Tag: social media

Speak Now: Turning Around, Turning Away, and Turning Over

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Kristin Kuster - Articles, Speak Now

“…when love stirs
it asks for nothing—but a world made safe
for truth, for beauty, for this tense blooming.”
— from Megan Levad’s “Volta”

We were generously gifted a bottle of Dom Perignon. My husband Bill and I saved it for something special and chilled it on November 8, to share with our friend Matt as we watched the election results roll in. Some time before midnight that night I posted a picture on social media with Matt holding out his hands as if to say “WHAT IS HAPPENING” and Bill giving our TV a middle finger. Our fancy champagne remains unopened, still waiting for something special.

I will turn 44 in June 2017.

And, I am worried.

In the last month, I’ve been turning around and looking back at some of my earliest social media posts to check in with my past worry levels. What an odd trip—a living memory lane sky-written on the internet, where we can watch ourselves stirring and seeking public feedback, placation, or applause, for the images and versions of ourselves we project online.

As a mom, composer, professor, and professional fun-haver, I reflect on the years before the prevalence of social media with some regret: I spent a significant amount of time torqued up and spazzing and saying not-nice things and cultivating a bubble of snark and worry around my being. I can also hear a spiky unsureness in the music I wrote in those days. It took me a handful of jangled years to choose to resign from my self-elected positions as Mayor, Treasurer, and Secretary of Worry Town. I was totally winning at leading Worry Town, because I could worry more and more awesomely than anyone else.

Here’s the thing about Worry Town: it is a reliable, comfortable, and seductive zip code in which to reside. Also, we are super great at inhabiting Worry Town. Staying in a place of worry is reliable because it feels real, it comes naturally, it’s not something we have to work at; Worry Town is reliable because there is an endless abundance of stuff to worry about, isn’t there?

Or is there?

A while back, I was both deep in the throes of a divorce and overworking myself in an effort to pile up tenure-worthy lines for my C.V. Those years were screamingly intense. The dopamine hits I got from posting silly, positive stuff online felt useful, but it was more probably a perceived protection from presenting myself online as being vulnerable in any way.

During the divorce we transitioned our son into spending nights at his dad’s new apartment slowly. We started with Wednesday nights. Our son did great, but the first night he spent across town I sat lumped on my kitchen floor for a good, long, bewildered sob-fest in Worry Town. The next Wednesday I cried again, watched a movie, ate my feelings via a giant pizza, and cried myself to sleep. The third Wednesday I enlisted help. I called my dear friend Cynthia and asked if I could come to her house and cry there; at least I’d be around other humans.

After she put her two young boys to bed, Cynthia brought out a bottle of bubbly and calmly gave me an amazing string of sentences: “Look, these Wednesdays are forever now. They just are. They feel like a shitty kind of special. Drink your champagne. These Wednesdays can also be a time for you to re-group, to make plans, to relax, to sleep, to do whatever you need for yourself so that you can be better for your boy. You can make these nights a good kind of special. They can be your special time to have and shape any way you want, or to get done what needs getting done, or to figure out what are the right things to do. You got this. Cheers.”

By simply being a kind, thoughtful, reasonable, and supportive ally, this gift from a trusted friend changed my life. That Wednesday night was a magical turning point; it helped me flip over, turn around, and turn away from Worry Town. It was also the birth of #ChampagneWednesday on my social media posts, and a cherished time I continue to preserve for specialness every week.

Now, in this new 2017, as our highly politicized climate is doing its thing, my worry muscles are re-strengthening. I am not sleeping well. I am sort-of, kind-of, almost writing music. November and December were a blur and if I don’t back the hell out of Worry Town soon, I run the risk of morphing into full-throttled Angry Kristy. Not only does no one want to be around Angry Kristy, she is blindingly not useful to anyone. Besides, the music Angry Kristy writes is stale and grey and over-tries to sound interesting.

#ChampagneWednesdays remain a vital part of my weeks, yet since November 9 I’ve not known what to do with my online presence. I have loved social media, but it’s a funky house of dissonance for me: this house is too big for its tiny plot of land within the vast expanse of Complain County. Throughout this last election season, social media sounded like metal-on-metal bending, growling, screaming through a vat of bloody bile. I felt I was watching our collective ego over-functioning so much that it was eating itself.

Using social media to initiate and cultivate conversations about the gender gap in the contemporary composition world felt productive and useful to me, and I hope it was useful for our artistic culture at large. Observing others’ successes and joys online is like a lovely, cool glass of water when pitted-out on a sticky Midwestern summer afternoon. When studies began appearing with data tracking people’s “happiness levels” in relation to their social media usage, I made a decision to be as positive as possible in my online posts. Great! Awesome? That made me feel better about what I was throwing online, but so what?

As I read this article on November 19, I felt buckets of tension release from my neck and shoulders. Consider these sentences: “(Social media) diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter. The latter activity is seductive … but it can be disastrously counterproductive.” Yup, that resonates with me.

Things (seeds, herbs, trees, vegetables, clouds, babies), cannot grow if they are not given the proper environment in which they can thrive. This includes the delicious all-you-can-eat buffet of worry choices we cook up for ourselves; lay out a pretty menu and pick from it any time. In this new season we will undoubtedly have to turn and shift and adjust, and possibly relinquish, the current lives that we know for lives we don’t yet know. This has always been reality—the possibility our lives will be upended, uprooted, or undone at any moment or given time. What comes with this reality is a natural fear of the unknown. However, what we DO with that fear and worry is wholly up to us.

We may or may not see upending change with our country’s new leadership, and I’ve been sautéing some fresh daily specials for my worry buffet: I worry that it will be increasingly difficult for our young composers to make a living doing their art; I worry that our entire education system may be gutted; I worry that our society will, in fact, over-function so disastrously out of fear and division that we will be set back decades from our best social progresses into a total implosion of any modicum of civility; and I worry that our future may be a shitty kind of special.

When the worry creeps in, its antidote is patience.

Patience, I’ve found, is both a most difficult behavior to learn and sustain, as well as one of the most helpful behaviors we have. And social media teaches us, and fosters in us, the precise opposite of patience. Things take time. The best things—joy, love, music that moves people, social change, equality for all humans, getting one’s self out of a self-made snarkbubble—take careful, slow, meanderingly focused, craggy time.

To what must we devote our time in order to cultivate the environment in which goodness, justice, love, and gratitude can pervade our society? How can we, through our art and our interfacing with actual humans in person, be useful to these fellow humans and our culture of the arts?

I don’t yet know. I’m still working out ways I can be useful. But I do know that the time has arrived for me to turn away from the worry and turn over my social media presences to better uses of my time. Also, I believe that no matter the platform or interaction, by merely being allies—with patience, kindness, thoughtfulness, reasonableness, and support—for one another, and surrounding ourselves with other allies, we can change lives and change our culture.

Our time ahead may be an extremely tense blooming. It can also be an exciting and good kind of special if we commit to making it so. It can be our special time to figure out what it means to do what’s right for the world.

And we must answer the stirring of Love, by doing everything we can to turn ours into a world that is safe for truth and beauty to survive and thrive.

We’ve got this.

Cheers.

Kristin Kuster

Coming and recent performances of Kristin Kuster’s music include works for the Baltimore and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras, Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Lisbon Summerfest Chamber Choir, Network for New Music, and multi-percussionist Joseph Gramley. Her chamber opera KEPT: a ghost story with a libretto by Megan Levad will premiere at the Virginia Arts Festival, in conjunction with the John Duffy Institute for New Opera, in May 2017. When Kristin is not working, you can find her on her deck with coffee. An associate professor of composition at the University of Michigan, Kristin lives in Ann Arbor with her awesome son and her badass husband.

Delivering the News You Need

Posted on September 27, 2016 by NewMusicBox Staff - Headlines

Once upon a time, the flow of online new music content resembled a fairly impressive waterfall that gave off an encouraging roar of ideas and new sounds fed by individual music makers and appreciators. We bookmarked them. Later we followed their RSS feeds. When we look around today, it can feel like those many channels of commentary have more or less steadied into (main)streams of Facebook posts and Twitter links and SoundCloud files, but the volume has exponentially multiplied. Take your eyes and ears off it for a second, and this wall of ever-increasing thought and opinion looms like snow about to cut loose down the hillside. Yet we bravely wade in, anxious that we may be wasting time but too worried that we’ll miss something important to look away.

If you take a cruise through any of our index pages here on NewMusicBox, you’ll notice we’ve done a little restyling just in time for the new season. This fresh look will make mobile consumption of content a bit more friendly and hopefully offer you a better browsing experience both at home and while running between gigs. You’ll still find Counterstream Radio at the top of every page, the day’s birthday wishes in the content stream, and the same flow of original posts bringing you news and ideas from writers spanning the nation.

In addition, we’re going to mix in links to great content drawn from across the web. As users of any type of social media know only too well, the underlying design of these services is continually tweaked to help us better filter and sort through the firehose of online expression. Yet by adding so much machine to the curation chain, the result is imperfect (even if that is just how the internet works). Here at New Music USA, we have an office Slack channel devoted to sharing brilliant or otherwise thought-provoking content with fellow staffers as we come across it, just so no one misses out on an item worth consideration or a second look. Often these bits of news and discussion then flow out through our own social channels, to be bashed about in the content waves. Yet it’s never felt like quite enough. We wanted to more easily find this content again in the future and to make sure there was space to host conversation around current hot topics—especially when they related to our field concerns in ways that take us beyond an outside article’s surface.

So we are going to try some new ways to feature not only the same volume of original content here on the site but also great reading that we’ve discovered out in the wider world. See a post that you think warrants broader notice? Please do tip us off!

Got a Question? Get Answers on Twitter #MUSOCHAT

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Molly Sheridan - Field Reports, Headlines

A couple of weeks ago, the #musochat hashtag popped up on Twitter and began to gather new music makers around sets of creative and career questions. This Sunday the virtual salon will hold its third open door event, and we realized that we had a few questions of our own regarding how this all got started in the first place (though we went old school and sent the founding group an email). Here’s what we now know:

What spark of inspiration kicked off the weekly (Sundays at 9 p.m. ET) #musochat Twitter chats? Is someone spearheading this or was it a spontaneous creation of the internet?

Shaya Lyon (@pickleshy):

I’d been chatting with new music friends on a regular basis as part of a research project for NewMusicBox, and when the series came to an end, I found I really missed our conversations! I sent out a plea, they jumped in the ring, and Gahlord pulled #musochat out of a hat.

Gahlord Dewald (@gahlord) a.k.a. Patternroot (@patternroot):

There have been many industry-specific #chats over the years. I don’t know if they’re all still there or not but, for example, #journchat and #edchat—just Twitterheads from those industries getting together and doing the Q&A thing. When we were hanging out the other day, using up all those characters trying to keep everyone included, it struck me that we needed to do a #chat so we could have a few characters left to actually communicate. I chose #musochat instead of #musichat so it would be differentiated should someone from the larger music community start a #chat and/or in case someone invented a hat/radio combo. It also helps identify the real humans from the bots and botlike Twitter accounts.

For the media producers among us (I write for my site, Shaya writes, Megan Ihnen writes, most of us are media producers these days, I suppose) the #chats also provide some useful content ideas for further documentation. That’s an area of weakness for the format. #chat streams become lost and inaccessible over time, and sometimes the ideas shared are worth returning to later.

What are the advantages of Twitter as a platform for such dialog? Can you really get a decent amount of information across in 140 characters?

Hillary LaBonte (@surrendertofun):

Twitter’s demands of brevity really make me focus on getting to the point quickly. That, combined with the rapid pace of the discussion, forces me to prioritize which questions I want to explore further. As a result, there’s not as much of the beating-around-the-bush that you normally get in other forums, which I appreciate.

Gahlord:

We’ve all been to a conference where someone starts asking a “question” that turns into a long-winded speech that is actually a product pitch or completely off-topic. Twitter makes it difficult for that sort of thing to happen. With everything kept relatively short and fast-paced, people say what they need to and get on with it. When others say something intriguing, then more discussion and interaction follow. It’s terribly natural.

Jason Michael Gerraughty (@jmgerraughty):

There’s a lot to be said about Twitter’s leveling of the playing field, in terms of geography—I wouldn’t have been able to interact with the calibre of composers that I can today. What I appreciate the most is that the conversations happen in almost realtime. It gives a sense of vibrancy that other written formats don’t have.

Megan Ihnen (@mezzoihnen):

One of the reasons I fell head-over-heels for Twitter as a social media platform was that it helped me connect with my new music tribe all over the globe. I didn’t have to know them in person, yet, to start participating in conversations about music both artistically and business-wise. I completely agree with Jason that this type of platform releases me from some of the limitations of geography. #musochat is like the masterclass or forum I wish I had as an undergrad in South Dakota.

Are there rules of order that a newbie might not be aware of? Can anyone with a Twitter handle and 30 seconds dive into this virtual salon with a question?

Gahlord:

Yes anyone can dip in or even be late (I was an hour late last time and just dumped my responses in). It’s a bit crazy at first, but you get the hang of it if you go slow enough. It really is completely manageable by anyone who has been to a 7-year old’s birthday party. Mostly I’d say, don’t just lurk. Throw your answers in the pile. This isn’t an “experts only” thing or whatever. There are no real experts. The raw pile of ideas and experiences is what makes the experiment worthwhile.

I should note, usually it is one person, the host, that is asking the questions. The reason is that all the questions get numbers and the answers get corresponding numbers. If everyone asks questions then the numbers get out of order and the chaos gets a little unmanageable. If you really want to know the answer to something there are two great ways to do it: 1) Volunteer to be the host for the next session and then you can ask all kinds of questions. 2) Ask the host to ask your question to the group—keeping in mind that the hosts are insanely busy during the #chat, so don’t get worked up if they don’t get around to your question.

Also, if you’re new to Twitter, a #chat would be a difficult environment to learn how to use the tool. They tend to be fast-paced and confusing. If you don’t already use Twitter, sign up and mess around with it a few days in advance so you learn how to post, how to include a hashtag, how to use the search feature, etc. Then you’ll be less stressed out during the #chat. Also, remember that you can take your time and go very, very slow. You don’t have to read and respond to everything, just answer the questions and keep moving along at your own speed.

Shaya:

A tip for newcomers: It is nearly impossible to keep up with the entire chat as tweets fly by. I’ve found it helpful to use a third-party tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite and set up filters for the individual questions. In Tweetdeck, I dedicate a separate column for each question, by searching for “A1 #musochat”, “A2 #musochat” etc. Here’s what it looks like on my screen:

We’re also trying to collect the responses on Storify. Here’s a transcript of our first chat.

Garrett

Remember, it’s a multi-person conversation. So, just like any large conversation, it’s as important to listen to (or, in this case, read) what other people are contributing as it is to contribute yourself.

Hillary:

I was a half-hour late to the second chat, so I decided to create a schedule for myself—10 minutes to quickly answer the first 5 questions, then 5 minutes of responding/favoriting/retweeting, and repeat with the remaining questions. I haven’t used any special tools to organize it for myself yet, but I’ve found that even just on the mobile app, I can keep up with things.

What have been some of the most remarkable/illuminating revelations (and/or good jokes, best use of emoji) the conversations have generated so far?

Gahlord:

For me it’s been enlightening to see what kinds of challenges people are facing in producing more music and what the general bent is in terms of how to do more of it. There are moments of insight and idea generation. But looking for “key takeaways” or other stuff like that is probably not the best way to approach it. Better to just go in, answer the questions, and read others’ answers. Make connections with other people, try what they’re trying, etc.

In our “entrepreneurial” #musochat I realized that some people confuse “entrepreneurial” with “wearing lots of hats” and that there might be some opportunity to help in that regard. As a result, I’m going to do a free webinar going over Business Model Generation/Business Model Canvas—something I do in my work life on a regular basis.

I also suspect several of the composers who have attended will begin work with some of the performers who attend. I got added to a local-to-me composer group by way of one of the attendees, for example… sort of a friend of a friend thing. I’ll probably end up performing something they write in the fall.

It is these outgrowth projects that are the result of people just hanging out and answering some questions etc. That is probably the more tangible outcome, more networking that leads to production.

It works this way in other industry #chats all the time, so I’m certain it will work that way here as well.

Jason:

What struck me the most with the “entrepreneurship” #musochat was just how willing people were to contribute. I was not expecting such a sizeable turnout (and we can’t even account for the folks who followed along without answering any questions!).

Favorite tweet, from David Rakowski: “I’m not an entrepreneur. But I am entrepreneurial. It’s not something with binary properties.”

Hillary:

So many people have had interesting, compelling responses (in part due to that Twitter brand of brevity!). I’ve also loved getting to connect with people I don’t know and may not otherwise meet, but who engage with me on the significant issues of our field.

Favorite tweet, courtesy of Shaya:

Megan:

I cannot say that #musochat will be extremely relevant in the future, but it is such a powerful use of our current resources. As new music people, we are inherently interested in the new, the untested, the frontier—this is a genuine way to explore socially what that means. How we make music isn’t only dependent upon what you hear in the performance space—it’s wrapped up in conversations like #musochat, and I want to be a part of that.

Garrett:

I don’t think I can top any of the above references. All I’ll say is how impressed I’ve been by the tenor of the #musochats: most everyone who is participating wants a sincere exchange of ideas, which is difficult to achieve in any context in which a bunch of composers/new music folks are having a conversation. I think this attitude speaks to (what I perceive as) Shaya’s original impulse to pursue what has become the #musochats—recapturing the congenial, open discourse of the New Music Gathering last January in San Francisco. I think this out of bias, mostly—many of the participants in the #musochats (Shaya, Megan, Hillary, for example) are people I met for the first time at NMG, and one of that event’s defining qualities was the approachability and openness of its discourse. Conversations happened between strangers that were more forthright than what I’ve observed among cohorts of students/professors who have known each other for years. At NMG, I think this dynamic came from the recognition that everyone at the conference, regardless of what they might have accomplished elsewhere, had the same stakes, the same investment, because they had taken the time, trouble, and expense to be at the New Music Gathering. Participating in #musochat is, obviously, far less burdensome, but I think some of the same spirit of what I saw at NMG has infiltrated these Twitter-based conversations.

As someone who has used Twitter for a long time, the functionality of the #musochat discussions is very impressive, because Twitter is not, in my opinion, well-suited for conversation. Possibly because #musochat is a specifically designated time and space, the folks who have participated in these chats have, for the most part, bought in to the idea that #musochat is a time for exchange and connection, not broadcasting.

The Media and the Message

Posted on August 21, 2014 by DeanCMinderman - Columns

When I read Kenneth D. Froelich’s article “Lessons From The Central Valley” back in June here on NewMusicBox, his experiences presenting new music in Fresno resonated with my own as a presenter/producer, publicist, and music journalist and sparked some additional thoughts about audience development and the media.

(For those already knowledgeable about publicity and marketing, some of this may seem obvious or old hat. But I’ve learned from interacting with musicians, composers, and presenting organizations that a lot of them aren’t all as well versed in this sort of thing as I might have supposed, so my hope is that this will be useful to at least some of you.)

One of the lessons Froelich mentioned was to “shop local,” noting that when promoting an event, providing a local connection or angle is helpful in gaining the attention of the media. That’s true for all local journalists, not just those covering music or the arts, and there’s an important corollary to that.

“The media” is not a monolithic entity. It’s made up of a variety of outlets (each with a particular focus) and individuals (each with their own personality, interests, preferences, and so on). Knowing the specifics about each outlet and each individual can help you to target your communications more effectively, and even to develop angles and story ideas that may be of interest specifically to those individuals.

In my work with the Mizzou New Music Initiative, we’ve been fortunate to have local newspapers and radio pay a good amount of attention to our signature event, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, from the beginning.

That’s partly because Columbia, a college town with a population of 115,000, roughly equidistant from St. Louis and Kansas City, has a lot of local media for a city its size. There are two newspapers: the Daily Tribune and the Missourian, which is published by Mizzou’s School of Journalism and is not a campus paper, but rather a daily covering local, regional, and national news. The J-school also plays a role in the operation of the local NBC and NPR affiliates, and the market is served by affiliates of the other broadcast TV networks and a total of 15 radio stations.

It’s also because rather than just sending out press releases and hoping for the best, we’ve made an effort to identify and interact with specific people in the media who have taken an interest, and to keep them informed about what we’re doing.
For example, Aarik Danielsen, the arts editor of the Tribune, also is a musician and composer. When MNMI presented its first summer festival in 2010, it was clear immediately from our first contact that he had a genuine interest in what we were doing, so we were pleased to assist in arranging interviews, provide photos and links to online media, and do whatever else we could to help him cover the story.

For that first festival, Danielsen wrote a couple of stories for the Sunday edition, supplemented by online-only interviews, and he’s continued to produce extensive and substantive coverage of the festival each year. He and the paper’s other arts reporter, Amy Wilder, have written about various other events and profiled students and faculty members involved in MNMI, too.
Over at the Missourian, ongoing relationships are more difficult to develop, since the student reporters change assignments each semester and eventually graduate. However, when we learned that editor/faculty member Elizabeth Brixey had been a fellow in two National Endowment for the Arts journalism institutes and is an amateur French horn player, we began sending information specifically to her, which has led to reporters being assigned to cover several stories about the Initiative.

Now obviously, not every media outlet is going to have a musician or composer in a position of editorial importance, so we’ve undoubtedly had some good luck there. But the basic principle—look for specific people who may be interested in what you’re doing and then get information to them—still applies.

Contrary to some stereotypical views of public relations, there’s nothing inherently manipulative about this. You can’t force a reporter to cover a story—you can only appeal to their interests and then help them get the information they’re seeking. And although some journalists are understandably wary of professional publicists trying to “spin” them, most are glad to get pertinent information in a timely fashion, to have their phone calls returned and questions answered promptly, and to get some help in setting up interviews, obtaining photos, and so on.
Froelich’s essay also noted that in Fresno, “a smaller, economically disadvantaged market, nothing beats traditional media” and that social media had not been particularly effective in selling tickets for his series.

The conventional wisdom is that older people consume more traditional media like newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, while younger people flock to social media and get more of their news from the internet. While my experiences suggest that’s generally true, there’s no real reason one has to choose between traditional and social media; a comprehensive communications plan should include both.

The first year I worked on the Mizzou International Composers Festival, most of our time was spent reaching out and pitching stories to traditional media, but the social media part of our plan has grown in importance in each subsequent year.
For the last two years of the MICF, we’ve even laid out a social media schedule for the weeks leading up to it, as well as during festival week. Tweets and posts to Facebook are scheduled throughout the day at regular intervals, with enough room in between for spontaneous and serendipitous updates, retweets and reposts of select messages from various participants, and communicating with other users.

The prescheduled messages cover all sorts of topics, including links to information about each of the composers and performers; videos and streaming audio; ticketing information; background about the Initiative and the MICF; and more.
While we can’t really attribute an increase in ticket sales specifically to social media efforts, the festival has enjoyed modest gains in attendance each year, so the overall plan seems to be working.

However, the really interesting thing is that in looking at who follows our Twitter account, we discovered that a vast majority of followers identify themselves as being involved in some way with music, including many composers, but also musicians, ensembles, educators, and presenters.

So we’re now trying to find ways to make use of that information going forward—for example, how best to employ Twitter as we solicit applicants for the resident composer spots at the 2015 MICF.

If we hadn’t developed an active social media component to our communications plan, or taken the time to analyze our followers list, we might not have discovered that so many people were paying attention through that particular channel. The takeaway is that as social media continues to evolve rapidly, the benefits may not be obvious at first, but instead may reveal themselves as you go.

New Marketing for New Art: The Mondavi Center Google Hangout Experiment

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Dustin Soiseth - Field Reports, Headlines

In 2003 and 2004, the Concert Companion, a device designed to enhance the concert experience, was tested during several orchestral concerts around the country. The user response recorded in post-concert focus groups was quite positive. The goal, said creator Roland Valliere, was “to attract new listeners to come and attend concerts, much like audio guides do in the museum world,” and many of the concertgoers who beta tested the device reported learning new things about a certain piece or aspect of the orchestra. They felt more connected to the music than they ever had before. Yet despite this positive response, which was accompanied by a flurry of press, the Concert Companion faded from sight.

There were issues with the service itself. The creation of content for the CoCo, as it was nicknamed, was extremely labor-intensive, and special technicians had to be flown in to coordinate the device with live orchestral performances. But perhaps more lethal was the disdain with which the Concert Companion was received by musicians and orchestra administrators. Pianist Leon Fleisher refused to allow its use during his performance at a trial run by the New York Philharmonic, and John Summers, chief executive of the Hallé Orchestra, described it as “patronising.” “For me, music is an aural experience, about being there,” he said. “I would be absolutely staggered if these devices became part of the regular concertgoing experience.”

Here in the Bay Area, the Oakland East Bay Symphony tested the CoCo, and music director Michael Morgan could only muster up a half-hearted, if pragmatic endorsement. “As a professional musician I am, of course, somewhat ambivalent about such devices. But I am also smart enough to know that if using this brings people, particularly new and infrequent concert-goers, closer to the music and provides a more enjoyable experience, then it could be a wonderful tool.”

The Calder Quartet. Photo by Autumn de Wilde

The brief rise and fall of the Concert Companion—and its goal of bringing audiences “closer to the music”—was in the back of my mind when I attended a Google hangout with members of the Calder Quartet on January 30. The hangout was part of a new audience engagement initiative supporting the Studio Classics series at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, California. The series showcases new music and I was curious to know why the Mondavi Center chose Google hangouts to promote the series, and what they hoped to accomplish.

For those who are unfamiliar, hangouts are a feature of Google+ (Google’s social network) and are free video chats for up to ten active participants during which everyone can see everyone else on screen. The Mondavi Center also uses the On Air feature that streams hangouts live on their YouTube channel so that those not actively participating can still view the stream, and then an archived recording of the session is made available for later viewing. I asked Rob Tocalino, director of marketing at the Mondavi Center, why the decision was made to use hangouts. “Our intent was to find a way to bring new music fans and artists together in conversations,” he said. “We wanted a tool that was cost-effective, provided real interaction, and allowed us to archive those interactions, in whatever shape they took.”

Lara Downes, pianist and Mondavi Center artist-in-residence.

For more on the appeal of this type of audience outreach, I reached out to Lara Downes, pianist and artist-in-residence at the Mondavi Center. Downes assists in the programming of the Studio Classics series and was the moderator for the hangout with the Calder Quartet. “The goal is to reach out beyond the immediate physical perimeters and to invite in an audience from the much wider community,” she explained. “This is an opportunity to cast a much wider net and really reach out and allow people who aren’t able to physically even be at the performance to at least experience the interaction with the artist.” This is one of the advantages of the hangout, to both audiences and marketers—the personal, visual interactions with artists, what Tocalino called “real interaction.” In hangouts you can chat (if you’re one of the active participants) with composers or performers while sitting in your living room, hear them speak about new works, and get to know them as fellow human beings—a riff on the pre-concert talk in which anyone (well, up to ten people anyway) can participate.

Providing real interaction between audiences and artists is laudable, but does that translate into ticket sales when this technology allows and even encourages participation by people all over the world? Thinking about Downes’s statement about “casting a wider net,” I wanted to understand the benefit to the Center of engaging someone who might live too far away to actually buy a ticket and attend a show. I posed this question to Tocalino and he said that connecting new music fans and artists is the main goal, regardless of whether or not those fans ever attend a concert at the venue. If this seems unusually altruistic, it helps to know that the hangouts are funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation specifically for online audience outreach.

For a complimentary perspective on the free content issue, I reached out to friend and colleague Scott Harrison, executive producer of digital media at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which streams free webcasts of its performances at www.dso.org/live. I asked Harrison how providing all that free content helps the orchestra. Regardless of where viewers are tuning in from, he noted, many are returning for multiple performances and are forming a relationship with the orchestra, and that is what’s important. “I think that it’s not just about reaching people or having a huge audience,” he said, “it’s about having an audience that’s very connected, whether that’s a new connection or rekindling an old one.” I asked Harrison if fostering this sense of connectivity is a higher priority then generating revenue. “If you were only worried about revenue,” he replied, “you’d never get off the ground because you’re never going to make money in the beginning.”

Like the Mondavi Center’s hangouts (and the Concert Companion), the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s webcasts are grant-supported, which allows Harrison and his colleagues the freedom to experiment. (He compared the grant funds to the revenue a for-profit company would invest in R&D.) It provides them with a “runway” to get the Live from Orchestra Hall webcast series—currently in its second season—up and running and then start to think about how to make it first self-supporting, then ultimately a revenue contributor to the DSO. Plus, Harrison says the resulting videos are a great resource for promoting the orchestra. They bring the DSO to a worldwide audience at a time when touring is becoming more and more expensive. And while this isn’t marketing specifically in support of new music, performances of some new works the DSO has performed recently, like “Acrostic Song” from David Del Tredici’s Final Alice and Mason Bates’s The B-Sides are archived on their YouTube page for anyone to hear. Even if you can’t experience the DSO live in concert, you can experience it online in more ways than you previously could.

The Mondavi Center’s Google hangouts also generate digital materials that can be used by both the Center and the artists, and while they differ in content, both the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s and the Mondavi Center’s marketing efforts aim to create a sense of community by providing more opportunities to connect with them in the arena in which so many of us spend our time—online.

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The Studio Classics series is one of many at the Mondavi Center, which is part of the University of California Davis campus about twenty miles west of Sacramento. Like many large performing arts centers, it hosts a broad range of regional, national, and international performing artists and also serves as the performance space for the UC Davis music, theater, and dance departments. The 2012-13 Studio Classics series consists of three concerts, each with a hangout preceding the performance. The Calder Quartet performances were the first of the series and featured works by Elliot Cless, Lei Liang, Nicholas Omiccioli, Ryan Suleiman, and Tina Tallon along side classics by Bartok, Mendelssohn, and Ravel. The second concert pairs pianist Lara Downes with composer Matt McBane’s band Build, while the third features The Paul Dresher Ensemble performing Dresher’s works for invented instruments as well as works by John Adams and Martin Bresnick. It’s an appealing, eclectic mix, and Downes said she often uses the word “laboratory” to describe the series. “It’s a place where we are able to push boundaries when it comes to crossing genres and developing partnerships between artists who are working in different genres or different disciplines.” The Calder Quartet certainly fits that description; they are the quintessential gnarly-music-playing, rock-band-accompanying, omnivorous new music group.

In order to participate in the hangout I had to revive my previously deleted Google+ account, and after a bit of poking around the Mondavi Center’s Google+ and Facebook pages I was able to join. Other than Calder Quartet cellist Eric Byer and violinist Andrew Bulbrook, moderator Lara Downes, and San Francisco-based PR pro Maura Lafferty, who is also part of the Studio Classics marketing team, I was the only one there. Given that this was the Mondavi Center’s very first hangout a low turnout was not unexpected, but the lack of outside participation stifled the half-hour conversation a bit and forced Downes to carry it all herself. Even so, there were also some really interesting moments, like when Calder Quartet violinist Andrew Bulbrook spoke about his quartet’s role as an interpreter and curator (7:25) and about how participating in the creation of new works is the best way to expand the string quartet canon (11:35). “There is something to a consensus that builds around things and weeds things out,” he said, “but to get to that point you have to create. Things have to be generated; they have to be made and they have to be explored and interpreted and discussed. The canon and what is being created now are completely intertwined.” You can view the full hangout below.

Its clear that it’s going to take the Mondavi Center some time to grow their audience for the hangouts. They just had a second hangout on March 5 with composer Matt McBane and it too lacked outside participants. If the goal, as Mondavi Center Marketing Director Tocalino says, is to create connections between audiences and artists, then I think Google hangouts are an ideal format to help them accomplish it. For me, many pre-concert talks can be a passive experience—a one-way flow of information from the stage to the audience—but I found the hangout to be a surprisingly intimate experience. Perhaps the fact that I was sitting at my kitchen table had something to do with it. While this particular hangout with the Calder Quartet was hampered by a lack of participants, I feel that the format itself encourages free-flowing, informal conversations that have the potential to go beyond the standard Q&A. All the Mondavi Center needs now is an audience.

When asked about the value of new forms of audience outreach like Google hangouts, the Calder Quartet’s Bulbrook said, “as an artist you have to always be searching, trying new things. It’s such a thrill to make one’s life in music, and in picking up a stringed instrument you are entering into a tradition that spans centuries. It’s great to have the opportunity to experiment with new ideas of reaching people with an art that is rooted in such history.”

Ultimately, Tocalino and his staff are figuring out how to better market new music on the fly, and experimenting with new modes of audience outreach is part of the process. “We have tools that we rely on to market the better-known artists on our season; there can be tactical challenges, but they’re usually fairly easy to overcome,” he explained. “But with new music, we are often bringing artists and works into the area for the first time. And, sometimes, you are selling work that is “difficult” in the best sense of the word. But it feels great to work on the front end of trying to grow an audience that, we hope, will continue to value and trust our programming over the years.”

There will always be a need for experimentation in the marketing of new music, and of classical music in general. The use of supertitles in opera, while commonplace now, was quite controversial when it began in America in the 1980s. When Beverly Sills introduced them at the New York City Opera in 1983, she was called a “philistine” in The New York Times. In 1985, James Levine famously replied “Over my dead body” when asked about the possibility of supertitles at the Metropolitan Opera, and yet ten years later there they were, Met Titles in the back of every seat, and in standing room, too. While Google hangouts certainly don’t impact a musical performance the way supertitles affect the experience of opera, they have the potential to achieve what the Concert Companion never did: to allow audience members to connect directly with a composer or performer as a person before connecting with them onstage. Perhaps this is exactly what the Mondavi Center’s Studio Classics series needs, perhaps not, but they won’t know unless they try.

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Dustin Soiseth is a conductor and co-founder of The Loose Filter Project. He lives in Oakland.

Bandwagons

Posted on March 8, 2012 by DanVisconti - Columns

Almost a month ago, the fervor over New York Knicks player Jeremy Lin burst from the confines of the basketball world into the mainstream, with a big leg-up from television and radio personalities who coined the 2012 term I most wish I could erase from my memory—“Linsanity”—and parroted the story, which displayed that “just right” Goldilocks quality that causes media talking heads to salivate.

Meanwhile, social media played its own part in amplifying the viral story with the right kind of pro-underdog, feel-good sentiment that fuels the online echo chamber: there are few people who would have set out opposed to such an affirmative story of multicultural success, and as mentions of this story in my own Facebook feed increased I couldn’t help but notice friends with an apparent newfound interest in basketball. I’m sure part of this can be accounted for by the story generating genuine interest. But there also seems to be a self-ratcheting process at work, in which our interest in things about which we have basically no opinion spirals out of control when we see that The Crowd has pronounced it good.

The crucial thing about bandwagons is they can only take us from a place of relative indifference to a place of stronger emotion—which is also why few but the most eager-to-please can be swayed once they already hold a strong opinion. This might partially explain the elevation of certain (usually interesting and/or valid, yet overhyped) stories in our cultural consciousness. If you don’t particularly care about basketball or Jeremy Lin (and as long as you don’t harbor strong negative feelings directed at either), then there’s a subtle pressure (in part, because the issue is not of great personal significance) to get drawn into the Linsanity, ever so slightly.

As far as music is concerned, social media has done wonders to help connect people and ideas; yet there are many facets of online interactions that increasingly encourage us to hop on bandwagons via the process detailed above. We “like” some things that we really like, but sometimes we “like” things mainly to be seen doing so, or in response to a promotional request that we feel sheepish about turning down. We’re encouraged to share more and more personal details, including our current location, recent music playlists, and auto-reposts of the articles we’ve just read. And in our natural and quite legitimate effort to share ourselves (through our text and media), we might be losing a lot of the spontaneity, privacy, and freedom that makes interacting with others worthwhile in the first place.

Let me be clear that the positives of this social media revolution are obvious and thus hardly need my explanation; of course a great deal of the social media experience is positive, useful, and (usually) governed by free choice. My concern is that we’re doing more and more things in public that used to be private in nature, and the consequences of doing so are that things like where we “check in”, what music we choose to listen to, and even our opinions become “accessories”, to a degree—something put-on rather than authentic. This has always been a tendency in offline human interactions, but there’s something about the permanence, power, and distance between acting and thinking afforded by online interactions which exacerbates our Machiavellian tendencies at the expense of the Erasmian.

The effects of media bias are amazingly widespread and easily observable in American culture, and while social media redresses a lot of these wrongs that’s not to say it doesn’t produce its own pressures and neuroses. I love sharing music that I like with specific people that might be interested, but I can’t quite stomach posting all my listening playlists online—who knows if my awareness that everyone would know I listened to Enya for hours might cause me to be excessively self-conscious in my listening habits?

Perhaps the biggest bandwagon that underscores the new culture of social media is the notion that it’s cool to tell everyone everything about yourself, as much as possible—an idea whose results have yet to completely play out. The same mechanism that allows us to share our individual selves might also have the longer-term effect of funneling our individuality down narrow channels of self-enabled groupthink, in which we choose to interact with only the people wearing the same brand of blinders as ourselves, reinforcing one group opinion over time.

As much as I enjoy the connective potential of social networking sites, I also know that it’s within the other realm of offline interaction where I’m most likely to encounter people and ideas most different from myself—and especially for creative musicians, it’s people and ideas outside of ourselves and immediate social network that can best challenge us to find our true voice.

DanVisconti

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