As a footnote to my posts on classical music publicists, and how they could do better, here's a post I did in 2005 -- wow, 11 years ago! -- about how to make press releases better. My examples may seem fanciful, but on the other hand, they're almost all based on things musicians told me, about music they'd performed. Musicians, I might add, ranging from my Juilliard students to some household names in classical music. What I did, in these imaginary press releases, was to highlight what the musicians said was going on in their performance, and … [Read more...]
The future of classical music
Here's a quick outline of what I think the future of classical music will be. Watch the blog for frequent updates! I Classical music is in trouble, and there are well-known reasons why. We have an aging audience, falling ticket sales, and — in part because our audience is shrinking — persistent financial woes. And behind the numbers lies a deeper problem. Classical music has grown distant from our wider culture. We don’t connect well with the world. Most of the music we play is from the past, while the people around us are connecting with … [Read more...]
Timeline of the crisis
Here — to end my posts on the dates of the classical music crisis — is a detailed crisis timeline. The information in it comes from many sources, including published reports, blog comments by people who saw the crisis develop in their professional work, and my own experience. Nobody should think this timeline is anything but tentative. It's just a beginning of the timeline we could eventually construct, with more data and more reports from people in the middle of it all. And this timeline, tentative as it is, has some obvious weaknesses. … [Read more...]
Before the crisis
Yes, the classical music crisis, which some don't believe in, and others think has been going on forever. This is the third post in a series. In the first, I asked, innocently enough, how long the classical music crisis (which is so widely talked about) has been going on. Answers poured in, here and on Facebook and Twitter. The answers — as I said in the second post — suggested that we don't know how to talk about our crisis, because we don't have enough information. Compared, as I've said before, with data that's widely available about other … [Read more...]
Four keys to the future
Here, as promised, are the key things we need to do, if we're going to give classical music a future. When I wrote this, I was thinking of people who present classical performances. But I think it applies to all of us — for instance, to people who write about classical music, for whom the last point might be rejiggered as "write vividly." But enough introduction. Here's my manifesto: We’re in a new era. To adapt to it, and build a new audience, here are four things you should do: Understand and respect the culture outside classical … [Read more...]
Age of the audience
Conventional wisdom: the classical music audience has always been the age it is now. Here's evidence that it used to be much younger. … [Read more...]