I am sick and tired of hearing that marketing is to blame when subscriptions fall. We need to be honest with ourselves, if someone is already in a seat in our hall, then if they don’t come back it’s not because of the paper thickness of the season brochure! For whatever reason we are not engaging them by what we are doing or not doing on stage. We can’t blame snow or parking either, if we meet someone we are really into, even if they live on Everest, we will find a way to get there! Free valet parking on a clear warm day wont make them come if they are just not into us! One of our strategies here is to turn passive listeners into active participants in the programming process.
We decided to turn audience requests from being a gimmick into being a policy……..
Many orchestras will ask the audience to fill out surveys asking for favorite repertoire, this not a new idea. Some orchestras will even bill one concert in a season as “audience request night”. It makes me wonder, if it is listed that way in the brochure, does it mean that for the rest of the season, the music is not what they want to hear.?..and now for the music you didn’t ask for! One executive director shared with me that request night is their best attended concert every season, jokingly wishing there was a way to have request night for every concert. Well there is a way, no joke!
When request forms were given to the audience here at my first performance as music director in 2004, I told them that the new policy to prove to them that we really will listen, is to make sure that on EVERY Classics concert (starting the following season) there would be at least one popular choice from the surveys on the program, EVERY season. This still gives us the opportunity to program more adventurous, contemporary or lesser known works. We had enough requests to fill countless seasons and in the following two in the season brochure we would asterisk the works that were audience choices. People will stop me in the street to thank us for programming a Symphony or Overture they chose! The fact is, I would have probably programmed many of the works anyway as there were not many surprises; lots of Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Mahler, Gershwin etc…. The point is that the audience is now actively involved in the process, and someone is more likely to bring a friend along if a work “they” chose is on the program. I believe this is one of many reasons our sales have gone up significantly and our renewal rate is 97%. This is my 4th season and we just did another survey which will kick in for the 09/10 season our 75th. The response was even bigger this time!
Recently I took this idea one step further on the spur of the moment. I was on our NPR station KSMU 91.1FM lending a hand for their pledge drive. During the season they give us a whole hour the week of each concert in a show I co-host called Symphony in the Ozarks. They also broadcast the concert. We want to help them so that they can continue to help us and to benefit the community also. For the drive we were giving away a ticket package for a $150 pledge and to be honest we only got a couple of pledges that first hour. I gave my pledge of that amount and gave away my ticket package to the next person to call in with the same pledge, meaning that they got two packages. That worked but then in the last few minutes I was determined to hit their goal for the hour so this is what I came up with:
Our audience request surveys had every Beethoven Symphony listed numerous times. For next season I was going to program either Symphony No.1, 4, 6 or 8. So I offered for the next person who pledged $150 the choice of which one of those we would play.
Within 5 seconds a lady called with her pledge and requested No. 8. I have no problem with that, it hasn’t been played here in years and oh by the way, she is bringing all of her friends too!
Next time: Increase sales by selling tickets to those who have already bought them….
I am very excited to welcome Frank Almond and his new column non divisi, he is a great friend and collaborator!
This brings up an interesting question that maybe you and Bill can address in future entries.
I was always under the impression that some arcane formula went into determining what pieces would be performed at a concert. Something that considered balancing all sorts of factors with barometric pressure and the grazing patterns of sheep thrown in for good measure.
So the question is, how do you decide what is going to be performed?
Does including audience favorites make the job of programming tougher? Do you build a concert around a suggestion or do you look at which suggestion will fit best with what you have planned?
I am guessing there is a chance that some suggestions will never be performed if they fall too far outside your general philosophy. How do you tell people this without alienating them?
I agree that marketing can’t substitute for a good presentation on stage, and that it can’t bring in people who don’t give a damn about what we do in the concert hall, but I do think that it is a very important factor in getting people in the door in the first place. If they have a bad experience once they get there, that’s the fault of the performers/programmers, I would say. But if they came expecting one thing, and got another? That falls right in the marketing camp.
Why people don’t go to concerts, in no particular order:
1. Anything that can be rehearsed and performed in three days isn’t worth hearing (one of the decent draws where I am from is the school of music at the local university). The kids play at a high level and there is a sense of accomplishment that occurs in each performance (in spite of the fact that the conductor really sucks [which the kids don’t know])
2. Acoustics of performing spaces also sight lines of performing spaces
3. Cheap alternatives,cds, itunes, dvds, stereo systems
4. Enjoying classical music used to be a sign of erudition and sophistication. Now there are connoisseurs of rock , country, jazz, pop etc. Does anyone remember when the music section of Time magazine only considered classical music? (hint it was before 1968).
5. All the performances sound the same. The ones that try to sound different only sound kinky.
7. The playing is generally out of tune even in “great” orchestras. Good intonation results in sonority. Listen to Stokowski and you’ll understand.
8. the soloists/conductors all look like perverts, there is no gravitas. Also why do the mean have to wear tails and the women in the orchestra look like the moonlight at a hostess bar?
9. no one knows the difference between good and bad, standing ovations at every performance are boring
10. they killed the singing tone. A singing tone in the strings means portamento. Haven’t heard any of the recently and given the state of modern string technique I probably don’t want to hear any.
11. serialism: what a fatuous dead end.
12. Shostakovich, Mahler and Bruckner. May be exciting once but thereafter ponderous navel-gazing.
13. Too much period performance. Its okay to play Haydn and Mozart with 10 violins or more.
14. Almost nothing to do with the orchestra and arts management but what is “good” any more? If everything is relative then why is classical music even relevant? The culture is dead so how can their be any product of the culture?
1. Most repertoire can be played on three day’s work because the level of the average orchestra has gone up quite a bit since the early 20th century. Does that make Ein Heldenleben un-programmable? What about Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra?
2. No argument from me on this one.
3. ditto.
4. Well, erudition and sophistication are hardly considered virtues in the country anymore…
5. I don’t agree – orchestras sound more similar these days (though there’s more variety than you might think, in spite of cross-pollination and recordings).
7. Can’t agree with you here – I’ve heard plenty of out of tune playing from great orchestras of the past in their recordings. The bloom of the sound has more to do with the overall approach to the sound than just intonation. In Philadelphia, they have had a special approach to string playing for decades, and much of this had to do not only with Stokowski and Ormandy, but the particular principals who have served during that time – not only as players but as teachers at Curtis. Also the notoriously dry acoustic of the Academy of Music necessitated a very bravura approach to tone production from the strings in order to give some warmth to the sound.
8. I’m sorry, but this is just rude. I agree that there are some soloists in particular who could dress up a bit more, but I’ve yet to see a conductor who didn’t dress the part – and can you tell a pervert just by looking at someone? As for orchestral dress, I feel that the tails for men is an instantly identifying uniform and that it’s a great look. You haven’t been to a bar in a while if you think that’s what they’re wearing there now!
9. yes – too many ovations, not enough booing. I’d love it if we played a crappy new piece and people booed it – at least you’d know that they cared!
10. Portamento has been in and out of fashion for as long as there have been stringed instruments. In the time of Brahms, Joachim played with very exaggerated portamenti. In the time of Mozart it was not in fashion at all. Now we’re tending back to a “cleaner” approach to most music (though Mahler does indicate when/where he wants it in his scores). It also varies by orchestra – Philly still slides like crazy. I personally like it, but don’t think it makes people stay away from concerts.
11. Maybe so, but we got some good pieces out of it – Berg Violin Concerto, Three Pieces op. 6, Wozzeck, Lulu; Schoenberg Variations for Orchestra, Five Pieces for Orchestra, etc.
12. What utter crap! Our consistently biggest audiences come for these pieces, and there are some brilliant interpreters on the scene these days, making for some great concert-going.
13. I cannot agree. That’s like suggesting that we paint over the Last Supper with acrylic paint so we can see it better. Variety is good – why not hear a Mozart symphony the way he intended it to be heard, not the way some 19th century impresario wanted it to sound?
14. People were arguing over the merits of Beethoven’s works in his time – some would have been happy to have never heard them again. “Good” comes from years of consideration by the public and artists, not from snap judgments.
5. I actually think you agree with me.
7. Some people say that folks in the past played out of tune but we have redefined intonation so that it seems so to our numbed ears. There is an excellent little book at on tuning. The author studied Joachim’s intonation in his unaccompanied Bach. Seems that people think that it is out of tune but the instruments show that it was perfectly in tune in “just” intonation. But, yes ideed, there has always been out of tune playing. Listen to the Orchestra of the Suisse Romande in the 1940s. Ouch. But today we have “out-of-tune” on purpose. There is no sonority in most equally tempered chords. People can’t put their finger on it but if they can hear it once they” know it forever. Isn’t it interesting that a cappella vocal performance is so popular? I think part of it is sonority.
8. Can’t tell a pervert by looking but I can tell what looks like a pervert by looking.
10. Haydn notated portamento’s by notating successive use of the ame finger for widely separated notes.
11. 5 good pieces isn’t much for all that has been inflicted on us.
12. Masturbation keeps a lot of people occupied and interested but it isn’t intimacy. The three stooges can’t take people past bathos.
13. Mozart loved his performances in Paris with large orchestras. Handel loved his performances of Messiah with massed strings and big choruses. Christopher Hogwood did a period recording of Haydn’s Creation with an orchestra that was bigger than the chorus and as large as modern string sections. It can and should be done. This isn’t acrylics. Its more like scraping the soot off of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is vivid and bright — if the orchestra can do it.
14. I argue that if people try to dig deeply into art and they don’t find at least a trace of God they have missed the point. The true artist may be uncoscious (or probably “subconscious”) of God but all true art shows his trace. But f one denies God then one denies good. Kurt Cobain becomes as worthy as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Why bother with Mozart then? My point here is probably too subtle to argue further about.
I didn’t respond to no 1. I don’t think you can make such an assertion about an increase in orchestra quality. Listen to Fredrick Stock conducting the CSO and tell me if you think that today’s CSO is better. I don’t think so. Not on any dimension that counts for ensemble playing. The modern Philadelphia under Eschenbach is better than Stokowski’s Philadelphia? Not without a Tabiteau or a Kincaid and 90 other superstars.