“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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Just a few seconds before 11am on Wednesday 11 November 2015, I was descending the steps into Kings Cross Underground Station in London when a voice came over the tannoy asking that we join with the staff of London Underground in 2 minutes silence to honour those people who had been killed in two world wars and more recent hostilities.
10th November saw An Evening of New Music curated by young composers Jay Richardson and Alex Woolf, under the aegis of Young Composers’ Network*. Jay is reading Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge and Alex is in his final year at St John’s College, Cambridge. Both already have impressive CVs which include performances with national orchestras and broadcasts on national radio.
Well, I’m still sharpening pencils and today I have managed to tie up a lot of loose ends which would otherwise niggle away while I am trying to get down to the heart of the matter. I actually managed to create the Finale file where the Impulse Edition of the new work will be published – that is a statement of intent! Tomorrow evening I’m going to lead a ‘Summer Sing’ with the choir who are commissioning the work – the Islington Choral Society. This is a great idea, (which could only be put into action by those completely passionate about their singing), whereby, those unfortunate souls left behind while others prance about en vacances, gather together under the batons of guest conductors to explore some new repertoire. This is particularly good from my point of view as it gives me a chance to get acquainted with the musicians for whom I am writing and their ways of working. I also get to hear something of their strengths and weaknesses, abhorrences and passions, too! I’m going to work with them on breathing, articulating, listening and feeling (well that will all get done in 30 minutes, won’t it!!) and then lay on them a little gem of a choral piece by Grieg which I heard performed a couple of months back by the choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor – entirely captivating. It is Grieg’s setting of Ave Maris Stella, edited by my good mate, John Rutter.
Now I absolutely cannot write today without referring to an experience about which I feel intensely passionate – last night’s Prom concert. Anybody out there hear it? A chunky programme full of promise with Brahms, Elgar and Strauss (Richard) on offer. The band was the RPO, but I cannot believe what was done to them in rehearsal to produce such extraordinarily inappropriate interpretations. The playing was fine and heartfelt but to my ears, completely off the interpretative radar: Brahms, whimsical and over-sweetly full of vibrato and this was the St Anthony Variations for goodness sake – variations on a theme by Haydn. I hoped for better in the Enigma Variations, but the performance was so precious and placed and saccharine, I could barely listen; as well as the tempi being up the shoot – Nimrod was so slow I thought he’d fallen asleep – so much for the mighty hunter. Regrettably, so much of this had stuck in the craw to the extent that I couldn’t hang in there to listen to the Strauss Oboe Concerto – my loss I fear. I’ll make myself feel better by giving you a link to all the oboe music we have on tutti.
Sorry to moan, but really, Brahms and Elgar are Saxons, not Siamese (no offence to anyone oriental intended!) I’ll let you know how I get on with the Islington bunch, but not ’til Wednesday.
Well, to be honest, I would never have thought I would put that as a title for my blog! but the good old BBC has followed up its Beethoven abd Bach extravaganzas with the Tchaikovsky experience. I got invited to an evening at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in London to hear the wonderful BBC Singers perform a programme of unaccompanied sacred choral music by Tchaik. Well, actually it was a Tchaik sandwich with Stravinsky for the filling – a rather extraordinary but not unappealing juxtaposition. The cathedral is an unremarkable building but has a more than remarkable impact – it makes you want to be quiet. (I remember experiencing that in the Kremlin on entering the church with the Rubalov icons floor to ceiling – that actually just silenced you without and within!) The BBC Singers did a magnificent job although their very beautiful balance didn’t always give that flavour of the basses underpinning not only the music, but the whole wide world! Nonetheless, it was profound – not a word one can use easily these days. I rushed back to tutti to see what Tchaikovsky offerings we have. In sheet music there is some interesting stuff, especially for trumpet, and as for CDs, one rather special recording of Tchaikovsky works for piano duet, including Romeo and Juliet transcribed by Nadezhda Purgold (wife of Rimsky-Korsakov). How’s that for original, but then you wouldn’t expect anything else from tutti. Incidentally there is a new year’s sale at tutti at the moment with 20% off everything. Yes, I said a SALE.
Duh! Where did all that time go? I know the essence of blogging is that it is regular and continuous in order to keep a thread of ideas and information but in the oh so busy world of a freelance composer and musical entrepreneur gee is that a challenge! Anyway, I’m back after an interval of – I dare hardly admit to it – 2 months. BUT, a fantastic amount of passionate stuff has taken place in that time. First there was the British Composer Awards. I have been spearheading these Awards on behalf of the British Academy of Composer & Songwriters for four years now and they have had a tremendous impact on the classical composing community here in the UK. The Awards give recognition to composers in just about every area of contemporary composition and because we are partnered by BBC Radio 3, there are all sorts of added benefits such as a broadcast festival of the nominated works and performances by the excellent BBC ensembles – Symphony Orchetra, Concert Orchestra, Singers. It’s a really great celebration! After that it was the much lower profile but just as passionately important matter of the church carol service – a chorus of 40 and an orchestra of 20. Well, when I say orchestra, that includes penny whistle and three trumpets, but it’s another great jamboree. I think the orchestra was saved this year by the tutti programmer, Olly, who led with his violin! And now we have turned 2007, there is a whole new year of passionate music matters starting to happen. I have the first of three commissions to start work on and from the end of the week, we will be running a new year sale on tutti with 20% off EVERYTHING! So check that out. In a couple of weeks there will also be clarinet tips on tutti, written by our resident expert and tutti team member Geraldine. Definitely not to be missed – so, I’ll keep you posted! That’s a promise!
