Firstly Greg Sandow is one of the first bloggers I started to read regularly, and I still do. I have met him, I admire him and respect him greatly. I think his recent post though about relevance doesn’t take an important thing into account, which is that a determination of what is relevant is not really our call to make….that belongs to our audiences and our communities….
His post The Relevance Trap tackles what I believe to be our Achilles heel which is the challenge of how to be relevant to our audiences and to our community. However Greg’s suggestion is that if we pander or see ourselves as irrelevant then we will wont achieve relevance. From the article (bold my emphasis):
First problem:
If we say we need to be relevant, then we’re also saying that — right now — we think we’re irrelevant. Which means we’ve defined ourselves as losers.
Much better to step out proudly and say, “We have something wonderful, even if other people haven’t caught on to that yet.”
Second problem:
If we worry about relevance, there’s a danger that we’ll pander to the people we wish we could please. We’re running scared. So we might do things we don’t really care about — things we might not even believe in — just to please the people we think we’re not relevant to.
There’s a double trap here. If we think we’re not relevant because our culture is superior, we’ll never get anywhere. The people we tell this to will think we’re insulting them. But if we try to jump the relevance gap — if we try to pretend that classical music isn’t really different from the culture other people share, by (for instance) drawing cute little parallels between classical composers and current pop stars — we’ll also never get anywhere, because other people know that what we’re saying isn’t true.
Third and biggest problem:
The word “relevant” has no clear meaning. So when we worry about relevance, we haven’t defined what we mean. Is classical music relevant? Well, people are going to classical concerts, and listening to classical music radio. So classical music is relevant. It’s relevant — passionately so — to the people who love it.
First and foremost, my biggest issue is if the word relevant has or even needs a clear meaning. Weas artists don’t get to be the ones to` define its meaning for our constituents, they do, and how they define it is as personal and subjective as their personal feelings towards any art form. Relevance to one person could be them staring at painting in a gallery, to another having a poster of that same painting on their bathroom wall that they barely look at but like that it’s there. There are as many definitions of relevance as there are people in this world. The real trap is when we decide what we want relevance to be for our audience, and then the only people we attract are like minded people…and that wont sustain an arts organization!
It’s up to us to work on a creative delivery system taking into account current thoughts, ideas, and what priorities our communities are focusing upon so that we have an entry point for someone to try us out so that they can determine if we are relevant…to them. That is not Pandering because if we take what is important to people into account by creatively programming and performing music from all periods, and in addition we also put in the effort to make the live experience accessible, this is creatively finding a link between the music we believe in performing, and the world today. My goal is for the concert experience to be a part of someone’s reality, not an escape from it. For it to be a basic need, and not a luxury item.
Projecting the idea that relevance is subjective, people who like the Symphony and/or Symphonic music for instance might like a certain genre, might not like it much at all but believe in supporting it, doesn’t understand it but wants their children exposed to it, might like to go once a year, only likes the sound of the Strings so goes when there’s a String soloist and so on. All of that makes it relevant to them individually so it is up to us to offer the kind of flexibility and accesibility in being able to accommodate diverse points of view which is not pandering. If I was to offer a stab at a barometer of relevance for me, then it’s when someone engages me in Wal-Mart to talk about Mozart i.e they have no issue talking about Mozart whilst they’re shopping meaning that they have accepted Music as a part of their lives, even at the most mundane of times. More than a person’s heart, we need to get into their psyche, and be constantly searching for ways to do that. It is after that we can get into their hearts. Simply proclaiming as Greg does: We have something wonderful, even if other people haven’t caught on to that yet begs the question, well why not? And what if it isn’t wonderful? The challenge is to find diverse ways to bring it to them, and not just to leave a breadcrumb trail hoping they “find” us!
In fact Greg himself reported about the Pittsburgh Symphony musicians before a concert in 2007 where they interspersed themselves throughout the lobby to individually and personally introduce excerpts of a difficult program to groups of audience members prior to the concert and what a success it was. Brilliant idea and what got me thinking as to just how important a personal connection is. That night the musical relevance was directly connected to the personal feelings the audience had for the performers because of the connection they established with them in the lobby. That was an entry point, an accommodation, a recognition that something extra was needed to achieve that relevance, it was not pandering. It also would have created a vivid memory that for many would have stayed with them, giving them long lasting feelings of the positive experience of attending a Symphony concert. We want our audience to be on a lifelong journey with us, and we have to engage with their experience to help them with that journey so they know we care about them being there, and to let them know that all of their separate reasons for attending are of equal importance to us.
Look at theRiver Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston. Their live performances and children’s program during their performances are incredibly popular, and they don’t even have their programming on the web-site! Why is that, isn’t it supposed to be about the music? Sure, after you get there, the audience completely trusts them and loves the experience which is their entry point to make the music relevant to them. The experience of how it’s delivered is the vehicle delivering them to a point of relevance, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Sometimes we get so caught up in the music that often times we forget people make a determination on whether or not we are relevant not by what we do, but also for who we are, how we do it and how we feel about them.
It’s not just about us becoming relevant to them, it’s also about them becoming relevant to us, and our efforts to create multiple entry points and accommodations to provide a pathway for as many people as possible to believe that we have relevance. I have said this many times and believe it more and more:
We are not in the music business, we are in the people business. Our job is not to perform music, performing music is our skill. Our true job is to utilize that skill to touch people’s lives. Music by itself cannot change the world, it is people who do that, but Music can change people and motivate them to change the world for the better, and that should always be our goal.
This article was shared to me at a very important moment in my term-paper writing this semester at the University of Minnesota. I am very compelled by the call to make a “Creative Delivery System” that people can relate to that also lets people navigate for themselves and choose what’s going to be important to them… but in a way that nudges them closer to our organizations in the process. I’d be honored if you’d read what I have to say and listen to your comments on it. Just let me know what’d be the best way to send it to you.