Critic sizes up classical music's health

A positive spin on the state of classical music (for a change).

Newsday's critic sizes up classical music's health
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/arts/ny-ettop5350194aug30,0,2746910.story

Seattle Symphony's concert volume fails to satisfy

In reference to our conversation concerning the importance of
headlines, I read over this article several times believing that
"volume" was in reference to seats...it wasn't. Just goes to show you
(or maybe just me) that headlines can give many impressions.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/classical/333624_sso29q.html

Traci

New Theater Complex in Cincinnati?

Check out what it would have! 200-seat theater devoted to education? Hmm..To build or not to build. That is my question. I'd like to know your thoughts.  
Downtown theater gains ground
http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070924/NEWS01/709240388


--Kobie Smith

---

Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail!

Chicago Lyric Traviata Cast sings "Take Me Out To The Ball Game"

I just got an email from Lyric Opera of Chicago.  In the email there was a link to a video that shows the La Traviata cast singing "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" to root on the Cubs.  It was recorded during the intermission of one of the dress rehearsals.  Alan and I found it comical.  Enjoy!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3nIh7NTego

--CR Ferguson

N.Y. Philharmonic, Union Agree on Contract Raising Musician Pay

Well, the Chicago Symphony will be the highest paid orch in the US...but the NY phil won't be too far behind by that time - they'll be at 140k base salary by 2011!

-Khoa

MacArthur Foundation Announces Winners of 'Genius' Prizes

The winners of the MacArther Foundation awards were just announced a few days ago. Wouldn't it be cool to wake up one day and get a call from someone telling you that they're going to give you $500,000 over the next five years because they love what you do and they want you to keep doing it?

The way it works is many people are under observation and are being considered for these awards each year. However, you never know that you are being considered until you win.

I was especially happy to see that Dawn Upshaw won this year! Yay for opera singers!!

http://philanthropy.com/news/updates/3093/macarthur-foundation-announces-winners-of-genius-prizes#c001524

--CR Ferguson

CSO, musicians OK 20% raise over 4 years

Another touchdown by the musician's union.

I wonder who will be fighting for highest paid next. New York Phil or maybe BSO?

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/568282,CST-NWS-cso21.article

--Jessica Hummel

Broadway, Next Week: Shows or Lockouts?

Considering the article regarding excessive prices for Mel Brook's newest Broadway, what good are those prices if Broadway experiences a lockout next week with their stagehands? Ah, unions, almost impossible to (not) do work with them!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/theater/26labo.html?ref=arts

---Traci (Unzicker) Mans

The Broadway BANG for the Buck

Is Mel Brooks really worth it? 

Some would argue his humor and wit are completely genius.  Some would call him a wash-up.  No matter what your opinion of Mel Brooks may be, you can be sure that he's charging a pretty penny for his newest extravaganza on Broadway, "Young Frankenstein."  Now, I won't lie.  I definitely want to see the show.  With bombshells like Sutton Foster and Megan Mullaly, it's sure to be a hilarious time.  But the producers for the musical may have heightened the world of commercial theatre to new levels.  With a "monstrous" top-ticket price of $450, Robert Sillerman and others have decided that to keep their weekly Broadway grosses private.  What impact might this have on the future of Broadway?  The biggest scare is that all other Broadway producers will follow suit and also not disclose weekly grosses.  These other producers may even go so far as to charge the Mel Brooks standard of over $400 for house seats.  That's a little bit ridiculous when you think about it, no?  $450 for two and a half hours of a musical??  Sure, if you are a millionaire, this price means nothing to you.  But what about the average theatre-lover in New York City.  I know that none of my friends, even in New York City, are willing to pay that price.   I guess we'll be seeing the second-rate, non-original cast from the last row of the mezzanine.  See you all there.

See two of the articles from Playbill.com.

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/109202.html

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/110848.html

Who knows... next, Hollywood may decide that their box office grosses are meaningless as well.  Titanic made how much?  Oh well.

-- M. Tyler Ennis

More Gutter Snipes on TV

As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered

By WENDY A. LEE
Published: September 24, 2007

Kyra Sedgwick, star of "The Closer" on TNT, walks under a police tape and scans the screen with her flashlight. And every time she does, she makes Gretchen Corbin, a technical writer in Berkeley, Calif., irate.

When Wolf Blitzer reported on Anna Nicole Smith last February, CNN viewers learned a lot more, thanks to screen crawls.

The promotional ads for "The Closer" run in the bottom right of the screen during other TNT programs — a graphic called a snipe. But for Ms. Corbin, who sometimes watches movies that have subtitles, the tiny images block the dialogue.

"Some ad just took over the entire bottom of the screen so I missed what the characters said to each other," said Ms. Corbin, describing a recent experience.

"And it's TV, so you can't rewind."

Snipes are just the latest effort by network executives to cram promotions onto television screens in the age of channel surfing, ad skipping and screen-based multitasking. At first, viewers may feel a slight jolt of pleasure at the sight of a new visual effect, they say, but over time the intrusions contribute to the sense that the screen is far more cluttered — not just with ads, but with news crawls and other streams of information.

For better or worse, viewers say, the additions are making the experience of watching television more closely mirror the feeling of using a computer.

That may be so, network executives say, but the extra content is here to stay.

The snipes — not to be confused with bugs, those network logos that pop up in screen corners during shows — are important enough to the beleaguered television industry that the networks plan to tolerate the backlash.

This fall ABC is introducing the "ABC Start Here" campaign, which consists of a series of icons in the lower right of the screen that direct viewers to related content in other media, like books, DVDs and Web sites. At the end of "Ugly Betty," for instance, a shopping icon could direct viewers to places where they could buy Betty's shoes, or an iTunes icon could invite them to that site to buy episodes of the show. The point, said Marla Provencio, an ABC executive vice president of marketing, is "to accommodate viewers' multimedia, multichannel habits and still lead them back to ABC."

ABC tested the icons in July and will introduce them gradually this fall to get viewers familiar with the shorthand. To minimize complaints, ABC will keep the icons and all similar visuals silent.

"We do not want to invade in the viewers' space so much that we intrude on their experience," said Ms. Provencio.

Promotional content on what the industry calls the "lower third" of the television screen is "the way of the world these days," Ms. Provencio said. ABC, she said, tries to make sure that the embedded ads do not interrupt, say, "a dramatic moment on 'Grey's Anatomy' " but the network does want to remind people they are watching ABC.

Viewers say that snipes and bugs are degrading their experience of watching television. Even some performers seem to resent the assaults on their work's integrity. At last week's Emmy Awards, the comedian Lewis Black delivered a blow against screen clutter, yelling, "We don't care about the next show. We're watching this show."

Network executives say that the trend toward busy screens is an attempt to cater to the tastes and habits of younger viewers, who reflexively toggle among screens, online and on cellphones.

David Grazian, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that television is simply borrowing a successful feature from the video game industry. "Screen clutter can be extremely eye catching, especially for the viewer who surfs between several channels," he said.

Viewers of MTV, VH1 and sports channels have come to expect frenetic programming. At ESPN, there has been a conscious effort to pump up the visual excitement of the viewing experience, said Norby Williamson, executive vice president of programming. "The key word in television these days is engagement," he said.

The network first introduced a crawling banner of sports scores to the bottom of the screen in 1985, has recently introduced more aggressive visuals, such as a Monday Night Football score box in the center of the screen that changes into other bugs and banners. Today's viewers today are conditioned to have a lot going on at once, Mr. Williamson said, adding, "Everything is shifting. Television has to shift, too."

Read Article

- Ruth Meberg Stine

Which ads dont get skipped

The other day I was watching quality TV with a dear friend, who, believe it or not, does have TIVO. Of course we skipped over all advertisements to get back to the intricate plot as fast as possible. But no, one ad was not skipped: the image of a leopard  bra managed to imprint itself on my cornea, as it came closer to the screen sitting on two perfectly shaped breasts, bouncing up and down ever so slightly.  Victoria's secret in full beauty.

Check out the link in Business Week

 

-- Magdalen Hayes

Where have all the classical music critics gone?

Greg Sandow: "In the Fray: Yes, Classical-Music Criticism Is in Decline; But the last thing the industry should do is blame the press."
Wall Street Journal: 16 June 2007

Yes, I'll admit it. I'm a nerd. As we went through the "7 Habits of Effective Public Relations Experts" and learned about the relation of the PR person at the not-for-profit arts organization to the ultimate power holder (aka- the "press"), I got excited and started making notes in the margins for blog ideas. One of my ideas stemmed from a brown bag lunch I attended as an intern this summer at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. We met with the Manager of Media Relations and discussed various strategies and challenges for the Lyric in terms of media coverage. We also touched on the state of press for the arts on a national level. This conversation occurred shortly after it had been announced that the classical music critic for New York Magazine had been fired, and furthermore, this trend is nationwide.

Music critics for newspapers are being let go, and furthermore, arts coverage in general is being decreased.

I later found this New York Times article that touches on this issue.

So, what does it mean? Mr. Sandow seems to believe that there are fewer readers for classical reviews and newspapers are justified in cutting them. He's doing something we try to do all the time: consider the audience. And, it seems pretty "black and white"- not many people read music reviews so why cover it?

I do have some reservations. Aren't newspaper readers the most likely to also be arts attendees? There is no question in my mind why performing arts lovers and advocates get nervous when newspapers and radios cut our coverage- these are our audiences, if we like it or
not! Yes, we need to use new media outlets to attract new audiences, but it is a fact that our current patrons and donors are old, educated, and rich. And, they just won't use these new media outlets.

Mr. Sandow goes on to question if "people in the classical-music business really understand the current state of our world" and describe the hum-drum of covering the arts- La Traviata was performed three years ago and Brahms last week- what's different about it today?

And here, he is right- we do not understand the state of the press world. What we need to do is change to appeal to the press and their readers. We need... the proper pitch! Or, maybe, we can just keep sending doughnuts and hope for the best.

--Mary

classical music in the virtual world...

Classical music performances are moving online in ‘Second Life?!’ This opens interesting questions with contracts and such.

-Khoa

Chicago Symphony to become highest paid US orchestra

The Chicago Symphony will raise their base musician salary to $143,780 by 2001, talk about rising fixed costs!

--Khoa

Piracy (not pirates) Attacks Brazil and Creates...bad buzz.

It wasn't supposed to be released until Thursday, but for weeks already, pirated copies of the feature film "Elite Squad" — about the shady workings of Rio's Special Operations Police Battalion — has been a best- seller at street stalls across Brazil.

What people have seen in the movie proved so controversial that police tried to keep the film out of theaters, and the illegal early release left director Jose Padilha in the awkward position of criticizing everyone who watched or wrote about his film, partially obscuring the film's message that society bears some of the blame for the squad's brutality.

Padilha won international critical acclaim for his 2002 documentary "Bus 174," which drew extensively on live footage of an hours-long hostage situation on a city bus that held a nation of TV viewers on the edge of their seats.

"Elite Squad" isn't a documentary, but it claims to tell the true stories of 12 former officers from the black-uniformed paramilitary unit whose very insignia — a dagger-impaled skull — strikes fear into residents of Rio's nearly 700 shantytowns.

The unit's members claim to be the world's most effective urban warriors. Engaging in almost nightly gun battles with heavily armed drug gangs, they have more house-to-house warfare experience than many soldiers.

The unit has a high kill ratio and relatively small losses. While no specific numbers are published, Rio police kill more than 1,000 people in gun battles and lose about 150 officers each year. Rights groups including Amnesty International claim the squad fires indiscriminately, often from inside a tanklike vehicle and carries out extrajudicial killings as a matter of routine.

The former squad members whose experiences were depicted in the film "were very concerned about sharing the blame with society for the repugnance of their professional lives," Padilha told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.

The film doesn't "assign blame but relations of cause and effect," he added. "Police don't exist in a vacuum."

Still, pirated copies proved so real to life that squad members tried to halt its theatrical release, arguing, among other things, that the film could endanger police by tipping off drug lords to the squad's tactics.

Judge Flavia Almeida Viveiros de Castro denied the officers' request after she saw a pirated copy, ruling that the film "represents day-to-day reality for a good part of the people living in this city."

The movie's success also speaks to another reality — about half of all DVDs sold in Brazil are pirated copies.

Rio state Gov. Sergio Cabral was forced to deny watching a pirated version after reports circulated that he was demanding better vehicles for police because the movie showed officers stealing cars just to get parts.

Producers quickly provided Cabral with a special screening of the official version, which led the governor to declare the film a "shock of reality."

Then he came under more pressure for his apparent endorsement, and later insisted that Rio police do not behave the way they are depicted in "Elite Squad."

Wiki Scanner Shows That PR People Should Be Honest

Adweek talks about the Wiki Scanner, created by a California Institute of Technology graduate student studying computer science, the scanner can trace an edited Wiki entry to the Internet protocol address of the computer network where the editing change originated.

 

Someone with an e-mail address at Wal-Mart changed "Wages at Wal-Mart are about 20 percent less than other retail stores" to "The average wage at Wal-Mart is almost double the federal minimum wage."

 

Of course, I find the article interesting, but I also find the statement "should be honest" ridiculous.  PR People are not hired for their honesty, and never will be--if you want to be honest--be a priest, or a teacher, or another profession where people get paid to tell the truth.  But when it comes to PR, spin, selective information, and yes, sometimes even lying is required.

 

--Chester Lee

 

 

 

Central Ohio Arts Groups Embrace Technology

The Columbus Dispatch has an interesting article about Organizations using technology to draw audiences. Some of the highlights:

 

The Columbus Museum of Art offers cell-phone tours of displays, prepares video documentaries of artists and helps high-school students create podcasts that highlight exhibits in ways that reach other young people.

 

The cutting-edge Wexner Center for the Arts has embraced technology, creating a robust Web site (www.wex arts.org) with blogs and podcasts, "mix tapes" (with musical clips from upcoming shows) and WexTV (with extended taped interviews).

 

The Columbus Symphony Orchestra connects with patrons through a blog as well as social-networking tools such as MySpace and Facebook.

 

-- Chester Lee

 

 

 

Getting Black America to the Opera

Read Article
"If the first thing we say is 'opera,' a lot of people are going to just kind of shut down," arts marketer Walker-Kuhne, who has been cultivating black audiences for the New York City Opera since May, said in an interview.

Donna Walker-Kuhne, who was a guest lecturer here in Cincinnati two years ago talks about attraction African-Americans to the Opera.

--Chester Lee

 

 

Website guru talks Internet marketing secrets

Larry Chase talks about increasing Website Traffic,  one of the things I like about Larry is that he understands about time crunch.  One of his tips:

 

Use Social Media Networks: Choose your social media networks carefully. Executing a social media strategy is time intensive. Be sure to evaluate whether your target audience is using the major social media sites or consider tapping into niche sites for your market.

 

Is important to remember.   Just because there are a lot of people on MySpace doesn't necessarily mean your patrons are on MySpace.

 

---Chester Lee

 

Selling the Arts in the Digital Age

This is an amazing time for both artists and arts organizations. It has never been easier to build relationships with patrons using the latest technology--blogs, virtual press releases, email campaigns, video news releases, and more--the digital revolution has given arts marketers the tools to increase audience attendance, as well as to increase arts awareness through internet public relations.