How To Generate Interest: Be Interesting

The fallout from the Boston/Rozhdestvensky debacle last week is continuing, in the press and the blogosphere, at least, and Boston Globe critic Jeremy Eichler advanced the conversation in what I thought was an interesting way in Sunday's paper:

The incident also shed light on a deeper problem of the orchestra condescending to a potential audience. If the BSO had the artistic vision to bring Rozhdestvensky to its stage, it should have had the marketing courage to stand behind its reasons for doing so.

Now, if I'm running the Boston Symphony, I have an easy rebuttal to that: artistic courage is all well and good, but are we really serving the public if we intentionally market ourselves in a manner that we know from past experience will either confuse people or put them off the music we're offering? How can we introduce people to an extraordinary conductor if they're not in the concert hall to begin with, and why should they come if our advertising implies that they're morons for not already having heard of one of the performers, especially if there's another performer on the program who they do know?

But Eichler fleshes out his argument in compelling fashion...

The plight of classical music in a free-market economy has never been an easy one, especially in this country... Yet the ace in the pocket of orchestras and performing arts groups is that they are selling an experience that is simply not interchangeable with anything else. But it is easy for that message to get lost as marketing strategies increasingly come to mimic the techniques of the entertainment industry at large. Is there really no other way?

Well, there might be. And I like Eichler's focus on the singular experience of live music in a great concert hall as the product we ought really to be promoting, rather than semi-famous guest conductors and soloists. All of this, of course, goes back to a problem we've discussed here in the past: programs that marketers believe will sell poorly if marketed honestly (regardless of their artistic merit) are increasingly being sold to the public as something other than what they are. (Exhibit A would be that Mahler 8/Schubert Unfinished incident from last spring that upset a number of you Mahler fans. It happened again this fall with Sarah's subscription concert debut, when a program of Lutoslawski and Shchedrin concertos for orchestra was advertised as "Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante," which was clearly not the centerpiece of the evening, and wasn't the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante most music fans would have assumed it was, in any case.)

Eichler sums it all up better than I could:

When the BSO chooses to present innovative programs, that approach should be trumpeted, not seen as a reason for apology... Ultimately, the easiest way to market classical music is to have something genuinely exciting to sell.