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Classical promoter, cure thyself: A cautionary tale
Music marketing: missed opportunities
Tom Purdom
Everyone agrees that music organizations should build their audiences. The Curtis/Opera Philadelphia production of Owen Wingrave last March left me with a salutary example of a missed opportunity. It provided the season's best illustration of the cultural gap that separates many classical music professionals from the audiences they could reach but don't.
The title character in Benjamin Britten's opera is a young man from a distinguished British military family who becomes a pacifist. Britten himself was a lifelong pacifist, and his opera makes a personal statement about war and military traditions.
This is obviously a subject of intense interest to many people. I attended the opera partly because I'm interested in the way people of various persuasions think about war. I invited a friend who shares Britten's anti-military feelings because I thought she'd be interested in the subject, even though she said she didn't like opera.
Unfortunately, the production made no attempt to accommodate all the people who thought they were going to hear a musical dialogue on one of the greatest conundrums facing our species. The drama on the stage was as unintelligible as a Sanskrit text.
Dozing off
As I've noted a number of times in the past, classical singers confront so many technical challenges that you can't expect them to concentrate on clear pronunciation. Most choral and art song groups understand this problem and furnish the audience with complete texts, even when a piece is sung in English.
Some opera companies understand the problem, too. Leos Janacek's The Makropoulos Affair is a science fiction drama about an immortality treatment, laced with complex discussions about the social and moral effects of immortality. When the Curtis Opera Theatre presented it in 1991, the producers recognized that the audience would have trouble following the discussions. So they provided surtitles, even though the opera was sung in English.
Owen Wingrave, like The Makropoulos Affair, loses much of its interest if you can't follow the dialogue. My guest actually dozed off for several minutes.
Charlton Heston's distraction
I've spoken to other people who aren't regular operagoers, and they all complained about the incomprehensibility of the dialogue. Steve Cohen discussed the matter at some length in his BSR review. (Click here.)
The stage director, Daniel Fish, could have provided surtitles. He had the equipment. Instead, he projected occasional scraps of dialogue, plus a few odd quotes, on a large backdrop at the rear of the stage, that served mostly as distractions from the drama.
(Instead of providing titles that helped us understand the opera, Fish went for a cheap laugh and and flashed one of Charlton Heston's pro-gun statements on the backdrop.
How would you feel if you spent $25 to see an English-language opera about a major social issue and discovered you couldn't understand a word? Would that make you feel like you'd sampled a vital, exciting art form?
Trolling for Quakers
Like it or not, everything in our society has to be marketed. Good marketers grab opportunities to reach out to new audiences. They think about the responses of newcomers and try to remove obstacles that could mar their experience.
Had I been in charge of this production of Owen Wingrave, I would have insisted on the surtitles, no matter how clunky and inartistic they looked to the stage designer. I would have mailed brochures and specially written statements to every Quaker meeting and pacifist organization within 70 miles of Philadelphia.
If I had the time, I might even search the web and send a few e-mail messages to military re-enactors and other military history organizations, under the assumption some of their members are interested in serious reflection on the issues raised by war.
Science fiction link
Contrast this lost opportunity with the marketing effort I observed in 2000 when Prince Music Theater premiered The Hidden Sky, a musical based on a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the modern masters of science fiction. The Prince's marketing director, Bety Keiser, realized that the musical might interest science fiction readers and searched for a connection to Philadelphia's science fiction community.
One of Keiser's musical contacts told her that I write science fiction; after she contacted me, I put her in touch with a key member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. As a consequence, Prince provided reduced-rate tickets, and about 20 members of the society organized a social evening and attended a performance. Most of those people had never stepped inside the Prince before.
Did any of them attend other Prince productions? Did the promotion generate useful word of mouth? Who knows? Betty Keiser thought about the kind of people who might find the musical interesting and lured some of them into her domain. Apply that kind of thinking to every production and some of it will pay off.
The title character in Benjamin Britten's opera is a young man from a distinguished British military family who becomes a pacifist. Britten himself was a lifelong pacifist, and his opera makes a personal statement about war and military traditions.
This is obviously a subject of intense interest to many people. I attended the opera partly because I'm interested in the way people of various persuasions think about war. I invited a friend who shares Britten's anti-military feelings because I thought she'd be interested in the subject, even though she said she didn't like opera.
Unfortunately, the production made no attempt to accommodate all the people who thought they were going to hear a musical dialogue on one of the greatest conundrums facing our species. The drama on the stage was as unintelligible as a Sanskrit text.
Dozing off
As I've noted a number of times in the past, classical singers confront so many technical challenges that you can't expect them to concentrate on clear pronunciation. Most choral and art song groups understand this problem and furnish the audience with complete texts, even when a piece is sung in English.
Some opera companies understand the problem, too. Leos Janacek's The Makropoulos Affair is a science fiction drama about an immortality treatment, laced with complex discussions about the social and moral effects of immortality. When the Curtis Opera Theatre presented it in 1991, the producers recognized that the audience would have trouble following the discussions. So they provided surtitles, even though the opera was sung in English.
Owen Wingrave, like The Makropoulos Affair, loses much of its interest if you can't follow the dialogue. My guest actually dozed off for several minutes.
Charlton Heston's distraction
I've spoken to other people who aren't regular operagoers, and they all complained about the incomprehensibility of the dialogue. Steve Cohen discussed the matter at some length in his BSR review. (Click here.)
The stage director, Daniel Fish, could have provided surtitles. He had the equipment. Instead, he projected occasional scraps of dialogue, plus a few odd quotes, on a large backdrop at the rear of the stage, that served mostly as distractions from the drama.
(Instead of providing titles that helped us understand the opera, Fish went for a cheap laugh and and flashed one of Charlton Heston's pro-gun statements on the backdrop.
How would you feel if you spent $25 to see an English-language opera about a major social issue and discovered you couldn't understand a word? Would that make you feel like you'd sampled a vital, exciting art form?
Trolling for Quakers
Like it or not, everything in our society has to be marketed. Good marketers grab opportunities to reach out to new audiences. They think about the responses of newcomers and try to remove obstacles that could mar their experience.
Had I been in charge of this production of Owen Wingrave, I would have insisted on the surtitles, no matter how clunky and inartistic they looked to the stage designer. I would have mailed brochures and specially written statements to every Quaker meeting and pacifist organization within 70 miles of Philadelphia.
If I had the time, I might even search the web and send a few e-mail messages to military re-enactors and other military history organizations, under the assumption some of their members are interested in serious reflection on the issues raised by war.
Science fiction link
Contrast this lost opportunity with the marketing effort I observed in 2000 when Prince Music Theater premiered The Hidden Sky, a musical based on a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the modern masters of science fiction. The Prince's marketing director, Bety Keiser, realized that the musical might interest science fiction readers and searched for a connection to Philadelphia's science fiction community.
One of Keiser's musical contacts told her that I write science fiction; after she contacted me, I put her in touch with a key member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. As a consequence, Prince provided reduced-rate tickets, and about 20 members of the society organized a social evening and attended a performance. Most of those people had never stepped inside the Prince before.
Did any of them attend other Prince productions? Did the promotion generate useful word of mouth? Who knows? Betty Keiser thought about the kind of people who might find the musical interesting and lured some of them into her domain. Apply that kind of thinking to every production and some of it will pay off.
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