Mark Likes Music

Last week on Polyphonic.org, Robert Levine criticized the "news business" for not reporting, as reported in the Journal Sentinel , that the Milwaukee Symphony had raised $5 million in emergency funds to pay off debt and balance its budge t. Levine also has a piece of advice: (M)ost of what you read about orchestras is crap. At the very best, it’s one-sided – bad news is sexier than good news, and weird news is more interesting than important news.  A few thoughts here: 1) I don't know where Levine gets his reportage, but when there is good news, people write about it. I've read interesting and heartening stories in the last few months about the Kansas City Symphony , the Baltimore Symphony , the Cleveland Orchestra ( also here ), and the Detroit Symphony . 2) Journalists' jobs aren't to be cheerleaders for their hometown orchestras, and they can provide a great service by critically examining the goings on of what are, after all, local civic organ...

On New Music Box, Armondo Bayolo exhorts musicians to think big : We must see ourselves as collaborators within a much wider network of musicians and citizens, helping each other as best we can—be it through something as complex as presenting performances or something as simple as sharing each other’s work on social media—regardless of personal payoff.  The benefits will ultimately manifest themselves and reach far beyond the immediate gratification of a paycheck (although let’s not forget the importance of that paycheck, lest we get too idealistic and starve ourselves in the process) and into the realm of real, tangible cultural change. It's dispiriting that some musicians need to be reminded that advocacy needs to be part of what they do, that it's not enough to play the gig, get paid, and go home. On the other hand, it's an encouraging sign that there are groups out there who are either engaging in new ways with other musicians-- Bayolo cites the relationship between ...

It's easy enough to walk into any workplace and hear people bragging about all the multitasking they do, but, as pointed out by Matthew Fritz , what gets undervalued today is the ability to focus and prioritize. Multitasking can be downright harmful:  Rahul Mayak on Twitter  cited a Time / Inc. article by Issie Lapowsky that discusses recent research on  the negative effects of multitasking . One big culprit? E-mail. As Lapowsky points out, almost a quarter of our work time is spent on e-mail , and almost all of it increases multitasking--and tension. According to a study out of University of California, Irvine, when employees were cut off from e-mail for five days, their levels of stress and focus increased. That's not to say that e-mail is inherently bad, but it does show how people use it to pay forward the chaos and instability their own multitasking creates.

I came across a couple of blog posts about music that talk about the shift from an industry model ("we make CDs") to a service model based on ongoing personal engagement . Classical musicians have been living this new model for years. Most of them not only perform, but they also teach, and it's common practice to engage in pre- or post-concert meet-and-greets after concerts. Even orchestras , the classical-music institution most closely tied to the industrial model, have embraced educational programs and events aimed at improving face-to-face contact with the audience. To some extent, all musicians have had to piece together a career, using all their entrepreneurial tools to sell various services. But classical music benefits having in place not only a long-standing tradition of engagement in place but also the institutions it needs to carry that out on a large scale. 

I'm really excited about this, because I just embraced the smiley-face emoticon . BuzzFeed now has its own style guide ,  as noted by Megan Garber of  The Atlantic  with notable condescension. To be fair, though, it is pretty slipshod work if you put together a guide that lets writers overrule you if anything "looks weird" to them. The point is that if BuzzFeed can have a style guide, so can you. No matter how small your organization, you'll have a lot of writing to do. Figure out whether you use Ph.D. or PhD , use serial commas, and accept smiley-face emoticons in e-mails (and, for that matter, whether you write it e-mail or email ). It'll save you a lot of time and embarrassment.

On Friday, four members of the Kansas City Symphony, including music director Michael Stern, wore Google Glass and recorded their rehearsa l. A local company will edit the videos together, and we should see a final version this week. Orchestras seem to want to bring people closer and closer to them ; it would be good if they return the favor more often.

We've got songs about baseball and songs about hockey , and now we have songs about football on this blog, courtesy of Thomas Meglioranza , who suggested Cole Porter's "Bulldog," from Night and Day ... and Leonard Bernstein's "Pass the Football" from Wonderful Town .

On news that Pinterest's growth has been driven by women , we have this from Steve Roggenbuck : fav thi tweet if u want a t-shirt that say "WE'RE DADS, WE'RE ON PINTEREST, AND WE WANT JUSTICE." — steve roggenbuck (@steveroggenbuck) February 2, 2014

Back in December, Tim Smith wrote enthusiastically about how the Baltimore Symphony was using a series of ads-- last week, they won an award from the American Marketing Association of Baltimore --to acquaint the city with its players. The images, done by videographer/producer James Bartolomeo of Protagonist Films, may not lead to a surge of ticket sales or mobs of new fans huddled outside the stage door. But it's always worth reminding the public that real live people are up onstage playing all that Beethoven, Mahler and Bernstein, people with individual personalities and tastes, people worth getting to know. The best thing orchestras can do to raise their profiles within their own communities is to put the focus back on its musicians, and the Baltimore Symphony's campaign provides an effective model of how to use paid advertising to achieve this. But ads alone won't build loyalty: it takes personal appearances where people can meet the musicians face to face, learn abo...

On Flack Me , Jeannine Wheeler profiles the man who started it all for PR people, Ivy Lee : "Tell the truth," he said, "because sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn’t like what you are doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what people want.” Apparently, this was groundbreaking advice back in the early decades of the 20th century, and Lee became very wealthy counseling some of the most famous industrialists of the time. Famously, he  came under fire from Upton Sinclair while representing the Rockefellers during  the Ludlow Massacre  of 1914-15 in Colorado. It's this contradiction--using the values your mother taught you to help people involved in dubious activities (to put it charitably) come away looking good to their constituents and the public--that makes public relations among the most stressful jobs around .