Back in June, I wrote about how the Metropolitan Opera snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in the marketing of Satyagraha–how when classical music organizations employ the right kind of marketing (or any marketing at all) they see much better ticket sales than they are accustomed to. This year the Nashville Symphony is further reinforcing that point with their new marketing strategy for their season, which seeks especially to improve single ticket sales to younger audience members and other audiences they haven’t been effectively reaching in the past.
Hi everybody. Just a quick reminder that the deadline for score submissions for consideration in the upcoming Sequenza21 concert is fast approaching. All submissions must be postmarked by July 16th. Here‘s a link to the original posting of the guidelines and its comments thread. To submit scores, get David Salvage’s e-mail address from the masthead and send him a message. He’ll give you a mailing address and answer any questions.
As a quick reminder, the performances will be on December 4th at the Walz Astoria Cafe in Queens and on the 5th at the Good Shepherd Church in Manhattan. This concert is a collaborative effort with our friends the fabulous Lost Dog New Music Ensemble.
Ben Rosen, former Board Member of the Met, has a fascinating post at his blog about the Met’s turnaround under the leadership of Peter Gelb. (Thanks to Alex Ross for pointing it out.) The whole essay is worth reading if you have any interest in the future of the classical music business or in the fortunes of the Met, but I want to highlight one passage in particular, concerning the marketing of Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha.” Apparently, prior to Gelb’s arrival the Met had no marketing team–marketing wasn’t seen as necessary with the number of sold-out performances they were playing. But in 2002, after years of steadily running at around 92% box office capacity, box office collapsed to 82% and began a steady decline to 77% in 2006. Rosen says that in the 90s the Met was selling out most nights, but in 2006 they sold out only 10% of performances.
As the 2007-08 season began, here’s what happened: Seven performances of Satyagraha was scheduled for the spring of 2008. Many subscribers who found Satyagraha included in their series decided to opt out of the Glass opera — they traded in their seats for other operas. And single-ticker buyers turned out to be equally cool to the prospect of watching a Sanskrit work. Normally, as a season progresses, single-ticket sales start out filling up the house. But a funny thing happened in this case. The forecasted box office of Satyagraha started declining, and at an alarming rate. The more time that passed, the worse the box office ahead looked. If this continued, there was a chance the opera would play to near-empty houses.
So a marketing task force was put together. For a modest budget, aided by contributions from a board member, the team was able to create dozens of different marketing initiatives designed to attract specialized audiences. New-age magazines yoga groups, anti-apartheid organizations, India groups, South African organizations, et al.
It worked. By the end of its run, Satyagraha had sold out its run. (By the way, it was a terrific production. I like to quip that Satyagraha is now my favorite Sanskrit opera.) Next year, the same team will have an opportunity to apply its narrow-focus marketing techniques to selling the John Adams opera, Doctor Atomic — a contemporary work about the creation of the atomic bomb.
Classical music organizations often fear that contemporary music scares away subscribers, and in this case it was true. The solution, usually, is either to program less new music or to essentially subsidise the new music performances with revenue (ticket sales and fundraising) from other more “audience-friendly” performances. But in this case all that was needed was an intelligent marketing campaign. Too few organizations do any real marketing efforts, and many of the ones that do focus on existing audiences. Note that the advertising strategy for Satyagraha wasn’t to push the opera harder to the existing audience base or to try to find an existing base of new-music fans–they targeted their advertising to people interested in the themes of the opera. Note also that the advertising matched a specific program with specific groups of people rather than trying to sell the organization or classical music in general to specific groups or to a general audience, or worrying about selling the specific program to a general audience. We don’t think of new age magazines or anti-apartheid groups as full of classical music lovers or potential classical music converts, and so we don’t advertise to them, but it turns out that when the program has direct relevance to their affinity advertising pays off handsomely. We shouldn’t be surprised–this is how modern marketing works–and yet I see very little of it in classical music.
My secondary point is that the success of the Satyagraha marketing campaign illustrates an important feature of industry trends. The subscription model of ticket sales is failing, and the main reason is simply that people have many options for entertainment and prefer to diversify. Attempts to salvage the subscription model may show short-term success (in fact, Met subscriptions are back up do to the fact that subscribers get first dibs on shows that are likely to sell out) but are doomed to failure over the long term. The solution, however, isn’t to appeal to the mythical “general audience,” it’s to use modern marketing strategies to pitch specific events to specific populations. I look forward to seeing how the marketing stratgy for “Doctor Atomic” plays out.
Check this out. (Be patient, it doesn’t really get good until 1:10)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ[/youtube]
This is a remix of Radiohead’s song “Nude” from their recent album “In Rainbows.” Radiohead held a remix contest, selling the individual tracks of the song on iTunes, and this was one of the results. Here’s the instrumentation, as listed by remixer James Houston on the YouTube description:
Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
HP Scanjet 3c – Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array – Act as a collection of bad speakers – Vocals & FX
And as you can see in the video, these aren’t samples he manipulated, they’re the actual hardware hacked together to play the music live. I’m reminded of the early days of electroacoustic music when the composers were coaxing music out of supercomputers and telephone equipment. Houston is a 21 year old recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art in the UK. As of right now this video has gotten 152,952 views.
[Update 6-12-08: fixed video embed. Current view count: 161,629]
I was at the Matrix Music Collaborators’ season finale concert on May 5th, and while the whole concert was good the highlight was the last piece on the program: “Girltalk” by young South African composer Braam du Toit. It’s a lush, gorgeous, and sometimes surprising postminimalist meditation/groove which manages to be still and restrained while simultaneously pregnant with occasionally relieved dramatic tension. It was one of the best new pieces I’ve heard in months.
The piece was composed for two pianos, two string quartets, and bass—the pianists were South African duo pianists Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna (friends of du Toit’s from music school), and the string section was headed up by Matrix violinist Yuri Namkung and consisted of other South African players and local friends of Matrix. Musically, it’s constructed out of a series of five movements related through similar motifs and harmonic moves, with much of the harmony coming out of pop progressions. And then, in the very last moments of the piece, it gives away the game and briefly quotes Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” I asked Braam (via e-mail, as unfortunately he was unable to be at the concert) how that quote related to the rest of the piece, and he explained that the earlier material is designed to be similar to the Lauper tune without ever being a direct quote. He describes the whole piece as theatrical and filmic, and says that it’s also a character study of pianists Laura and Cara. He talks about how when they were in school together he used to stand outside the door of their practice room and listening to both their verbal and musical communication, and that he used that as an inspiration for the structure of this piece, with its motif trading and sense of play.
Having heard “Girltalk,” I wanted to know more about the composer. Born in 1981, Braam grew up in Swellendam, near Cape Town, South Africa. He studied composition with Peter Klatzow at the University of Cape Town, and in 2001 he won the Priaulx Ranier Award for composition. He has worked extensively in theater, writing music for more than 20 theater, dance, and film projects. He cites John Tavener, Hildegard von Bingen, Michael Nyman, Meredith Monk, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, and Steve Martland among his main influences.
Braam doesn’t have a website, but he was kind enough to send me some MP3s of his other work. It’s all good, although “Girltalk” is the masterpiece among the pieces I’ve heard. All of the work he sent me was short—no movement longer than three and a half minues, and most pieces are slow, lush, and atmospheric. Their miniature-like nature put me in mind of William Duckworth’s “Time Curve Preludes.” His dramatic intensity tends to come not from fast and aggressive music but rather from changes in dynamics that bring out a dark edge from material that started out as merely melancholy and meditative. In the second movement of his piece “Tripsongs” (for string quartet, I believe), for example, a violin cycles through a simple fourteen note cell, and gradually the other instruments enter cycling through a swelling chord progression. About two thirds of the way through, the cello starts grinding out the bass line and the mood shifts, becoming almost menacing. But then almost as soon as it began, the intensity subsides and the piece is over. These same structural elements were apparent in “Girltalk” as well; most of the movements could have gone on longer, but Braam errs on the side of restraint. And with so many composers writing long, self-indulgent pieces that run good ideas into the ground, it’s refreshing to be left wanting more.
Speaking of wanting more, as I mentioned Braam has no website to which I can direct you. He will, however, be writing a new piece for next year’s Matrix Music Collaborators season. I’m looking forward to it.
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and David Lang won the music prize for “The Little Match Girl Passion.” I haven’t heard the piece, but David is a reliably excellent composer–one of my favorite performances of the past year was ICE’s performance of his piece “Men” at the end of the Bang On a Can Marathon. Runners up were “Meanwhile” by Stephen Hartke and “Concerto for Viola” by Roberto Sierra.
Unfortunately, the winner in the Feature Writing category was Gene Weingarten’s piece “Pearls Before Breakfast.” You’ll recall that this was the experiment with Joshua Bell playing in the DC Metro. I shamelessly and self-servinlgy refer you back to my own analysis “Why the Joshua Bell Experiment Tells Us Nothing.”
I went to two excellent concerts recently which served as great illustrations of what happens when a composer really understands what the instruments he or she is writing for are capable of. The first was a concert by cello/percussion duo Odd Appetite at Symphony Space in New York on March 12. Percussionist Nathan Davis and cellist Ha-Yang Kim are both composers, and they usually play some of their own music on the Odd Appetite concerts. Both embody the composer-performer aesthetic, although to a certain extent I am imposing that terminology on them–last summer when I asked Ha-Yang how she would describe herself she replied simply “I’m a musician” saying that she doesn’t see her composing and performing as distinct activities. In both cases, because they know their instruments so well they can write music which covers the full range of the instruments capabilites–“extended technique” begins to lose its meaning. In fact, for many composers I find that extended technique can feel forced, as if it is being used for the sake of having used it, but in this case the “extended” technique is treated as merely part of the standard repertoire of available sound. Because they work so colaboratively, they understand eachothers’ instruments almost as well as their own. The result is a music which often seems to be not so much about some abstract conception of music but about the instruments themselves. The whole concert was excellent, but the final piece was Ha-Yang’s “Samtak” which is absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous.
Then this past week I attended a concert by the International Contemporary Ensembe (ICE) on April 2nd at The Tank in downtown Manhattan. This concert was all music by Nathan Davis, and again revealed Nathan’s deep understanding of the capabilites of the instruments. He made a point of telling the audience that he hadn’t simply written music for the instruments but had worked closely with the players who would be performing the pieces in order to learn about both the instruments and the capabilities of the musicians playing them. This strategy especially paid off in the haunting final piece “The Bright and Hollow Sky” for flute, clarinet, trumpet, guitar, and percussion. The title is taken from a line in Iggy Pop’s song “The Passenger,” and Nathan told me that he felt that the line captured the feel of the piece, which seemed to him related to the Iggy Pop song, and that he simply loved the combination of those three words. I’m not sure I see the connection that he was talking about, but the ensemble of treble instruments mixing the “bright” of the trumpet and the guitar with the “hollow” of the clarinet and the flute worked for me anyway.
With both of these musicians, I am reminded of composer-performer Evan Ziporyn (they’ve all played together) whose extended-technique-laden clarinet album was entitled “This is Not a Clarinet.” In the same way, in Nathan’s and Ha-Yang’s hands the percussion battery and the cello are not merely percussion and cello.
Remember how you bought a bunch of Yahoo! stock at $13 per share when they went public in April of 1996, and how by January of 2000 those shares peaked at $475 per share, making you fabulously wealthy, which is why you now have so much time to spend reading our humble little website? Wait, you didn’t do that? Yeah, me neither. It’s hard to get in on the ground floor of a good thing, which is part of why I’m excited to have lucked into discovering the Matrix Music Collaborators. In truth, I went to their March 1st concert at the Tenri institute more out of professional obligation than anything else, but what I found there was a dynamite group of young musicians who are muscling their way into the New York music scene with surprising speed. The March 1st concert was the first of a three concert mini-series, and I also went to the third concert, on March 6th at the Nabi Gallery. Here’s what I found.
I’m a bit late in reviewing this, but two Saturdays ago, February 23, the Lost Dog New Music ensemble performed at Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square in Manhattan. Lost Dog isn’t yet a very well-known group, but if this concert was any indication they may be on their way to indispensable. The group is the contemporary chamber music wing of the Astoria Music Society, which was founded in 2003 and which also includes a composers collective called Random Access Music, a jazz series called Astoria Jazz Nights, and the Astoria Symphony. (I saw the Symphony in an excellent performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah last year.) Lost Dog has been around since 1995, but was rolled into AMS when the society was founded. Astoria, for those who dont know, is a neighborhood in Queens, New York, just over the Triborough Bridge from Manhattan, and on the N R and W subway lines. As artists got priced out of places like Downtown Manhattan, and DUMBO and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, many moved to Astoria, and in recent years has become one of the several rapidly gentrifying artsy communities in the Five Boroughs.
Saturday’s concert was, as I mentioned, not in Astoria but in Manhattan, and it was quite well attended for a contemporary music concert. The opening work was a piece by Lost Dog’s Artistic Director Garth Edwin Sunderland called Dark Heaven Angel. Composed for scordatura cello, tuned according to the harmonic series, the piece constructed a wide variety of sonorities out of different parts of the harmonic series. As in something like The Well Tuned Piano, much of the music seemed to exist in a contradictory world where the harmonies were simultaneously dissonant and harmonious, jarring and resonant. Part way through, car horns could be heard a few blocks away, and in almost any other circumstance they would have been an unwelcome intrusion, but somehow the timbre of the horns fit with the cello sounds, and actually enhanced my experience of the piece. Cellist Eric Jacobsen, it should be noted, is not a regular Lost Dog member, but he was spectacular in both this piece and as a featured performer in the next as well.
The featured work was Peter Maxwell Davies’s Vesalii Icones, a 14 movement work for chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, viola, and cello) and dancer. Davies drew his inspiration from a series of 16th century anatomical drawings by Andreas Wessels, or Vesalius in Latin. Vesalius used to perform human dissection during his lectures, and he was so celebrated that the government would time executions to coincide with them. The drawings themselves are, to modern sensibilities, quite bizarre—-rather than being clinical and impersonal, the dissected figures strike balletic poses, and are depicted with country landscapes in the background. Davies chose images and paired them with the Stations of the Cross, which the dancer interprets. It was an ambitious piece to write, and ambitious to perform. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a Peter Maxwell Davies fan, and I was not particularly impressed with the choreography, but, my own tastes notwithstanding, the piece is actually very good, and had some moments that even I found quite wonderful—-some of them funny and some beautiful. And I should say that other people seemed to like the choreography, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about. What I do know, however, is that the performances—-both the dancing and the music-—were outstanding. Silas Huff, who also conducts the Astoria Symphony, lead the ensemble ably, and at one point cavorted with the cellist and with dancer Dora Arreola, reenacting the famous Abu Ghraib photos during the “The Mocking of Christ.”
In short, most people probably haven’t ever heard of Lost Dog before, but this talented group of musicians clearly has a lot to offer, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next.
Check out this video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology, apparently leaked from the Scientology organization (they got it pulled from YouTube, but copies are kicking around the internet). The ideological content is pretty wierd, and it’s Tom Cruise, which make it interesting enough. But check out the Minimalist use of the “Mission Impossible” theme as underscoring. (more…)