to prominence, I think, in San Francisco (just as John Adams did). Then was based in Chicago and now DC.
So, bottom line — yes, there can be a NY echo chamber. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of good new music in NY, NY composers who become nationally or internationally known often deserve their fame. And there are composers from elsewhere who make their mark. I think we should be wary of the echo chamber effect, but maybe there’s no need for such strong language. Looking back at your last few sentences, I’d think that Caroline Shaw would be the perfect example of what you’d like to see. And her career, right now, is unstoppable.