Tracking The Innovators
An article from Helsinki's main daily paper caught my eye yesterday as I was running some online searches for my side job as a news editor at ArtsJournal. The subject was the opening of a couple of new classical music venues in the city, backed by violinist Pekka Kuusisto. Pekka's an old friend of our orchestra - he's soloed with us, and his brother Jaako is the concertmaster of Osmo's "other orchestra," Sinfonia Lahti.
The venue Pekka is helping to start is far from your average recital hall or chamber music space. In fact, it's closer to a rock club, offering serious but casual classical concerts in an intimate space that dispenses with most if not all the conceits of the concert hall. They even (gasp!) use amplification when it seems like it might improve the experience.
This kind of thing is actually happening a lot in Europe these days, and here in America, cellist Matt Haimovitz and others have been playing in rock clubs for years. Most of the concerts are relatively under-the-radar activities (although Haimovitz has become something of a media darling lately,) and word of mouth is still their main marketing device.
But let's face it: in a lot of cities, word of mouth is the only way that anyone in the local music scene, regardless of whether they play Scriabin or ska, gets anyone to their concerts. As media interest in quality music has dwindled, artists have learned to get creative in marketing themselves directly to their fans, and classical music is only just starting to wake up to the possibilities of viral video, social networking sites, and other newfangled methods of getting your product out there in the marketplace.
For years now, fans and purveyors of orchestral and chamber music have been bitching and moaning about the lack of exposure we get in the corporate media, the lack of popular interest in our product unless it's dumbed down to the point of cringe-inducing absurdity, and what some perceive as a general slow demise of our genre. But what musicians like Haimovitz, Kuusisto, and many many others have begun to grasp is that when you're no longer beholden to the mass culture, you're free to experiment, to seek out the niche audience that will likely fit you better than the teeming horde of Conventional Taste ever would.
As Sarah is fond of saying, "if you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less..."
The venue Pekka is helping to start is far from your average recital hall or chamber music space. In fact, it's closer to a rock club, offering serious but casual classical concerts in an intimate space that dispenses with most if not all the conceits of the concert hall. They even (gasp!) use amplification when it seems like it might improve the experience.
This kind of thing is actually happening a lot in Europe these days, and here in America, cellist Matt Haimovitz and others have been playing in rock clubs for years. Most of the concerts are relatively under-the-radar activities (although Haimovitz has become something of a media darling lately,) and word of mouth is still their main marketing device.
But let's face it: in a lot of cities, word of mouth is the only way that anyone in the local music scene, regardless of whether they play Scriabin or ska, gets anyone to their concerts. As media interest in quality music has dwindled, artists have learned to get creative in marketing themselves directly to their fans, and classical music is only just starting to wake up to the possibilities of viral video, social networking sites, and other newfangled methods of getting your product out there in the marketplace.
For years now, fans and purveyors of orchestral and chamber music have been bitching and moaning about the lack of exposure we get in the corporate media, the lack of popular interest in our product unless it's dumbed down to the point of cringe-inducing absurdity, and what some perceive as a general slow demise of our genre. But what musicians like Haimovitz, Kuusisto, and many many others have begun to grasp is that when you're no longer beholden to the mass culture, you're free to experiment, to seek out the niche audience that will likely fit you better than the teeming horde of Conventional Taste ever would.
As Sarah is fond of saying, "if you don't like change, you'll like irrelevance even less..."
Labels: contemporary culture, state of the art
posted by Sam at
10:14 PM
1 Comments:
Just an additional shout out for Matt Haimovitz, I enjoyed his concert here with the Minnesota Sinfonia a couple weeks ago . . . and the piece written by his wife
impressed me, too.
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