Valuetown

I'm going to spin a riff off of yesterday's post. Yesterday was about going out to less competitive waters. Today is about something different, but related. I'm going to talk about building value.

One of the critical problems we classical musicians are facing is, people don't value our stuff. Oh, they may say they value our stuff, but similar to the way Congressional representatives will say they value education, their spending habits don't match what they claim. If we are to move forward, we will have to change people's minds about classical music, and start to build value in the eyes of our customers. We must appear to be musicians worth spending money on.

Valuetown

I'm not going to be shy. I play Magic the Gathering. I know, what a huge nerdy thing to do, right? Well, yes. But it's also incredibly good for your brain in so many ways. I just wish the players in general were a little more socially graceful. And bathed.

That's beside the point. The point is, players who play Magic for a living (or attempt to) talk about "getting value." What they mean is, they spend X amount of resources, and they get X+Y amount of resources back. I will grant, this is an incredibly important definition of value. I'm going to talk about it sometime. I just want to make clear: if this is your concept of value, that's not what I'm talking about at the moment.

The value I'm talking about this post is, other people view your profession as something worth spending time and money on. A plumber is valued because he knows how to fix pipes. A banker is valued because they safehold your money against theft (in theory), and provide other convenient services along the way, like loans and such. Etc. Etc. Etc. You get the idea.

Right now, us classical musicians have a bit of a problem. I talked earlier about building a new audience, as well as audience retention. What we have now is, we retain audiences fairly well. Our fans are quite dedicated and devoted, to the point where some are vociferous about classical music being "the only music worth listening to." Which is wrong, but hey, I love the enthusiasm. If we're going to build an audience, then we're going to have to build value in other people's lives. We can't just play music, we have to make our job something essential, something that can't be replaced by anything else.

Whistle While We Work

One of the first issues we need to address is the idea people have in their heads that musicians "just happen." Not that they don't think we practice. Just that they don't realize how much we practice. The problem here is one of visibility. Audiences only ever see the concerts, the end product. But unlike a regular product where people have a strong idea of "well, people put in five 9-5 days a week to produce this," they don't have as strong an idea of "those musicians practice 4 hours a day on top of 3 hour long rehearsals... plus driving time. Oh, and they teach."

This is really simple to fix. It's mostly an educational problem. The easiest way is to just acknowledge the work you put in. Another, perhaps better, way is to sell tickets to open rehearsals. That way, audience members can see first hand how work intensive a rehearsal is. Still more is to make sure music programs are available to as many students as possible, because it's one thing for a parent to be told "we put in 3-4 hours a day," and quite another for that parent to actually experience. Not that young students should put in 3-4 hours a day, not at all. Just that even listening to their kids struggle through 30 minutes of practice will help make the practice WE do that much more clearly difficult.

There's more we can do, of course, but I will stop here for now.

Till Next Week

Well, the weekend is upon us again, which means you and I will part company for two whole days. T.T In the meantime, I am going to start ending with music recommendations. Before I get to that, though, I'm going to shout-out Kristin Center's project again, because it's pretty awesome, and you should donate money to it because it's awesome. Oh, and also because if you don't, Schoenberg's Fraternity of Tonebros will know. And, just to make the threat clear, the Tonebros are a branch of the Masonites, who themselves are a large subsection of the Illuminati. Just saying, your donation is a choice, but... if you don't, we're going to have another Great Recession on our hands. Your call.

Recommendation of the Day
Disclaimer: due to copyright reasons, I will not link directly to any recording I recommend. But you have this wonderful thing called "Google." You put what you're looking for in, and what your looking for pops out. It's like magic. Or magnets. Or both.

Beethoven Cello Sonata #3, op.* 69**
Mendelssohn Songs without Words: any, but especially op.* 30

*op. is short for "opus," which means "work." Very large works like symphonies were given their own opus number. Shorter pieces were usually collected into groups, and provided an opus number for the collection. This helps differentiate between pieces of the same name, as well as giving a somewhat chronological ordering. In this case, there are 48 or so "Songs without Words," in 8 groups of 6. The opus number lets you know which your are listening to in relation to the rest.

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