We tend to hear a lot these days about presenters experimenting: tinkering with the traditional concert form, making imaginative changes to programming and presentation. We hear (or care) less about the constant tinkering and re-imagining that goes on at the marketing end of things, although the creative and promotional aspects of things are inextricably intertwined. As the poet (Thomas Gray) put it, “full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Translation: great concert, but the seats needed bums.

For marketers, it’s no easy task to keep up: audiences’ personal information-gathering preferences change; new sources of information and devices emerge; new ways of searching and sorting the endless stream of invitations and demands on precious, non-expanding time.

The temptation is to grasp at each new straw as it rushes by on the tide – to declare that tried and true methods of garnering audiences have had their day. An example: going into this decade, there was a lot of gloomy prognostication on the PR and marketing side of things – predicting that season ticket sales and subscriptions were about to go into a precipitous decline. Audiences are no longer in a position to lock themselves into a whole season’s worth of performances months in advance, the argument went. Not with the health of parents, the welfare of children, and our own increasingly creaky bodies making it harder to predict, months in advance, what the demands on our time and other resources are going to be on any given day.

Instead, it seems that for many, with so much uncertainty, from personal to geopolitical, rocking our worlds, looking at a calendar stretching six to eighteen months into the future has become even more important: a way of saying “well at least  I know where I will be on THAT day, right down to the specific music I will be losing (or finding) myself in.”

All this is not to say that the season launch and its accompanying rituals remain monolithically unchanged, any more than the concert form itself. Timing; whether to have a launch event and if you do who to invite – previous subscribers, sponsors, donors, the public; whether to live-stream it; whether to tie it to a particular concert in the current season; what kinds of packages, series and sub-series and “pick- your-own” mini-packages to offer; where (if anywhere) the media (if there are any left) fit in… All questions to be answered.

And hardest question of all: how do we best capture, in a few precious pages or minutes, our prospective audiences’ attention to the essence of a whole year’s inspired creative endeavour that has been months or years in the planning?

Take the Opera Atelier photograph on this issue’s cover as an example. It looks like a production shot, and in a way it is. But the production in question is not either of the two mainstage shows around which 2017/18 will revolve. Rather, it is the season itself. OA senior communications manager Bronwen Bradley explains: “We always do a photoshoot in December specifically to create images for our upcoming season. Marshall [Pynkoski] and our set designer Gerard Gauci are typically working on the concept and art direction months in advance! Meghan [Lindsay]and Eric [da Silva] are wearing Martha Mann’s Dora Award-winning costumes from Figaro, and are loosely representing Figaro and Susanna. The photo is tied to our season theme of ‘Taking Aim at Your Heart’ as Love is the driving force in our two operas next season.”

Impeccably shot by Bruce Zinger, OA’s resident photographer since the early 2000s, the photograph is instantly recognizable as Opera Atelier’s to anyone who knows OA’s work. Meticulous gestural language, minutely detailed staging, opulently detailed, yet at the same time tantalizingly non-specific. Lindsay, a company regular, is in this spring’s Medea and will return next season, but not in Figaro. Da Silva, a member of the Atelier Ballet, uncharacteristically thrust into the foreground, strikes a characteristically balletic pose. All in all it is trademark Opera Atelier, selling the brand, not a specific product: “For those of you who know us, 2017/18 is business as usual! But for those of you who don’t, oh what lovely business it is!”

As mentioned, no one size or style or date of subscription drive or season launch fits all. What follows is a somewhat random sampling of information from presenters likely to be known to our readers. It’s a handy guide to how, and when, you’ll be able to start planning out next season’s long-term musical certainties amid the vagaries of daily life.

And be sure to check back on this story online for updates and additions to the list as they become available.

Work for an ensemble, music presenter or performing arts venue and want to add your name to this list? Send us an email at editorial@thewholenote.com.

fShare

Tweet