“Welcome,” says the Philadelphia Orchestra, “to a season of incomparable reach and breadth.” That’s in a press release they emailed, announcing what they’re doing next season.
So, really…incomparable? So good that it can’t be compared to any past Philadelphia season? Can’t be compared to any season at any orchestra, ever?
They can’t seriously mean that. Especially when they go on to outline what’s going to happen in 2018-19, and most of it is mundane, things every big orchestra does.
And then the main text of the press release ends this way: “A Philadelphia Orchestra season explores the power of live music.”
Quite a comedown from incomparable!
They don’t mean a word of it
Really they don’t. If the season really were incomparable…well, they’d have artists and programming that truly would be that.
And if they really were exploring the power of live music, they’d do it in some evocative, even systematic way. Play various kinds of music, to compare the power of each kind live. Play music in different venues, in different ways.
But they’re not doing that. They’re just giving concerts, as they always do.
So the words they’re using don’t touch on reality. They’re just words. Words chosen, I guess, to make the season seem special.
There’s a simple word for this: dishonesty. But I don’t think anyone was really dishonest here. Dishonesty would mean they knew their season wasn’t incomparable — really knew it, said it to each other — and then called it incomparable anyway.
But I don’t think they did that. I hope this doesn’t sound harsh, but I don’t think they considered reality at all. Just (as I said) looked for exciting words. Did they stop even for a moment to ask if the words reflected anything real? Or if, at least in a better world, the words ought to do that?
Aiming higher
This is disappointing. I’ve often told my Juilliard students something basic about writing. That you have to look at the literal meaning of the words you use, and ask yourself if that literal meaning is really what you want to convey.
I think the Philly marketing staff failed this test. Though I’d like to think they could do better. That they could ask what an honest description of their season would be, and then try to write that. I wish they’d try that exercise. I think it would make them feel good, both as individuals, and as part of the team that runs their institution.
But that they didn’t do this isn’t really their fault. It’s a problem throughout the classical music field. We don’t know how to describe what we do. We may not, in any deep sense, understand what we do, know what its meaning is, know why it matters, know why anyone else should care. The Philly marketing copy, in the end, reflects this larger problem. A problem we ought to fix.
One remedy
I’d love to help . Would any orchestra like to do a workshop with me? We’d start by talking in the simplest, most heartfelt way about why everyone involved really loves the orchestra, and the music it plays.
You could call that visioning. What’s their vision of the orchestra, as it functions right now? What’s their vision of what it could be?
Ideally we’d involve staff, board, musicians, and even people from the audience. Once we had some genuine ideas, genuine feelings, love for the orchestra coming honestly and authentically, straight from the heart, and described in simple, direct language — well, then we could start finding ways to tell all that to the outside world.
In essence, this would be a branding workshop, of a kind I’ve done with individual consulting clients, and each year with my Juilliard students. But the heart of it would be new. Not simply making up a brand, but letting one emerge from the deepest vision of why the orchestra exists. .
Orchestras, in my experience, don’t do this. But they should! If they did, everything the orchestra did — marketing, programming, governance, fundraising, maybe even playing — would be elevated to a new level. There’s nothing like deep honesty to make things go right. And the exhilaration everyone would feel, the deep sense of rightness they’d have — that would be precious in itself.
Mundane programming: You can read the Philadelphia release for yourself, and decide if you see much that’s special.
For me, two things stand out. The semistaged performance of Candide, which is a nice touch in a Bernstein anniversary year. I don’t know if anyone else is doing it. (Though whether that makes it incomparable is another story. Orchestras do many semistaged performances of operas and musicals.)
Maybe also a collaboration with the Barnes Foundation stands out, billed as “examining the relationship between two titans of art in Philadelphia, Albert Barnes and Leopold Stokowski.” But that, by itself, hardly makes the season incomparable.
I don’t think they considered reality at all. Just (as I said) looked for exciting words.
I suspect you’re right. What’s puzzling to me is why they would think their words are exciting instead of overused and tiresome.
I know you’re probably not looking for work, and I’m sure you don’t work for free, but I wish someone of your abilities would send them – would send a lot of arts organizations, actually – a rewrite just to wake them up and make them reconsider.
Ken, I’ve done this at times. A lot of people have liked what I’ve rewritten. But I almost never get a bite from the people I’ve rewritten, or others like them.
When I’ve dealt with these organizations, sometimes on this very subject, I’ve found that a desire to make changes doesn’t mean that the changes will be easy. Changing the approach requires, first, staff or outside publicists and marketers who know how to do it. Those people are rare, and might be expensive.
And then the organization has to be ready for the new approach. Which inevitably changes the tone that the group projects. Which the group may not want to do, even when they know the tone they do project isn’t working.
Finally, maybe the Philadelphia Orchestra is selling enough tickets to satisfy its needs. So for them, their approach works, whatever I might say about it. Whether they could sell a lot more tickets — or do better in the future that’s certainly coming, when the present audience is gone — is a question they may not consider.
Greg–really interesting piece. You throw in the line “Ideally we’d involve staff, board, musicians, and even people from the audience.’ Maybe the real problem with programing is that not enough of “even people from the audience” are involved. Everyone knows that most critics have heard enough and only push new music, but what do “even people from the audience” want to hear and what are they willing to pay for to sustain the orchestra.
On Broadway, plays take years of tinkering and refinement before performed to an audience and even then they rely on the audience to tell others to go see the play.
Books are reviewed but not sold unless the audience tells others to buy and read the book. Yet music is premiered and audience is forced to pay for it without any advanced word of mouth that it is worth listening to.
A very good point! I think the audience should be involved long before the premiere. Have the chance to get to know the composer and her work. Learn about the piece as its being written.
But I doh’t think audience approval is necessary before the piece is launched. It’s true that films are tested with an audience (potential blockbusters, anyway), and that similar pre-marketing (so to speak) is done in other areas. But there are plenty of plays, paintings, books, films released that nobody expects a wide audience to like. And that’s what art requires. The freedom to challenge an audience.
But in those cases, the things a big audience doesn’t like have a smaller audience of their own. The problem in classical music is that we don’t think of that. We launch major pieces the audience probably won’t like, full in the face of the mass audience. Because that audience is in many ways captive. The new piece isn’t the only thing on the program. The audience comes to hear other things, and has to sit through the new work whether they like it or not. THe new work almost always being programmed before the intermission, so no one will leave in order to avoid it.
This lead to the crazy spectacle, in past decades, of huge Elliot Carter pieces being thrown in the face of audiences that hated them. What’s the point of that? Would anyone force people who came to see the latest Star Wars film to also watch something that usually plays in an art house? Crazy!
Obviously we need a balance. And the whole subject has to be thrashed out far more thoroughly than it has been up to now.
Many arts organizations these days strive for diversity, and some of them even have friends who happen to be black. I hope you will get ahold of some of those people.
A good subject for discussion, Jim. Thanks for bringing it up. And it’s a big subject. It’s one I’ve dealt with, both publicly and privately. I’ve also seen some of the steps orchestras and other classical music institutions have tried to take, to become more diverse. It was very discouraging, a few years ago, to be at a League of American Orchestra conference whose main subject was diversity, and attend a panel discussion in which 50 or 60 orchestra people concluded that their job was to “start the discussion.” Internally, that is. To start talking about what to do. Not to actually do anything, at least not yet.
Then there’s a lot of talk about putting diverse people on the orchestra’s staff, on its board. Maybe also among its musicians, but that can be hard to do, since auditions for jobs in the orchestra are conducted blind, that is without (allegedly) anyone knowing who’s playing, when they make judgments about how well candidates for the orchestra play their instruments. That makes it hard to decide that, among the many qualified candidates, you’ll want to find people who’ll make the orchestra more diverse.
But what orchestras and other classical music institutions tend to miss is the simplest thing — that it’s not how many slots on your staff or board you fill with people not like those who are there now. It’s what your relationship is with diverse communities. To build a relationship with an African-American community in your city — wow. What would that require? What would the relationship be like? And, very important, how would it change the orchestra? That’s a direction I don’t see many people in classical music going in. Not yet, anyway.
I’m probably the Phillies’ biggest fan (I don’t mean the baseball team). But I’m a fan of the orchestra itself, not their marketing department, who, I agree with you, belong in the basket of deplorables, with the marketers of most orchestras, I guess.
Where do they get these people? I suppose they pick up the rejects from advertising schools. I wonder how they compare with marketers for other arts organizations: art museums, theater companies, dance companies, etc. I see some rather attractive campaigns now and then from those organizations. But since I try to ignore advertising in general, I’m not an expert on the subject.
To be fair, there’s more to orchestra marketing than writing press release copy. Which in fact is done by the orchestra’s publicity staff, most likely. Even though the email I blogged about was signed by the head of marketing.
But orchestra marketing people rather crucially mine audience data to find out who in the existing audience might go more often. Then they try to make that happen. That’s just one of the data-driven things marketing departments can do. Some are very good at it.
But talking about the value of what the orchestra does, why anyone should care — as I said, I think the whole classical music field is bad at that!
Thanks for a great post, Greg. I do worry, though, about gathering all of those insiders together to discuss how to communicate what they’re passionate about. Nobody cares what a bunch of out-of-touch arts insiders are passionate about.
Customers care about their own passions. The only way to speak to them is to know them well and understand what they want. As long as these orchestras refuse to fully engage with persuadable new customers and learn about their needs and desires, they’ll continue churning out this meaningless, self-indulgent drivel.
I agree with Stephen above who suggests that “even people from the audience” might be a better place to start.
I agree. And I’ve often said these organizations should know a lot more about the culture outside classical music, and the people who share that culture. (Aka their future audience.)
But along with knowing who they’re talking to, these orchestras need to know themselves. They won’t succeed in persuading others unless what they’re saying comes from their hearts.
When you hear orchestra members talk personally about why they are excited by their work and how much they care about impacting the lives of the people who hear them play, they are often quite eloquent and persuasive.
For example, members who form quartets or other small ensembles and go around to schools to play for the kids and converse with them.
Perhaps the “marketing experts” and other higher-ups should just shut up and let the players speak for themselves.
I so much agree. There’s nothing like personal testimony. When someone tells us, from their heart, why they love something, we’re likely to pay attention.
Often the challenge, though, is eliciting that why. I’ve seen attempts in that direction where the testimony boils down to “I love it because I love it”. There’s no doubt as to the sincerity of enthusiasm and affection, often that’s palpable, but for whatever reason, the person isn’t really able to put it into words.
Yes! to your other comment. For this one — people need leadership in these discussions. I’ve led quite a few, with my students and with consulting clients. People can easily go deeper, and cone out with really personal, striking things to say. And it’s gratifying for them, at least in my experience.
Tanglewood is presenting a fully-staged Candide this summer: https://www.bso.org/Performance/Detail/93204
This:
«I’ve often told my Juilliard students something basic about writing. That you have to look at the literal meaning of the words you use, and ask yourself if that literal meaning is really what you want to convey.»
And it’s doubly the case for words/phrases that might be currently in vogue. Like “kicking off”…
I have heard the artistic director of a ballet company (admittedly in unscripted speech) say that the season was “kicking off with Les Sylphides”, possibly the most serenely floating and least “kicking” ballet I can think of.
And critics (less excusable because in considered writing and in a specialist arts publication) saying that the Tristan Prelude “kicked off with some lovely burnished string tone” or that “the ethereal third
movement of the Pines of Rome kicked off with an impressionist piano solo”.
I’m convinced that people simply do not “listen” to what they write about classical music, let alone attempt to visualise their metaphors.
Reach and Breadth are basic grant-writing key words used on the early 2000 by a great number of American orchestras to describe their education and community programs when just about every proposal used the terminology ad nauseam to public and private foundations.
Strange way to describe a season indeed.
In Britain I think the marketing is even worse, as we have class based intellectual snobbery to deal with. And while marketing departments appear to want to make their ensembles/orchestras popular they contend to make them exclusive and exoteric.
I cannot understand why instruments decades old are not used in classical music. I would love to write for electric violin but I don’t know one good violinist who owns one. The electric guitarists and bass guitarists who play classical music invariably have flat, characterless guitar sounds. I don’t know any good classical keyboard players who are interested in synthesisers or electric pianos. Fortunately I have worked with a scratch DJ a few times. And when these instruments are occasionally used it is invariably in free improv or playing from graph scores.
Why isn’t there a classical concert with these instruments? It makes me think of the upper class balls in London. The attendees look like any other young person if they are walking down the street or going out but as soon as the formal ball comes along they look like middle-aged frumps from Victorian England.
The same with classical music: the composers listen to pop music, R&B, dance music etc. and then write for the same ensembles that have been around since the 18th century. I am convinced orchestras have had their day – and to think Monteverdi used every instrument available at the time.
Great food for thought Greg: we need to be asking the right questions and re-examining everything we in the field do and write. But to be fair, I’d assume the orchestra (each orchestra) is marketing to the people who already come (which of course is part of OUR point, not theirs), and that by ‘incomparable’, they mean “not comparable to other orchestras or even entertainments IN THE AREA.” Philly Orch doesn’t really compete with Cleveland Orch for subscribers. (Does it compete for subscribers with NY Phil? Not really.)
Keeping in mind these institutions remain highly risk-averse, we can see they are cornered by the need to maintain the status quo and ‘preserve the tradition’ like a museum, rather than be adaptive, to keep (in part) major donations and sponsorships flowing in and sell enough subscriptions. It would be easier to start a NEW orchestra with the kind of adaptive, “off the pedestal”, audience-centric symphony concerts you and I dream about. Fortunately, there are several such orchestras that have started. Naturally, they have a corresponding number of other challenges, such as budget and being truly ‘incomparable’ to a Philly Orch season.
If only the 1993 ASOL report, ‘Americanizing the American Orchestra’ was not shot down, perhaps our major orchestras would have slowly built alternative audiences for concerts that might truly matter to much broader communities. It certainly inspired me to launch my CutTime® ensembles, music and methods. Instead, we’re stuck with endless research leading to incremental (safe) changes meant to acculturate a some millennials to ‘art-centric’ concerts. We should’ve done better by now.
Good thoughts as usual, Rick. Good to see you here. I admire (I really mean this) your sympathy for the marketers. Which I’d guess comes in part from your long history with the Detroit Symphony. And your well-developed understanding of how big orchestras operate.
I can see your point about what “incomparable” might mean in that context. Not sure I’m convinced, though. Not sure these marketers would have stopped to think much about why they used the word. Justifying it in the way you suggested.
My own guess, trying to be sympathetic, would be that they’re working from an assumption — which their subscribers would share — that classical music is something exalted and special, which takes people to a better place. There are studies that show orchestra subscribers thinking that about the concerts they go to.
So, if that’s your mindset, then you might look for words that make the experience sound inspiring. Incomparable might be one of them. Id still think it’s not a word with much meaning here. And not much use with a new audience, I’d think.
That ASOL study — so glad you mentioned it! Buried so quickly after it was published on 1993, because the chief NY Times classical music critic found it appalling. While now we can look back at it, and see that nothing it calls for seems surprising in our time. Everybody’s doing what the study called for!
Yes; who knows what they meant by “incomparable”? Can’t be compared — with what? My guess is that they just mean “excellent” or “top-notch” or “you’ll have the time of your life!” It’s like the ad agency for Cadillac saying “incomparable” about that make, when in fact Cadillacs can of course be compared with dozens of other makes.