Creating Burning Desire for Live Classical Music — Part 2: The Spark
This is the second article in a series proposing a new approach for orchestras in the advancement of classical music.
In the introduction to this series, I offered a framework for a line of thinking about how and why orchestras might look differently at creating demand for classical music. This is as an arc of ideas that fit together, ranging from brand awareness to acquisition, retention, and long-term customer relationship building.
In Part 2 of this series, I present ideas around how an orchestra might initiate a spark of attraction for classical music in an increasingly unfamiliar public.
The Fire of Demand: A metaphor
Imagine trying to start a wood-burning fire. You have gathered small twigs and made an airy nest of kindling. Underneath it you put some small, easily combustible material for tinder. To the tinder, you introduce a small burst of radiant energy — a spark, which flames and slowly ignites your twig-nest kindling. Now you have a tiny fire.
You nurture your tiny fire with great care, adding more twigs and then sticks, being careful not to suffocate the fragile flames by adding too much too quickly. In a few minutes, you build your fire into something that will burn steadily for several minutes. You are ready to add a few split logs as fuel, and in time a hotbed of glowing coals forms. Now your fire is blazing, putting off heat, with flames dancing towards the sky. Your fire will burn for as long as you feed it. It will be difficult to extinguish.
Your fire began with a spark. That spark lit a single flame. In time, the flame lit a small fire that became a blaze with potential to create an inferno.
But first there must be a spark.
In live classical music, we attract a new person to a concert using messaging and advertising. Our messaging introduces an opportunity and — like kindling and tinder — all it needs to create the flame is a spark of appeal. It’s that spark which lights the kindling of opportunity, and a small flame is manifested through buying a ticket, attending, and enjoying the performance.
We then have the hugely difficult task of keeping that flame burning without smothering it, adding just the right amount of performance opportunity (twigs and sticks) at the right time, and hopefully nurturing that single flame into a small fire of occasional return engagement. This small fire is much easier to keep burning than a solitary flame. The more we can get this person to attend (i.e. the more substantial the blaze), the easier it will be to keep their engagement burning, and the hotter their fire will become.
Classical music is extraordinarily difficult to promote, as most people just don’t have the appeal to it. In all but a tiny sliver of the population, there is no spark, no attraction. We can advertise, tell stories, and use all manner of prose and pretty pictures to tell the world about what we’re doing, but without a spark, how can we expect to ignite anything at all?
Orchestras must create their own demand for live classical music in a much wider segment of their communities.
As we set out on our demand generation path, we first need to create sparks of attraction in much more of the population. We need to use these sparks to ignite small flames of interest to try a little bit of what we have to offer. We need to feed and nurture those tiny flames so that they might turn into small fires of occasional concertgoing. Some of those small fires will grow through repeat concert attendance, making the fires larger and more intense. In time, some of those fires will begin to put off their own sparks that create new flames on their own, bringing new people into the experience of classical music.
Demand generation can be thought of in this way: spark — flame — fire. I will rely on this metaphor for as long as it is useful to describe ideas for different stages of demand generation.
To get us started, I present the “Spark”.
The Spark
For those of us who already love classical music, even briefly thinking about this music creates a spark of attraction in our hearts and minds. We have a strong expectation for what we will experience from a classical music concert.
For most of the population though, a spark cannot be self-created, because the familiarity with the experience of live classical music isn’t there. It’s not only that they do not have an expectation of live classical music attendance, but they also have a quite negative expectation based on popular perceptions of it is: old, stale, formal and boring museum pieces that have no relevance in today’s world.
But what if we could spark appeal for people? What if we could briefly and emotionally connect with them on a fundamental human level to trigger even a momentary spark of attraction?
I hypothesize that we can create these elusive sparks with a high level of consistency, using experiential immersion.
Emotional Connection
Humans are complex; they are able to all at once operate rationally and irrationally, and emotionally and instinctively.
We are guided in part by rational thought. This is the area of science, mathematics, and budget forecasting.
But we are also guided heavily by our illogical emotions and instinctual urges. Often times we do not know why we feel the way we do. We can rationalize our thoughts and feelings to ourselves, but this internal rationalization may be true or false.
Great art capitalizes on our illogical and emotional capacity, eliciting responses in us that we often cannot explain. It is the game of expectation, resolution, and surpise that music composers use to bring about unexpected emotions.
The opening of the final movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is objectively triumphant. A computer could tell you that based on the instruments, the chord progression and the dynamic markings. But there is unexpected magic that occurs at the end of prior movement that sets up this mighty finale, triggering a level of deep emotional response that is elusive and illogical.
Traditional orchestra marketing relies on rational descriptions of concerts. We try to attach words and images to concert experiences to convey what will be heard, often times relying on biographical references of dead composers and living artists: “Joining the orchestra will be the winner of last year’s Van Cliburn competition performing Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece Piano Concerto No.1…”
Rationally, it sounds like quite a show. But sorry, I’ll be watching Netflix.
In order to attract audience, especially those without enough familiarity to have many favorite works or performers, we need to connect emotionally. We need to recognize the complexity of human psychology and make a deep connection on the level of our DNA.
We need a bit of magic.
Experiential Immersion
An entire field has formed around the notion that humans are emotional creatures, and we respond most powerfully and most memorably to emotionally-charged experiences. Experience Design represents a field that is the combination and consolidation of a number of design and technology specialties into a single creative platform. The different silos include industrial design, graphic design, videography, lighting, projection, theatrical effects, sound design, and architecture.
These creative specialties work together to create a highly engineered experience using sensory immersion and storytelling. These experiences are short, technologically over-the-top, and highly effective. Using story, surprises, and even a bit of perceived magic, an experience creates a change of heart through emotional response. An emotional response will have some physical manifestation: A teary eye. A breath held. A quickening pulse. The hairs on the back of your neck standing on end.
Through advancements in technology and best practices in storytelling, experiential designers have developed reliable means to elicit emotional response. By completely immersing your senses in a short story, experiential designers are effectively able to “hack” human psychology and physiology to deliver a quick release of endorphins. In just a few brief minutes, an evocative experience can deliver a tear or a chill to even the hardest soul.
Those are the sparks we need.
Applying Experiential Immersion to our Classical Music Problem
I propose we create “on-ramps” that precede any expectation of attendance at live classical music concerts. The premise of the strategy is this: it is quite a tall order to expect someone to go from zero engagement to the traditional 2+ hour concert experience. The somewhat disjointed programming coupled with the formality and trappings of a format that hasn’t materially evolved in at least 100 years presents a pretty tough challenge for attraction.
Experiential design provides us with the potential for an attractive “on-ramp” to classical music concerts. Utilizing the highly engineered methods of this work, we could create an experience that uses story and technology to deliver magic and surprises that will help us soften people’s hearts to the possibility that live classical music may enhance their lives.
Because of the particularly daunting challenge of promoting live classical music — overcoming unfamiliarity compounded by widespread undesirability — there has never been a better application for immersive experiential design to change hearts.
A short immersive experience could tell a story of the human connection of live classical music, of its ability to connect to our deepest emotions and to bring us together with others in a powerful shared encounter. We can use technology to create magical, overwhelming opportunity to convey these concepts and to attract and prepare people for attending a live concert. Going back to the spark-flame-fire metaphor, if we can create a momentary spark of attraction, our messaging and advertising will have a far greater effectiveness.
One such installation has already been created in our field, for this very purpose. The Ravinia Music Box was completed just before the pandemic. Through the lens of the life of Leonard Bernstein, this immersive theatrical experience tells a story about classical music, and its power to thrill, transport, and heal mankind.
This experience is offered for free to the Ravinia audience before concerts of all genres. Imagine you’re there (and that you are not already a classical music fan.) It is a comfortable, clear Chicago evening, and you’ve claimed your spot in the grass hours before, waiting for Sheryl Crow or the Queen tribute band to take the stage. A friend comes over to you most excited — “You just have to see this… I can’t explain it!”, motioning towards a building near the concessions. “Sure, why not?”, you say. You walk into this building, not having any expectation of what is to come or why you’re there; you’re just killing time. And then the experience begins.
Twenty minutes later, you exit the building, drying your eyes and thinking about what just happened. A nerve that sits very close to the surface in these unsettling times was touched by the story told inside that building. The story has resonated deeply with your experience and your emotions. The story was about our flawed humanity, but it also was about classical music. For the first time, you feel connected with this art form.
This story has left a permanent imprint on you, a memory that you will not forget. In the coming months, you might actually notice advertising promoting a classical music concert in your area. Having been warmed to the idea of classical music, you might just want to give it a try.
You have been touched by a spark.
More of this approach, telling different stories and with different means, could provide a tapestry of experiences across America that provide the elusive spark of attraction to classical music.
In closing
A major orchestra will spend millions of dollars every year promoting concerts, trying to ignite scattered flames of interest in the populace. But with each passing year there are fewer sparks of attraction. By leveraging experiential immersion as a critical on-ramp to engagement, we can create the sparks that will make our marketing dollars far more effective at building concert attendance.
With the right experience and on-ramps, we can attract much more of the population to try live classical music.
Once we have the sparks, we will go on to strategies for creating solitary flames using storytelling, and then growing flames into fire by taking a good hard look at the concert experience.
I will write about these next.
I would like to acknowledge the contributions of some key individuals to this series: Kate Prescott of Prescott and Associates and Tim Gallagher, Chief Strategy Officer at Heidrick and Struggles, both for their thought partnership and for inspiring so much of my thinking in this work; AJ Harbison and Nicole Beckley for their help editing and proofing; and Eric Williams for his hand in researching and contextualizing industry trends.Thanks to them all.
