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Audience Experience

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Travelling from here:

Looking at every touch point an audience member has (from social media, buying a ticket, to arriving at the hall and leaving), classical music presenters are becoming aware that the audience experience is just as important as artistic quality and excellence.

 

                                                                                                           arriving here:

Organizations are shifting their attention to audience members’ experience, asking, “How can we improve or enhance audience experience to provide a deeper interaction with or perspective on the art?” This question is difficult to answer because an organization must examine touch points with the patron in every department: ticketing, marketing, education, fundraising, concert production, etc. In large organizations where departments are separate from one another, tackling audience experience requires a holistic perspective.

The Political Power of Music

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The Political Power of Music

“The Noise of Time” by Julian Barnes is a novel about the life of Dimitri Shostakovich.

When I was reading it I was interested to be reminded how composers were used by Stalin and the Communist Party in an attempt to control the direction of new music. Stalin applied the notion of “socialist realism” to classical music, which demanded that mediums of art convey the struggle and triumph of the proletariat.

Musicians who hoped to gain financial support from the party were obligated to join the Union of Soviet Composers, a division of the Ministry of Culture. New works were then expected to be presented to the Union of Soviet Composers for approval prior to publication and that is how the Party hoped to control the direction of new music.

It is fascinating that in the 20th century the power of new music was considered to be so great as to be a threat if it was not controlled by the Party.

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Sir John Manduell dies at 89

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Sir John Manduell CBE 1928 – 2017

There was a time when the name of John Manduell would simply have been impossible to escape were you a musician or composer connected to the British music scene. The catalogue of John’s positions of leadership in major musical institutions is unparallelled and the legacy of his influence will continue to be felt and recognised long after his passing.

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Managing Your Concert

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Concert Concerns?

“How do I find and book the venue, promote the concert, print the event material, pay the musicians and still raise funds for the charity I want to support with my concert?”

This was the basic content of a telephone conversation we had recently with a musician who was taking advantage of our free half hour consultation.

The musician concerned had sorted out the important elements which was the repertoire and the performers but just did not have the time or mental space to cope with doing anything else and the concert is only a few weeks away.

We helped take the pressure out of the situation as well as ensuring the concert has the best opportunity of not only covering its costs but providing a good amount of profit for the very worthy cause it is supporting. We are supplying them with our knowledge and expertise by creating a plan that they will now put into action for themselves. This includes advice on collaborating with the charity and the venue by asking the right questions and working through a checklist of relevant items, as well as a ‘critical path’ which details what action to take when. Our service also includes one to one follow up over the phone to be a sounding board and support, with the aim of helping them to create the maximum amount of publicity and income with the least amount of stress.

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70th Anniversary of partition and the unifying call of music

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THE CAST FROM PROM 55

Marking the 70th anniversary of partition and independence on the Indian subcontinent by celebrating three contrasting traditions: Hindustani music of North India, South India’s melody-driven Carnatic music and the mesmeric Sufi music of Pakistan.

 
I have been saddened, as I have been reading and watching programmes about Indian Independence, by the realisation of how little I have been aware of the devastating effects of partition on that country.

As a clarinettist, I have been involved in performances with North Indian Musicians and enjoyed the company of musicians, dancers and narrators both through playing music with them and enjoying their hospitality. Anyone involved with Indian musicians will appreciate their generosity of spirit. Sharing chai, food and music, often in that order, is an integral part of creating music together.

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Contemporary composers: pretentious and tuneless

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A recent poll carried out by YouGov for the Symphony Hall Birmingham revealed that over 80% of those asked are of the opinion that classical music must change or wither.
Among views collected was this observation that the music of contemporary composers does less than nothing to draw in new concert-goers.
OK, so since when was a pile of bricks, or half a cow in formaldehyde or an unmade bed not unpretentious and out of tune with Joe public?

How about contemporary theatre – that can be shocking or incomprehensible; and who hasn’t described contemporary dance as angular or inelegant.

What is the purpose of contemporary art and the role of contemporary artists if it is not to refect, challenge and celebrate contemporary life?
Or, do the arts exist only to entertain, provide distraction and blot out the real world?

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Let’s hear it for classical music!

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Clapping between movements – good, bad or great?

Listening to Prom (the greatest classical music festival in the world) performances this year, it’s noticeable that audiences are clapping between movements. And why not?

Here are some thoughts.

If you have ever been to an opera in Italy, you will have experienced the adjudication of the performance by the audience at the end of every aria – appreciation or derision!

Under the leadership of Roger Wright, the Proms have evolved to provide not only world class performers but also to explore as many musical connections as possible so that new and different audiences have been drawn in.

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Mirga takes the helm at CBSO

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Maestro or conductor – diva or person – commander or sharer

I tuned in part way through a Radio 4 broadcast this morning, featuring the new conductor of the CBSO Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. A member of the orchestra who was speaking was saying how refreshing it was to speak with a conductor who was not always talking about themselves or their career and interests. Mirga is actually interested in the wellbeing of each person in the orchestra, he said and is far more likely to be discussing what you are doing or how you are feeling than anything else.

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Sheeran takes solo performance to new levels

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The thrilling, vibrant talent of the solo artist

There are very few solo artists who can totally captivate an audience for one and a half hours in front of a capacity house and that is what Ed Sheeran did at Glastonbury in June. I was fascinated to see the final part of Glastonbury on BBC 2 for which Ed Sheeran was the headline solo act on the Pyramid stage. This is an artist who is used to holding the attention of capacity audiences of 90,000 at Wembley Stadium for a sell-out run on several nights!

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Classical Legends Awarded Blue Plaques

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Classical legends Sir Neville Marriner and Kathleen Ferrier were amongst the 47 iconic musicians to be honoured with a Blue Plaque in celebration of BBC Music Day.

All 40 BBC Local Radio stations and Asian Network in England teamed up with the British Plaque Trust to find local legends who deserved to be better recognised in their local area. Suggestions poured in from the public and today, BBC Music Day, the full list of new plaques was revealed.

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More Work for less Money

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More concerts, larger audiences, wider outreach and a 5% drop in income – sound familiar?!

This was in a report commissioned by the Association of British Orchestras showing that orchestras in 2016 “delivered more than 4,000 concerts and reached almost 5 million attendees and 900,000 children and young people amidst a 5% drop in total income”.

Orchestras are succeeding in achieving larger audiences and engaging with more young people but it all has a cost which has to be balanced with an 11% drop in funding from local authorities, discounted ticketing, free concerts and fixed fee performances.

Read the report: The State of Britain’s Orchestras in 2016.

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Music is the DIY profession

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Ours is a do it yourself profession.

Many professional musicians today try to be experts in everything. Not just their “art” whether that is composing or performing or a combination of both but also in marketing, promotion, website design, videos, photography, concert administration, accountancy.

Everywhere we look we are bombarded by “10 things you must do” which will ensure instant success, and it is always a quick fix. But is it?

We were visiting our local picture framer in Norfolk recently and really I do him a disservice to call him a picture framer. We first came across him when we bought a work by a wonderful artist, Rachel Lockwood, who lives on the Norfolk coast and has all her framing done by this particular framer.

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Autism and the power of music

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Why am I blogging about autism?

I’m prompted by the manager of an artist who has recorded a song about his nephew who has Asberger’s Syndrome. The artist is Errol Sammut and the song, Burton’s Song is being used to raise awareness about autism via a number of charities and notably The Marigold Foundation.

You can listen to Burton’s Song here.

Go to The Marigold Foundation facebook page.

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Yellow Lounge Live

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Yellow Lounge hits high note for young audiences

I was reading an article in BBC Music Magazine about classical performers increasingly thinking beyond the traditional concert halls in order for classical music to be heard by new audiences.

This thinking is not particularly new of course as musicians have always had to be inventive about how they present and market their music to audiences and has certainly been the case for the 40 years of my professional career.

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Closed for music

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Visiting my local woodwind instrument repair shop I was saddened to hear that they will be closing in the summer. This I am told is caused by fewer children learning traditional instruments alongside the decline in instrument provision in schools.

Where instrument learning is provided by the school the parents are usually expected to foot the bill and for many this makes having lessons prohibitive. Government funding over the past three years has been declining and music is fast becoming the preserve of those people who can afford it.

This is combined with the problem that it is frequently no longer considered fashionable for children to learn instruments such as the french horn, bassoon and tuba.

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Opinions divided on David Bowie Prom

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Ever since the oversight of Roger Wright, the Proms Festival has pushed its boundaries and widened its horizons.

David Pickard’s crossover programme taking Bowie’s repertoire and giving it new treatments by Anna Calvi, John Cale, Marc Almond, Laura Mvula and Elf Kid, sought to pay homage but has attracted widely and wildly diverse reactions and polarised opinion.

Here’s a sample, which just goes to show, you can’t please all of the people all of the time!

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T.S.Eliot at Kings Lynn Festival

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Guy Johnston, Niamh Cusack and Rowan Williams illuminate T.S. Eliot

The Festival season is upon us! The summer months bring out the banners and bandstands, bowties and batons. Although, it is fair to say that the fervour for music within the British Isles usually means there is something going on somewhere the length and breadth of the year.

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Proms 2016 Panoply – where are the women composers this year?

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The announcement of the 2016 BBC Proms season brought forth a panoply of comment and observation. Here are a few choice entries, editorials and utterances to get your interest piqued.

David Pickard is the new Proms Director and as incoming incumbent he largely inherits what has already been prepared and put into place by outgoing Proms Director, Roger Wright, and perhaps more significantly Interim Proms Director, Edward Blakeman.

 

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Farewell to Max

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I have known Max for years – well, about 35 years, and, albeit through intermittent contact, that is still time enough to absorb a sense of the man, the musician, the communicator.

Too often styled as an ‘enfant terrible’ of the contemporary classical music world, his compositions are, to a large extent, far from the ‘difficult’ that commentators loved carelessly and lazily to use in pejorative description or parlance of avoidance, when in truth it was rather too difficult for them to take the time and trouble of better acquaintance.

Max was ever his own person – outwardly mild and congenial, inwardly robust, opinionated, fearless and frank.

A recent interview about his 10th symphony (think how many composers never got past number 9!) had him putting his work as a composer in the ‘upper end of civilised society’. Who dares, these days, from the world of contemporary music, to make such a claim?! Good on you, Max.

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