By Jim McCarthy Apr 1, 2009 2 comments

Innovation? In Classical Music?

Well, yes, of course.  In fact, it may be an area where we see an exceptional amount of innovation in coming years if only because Mother Necessity demands it.  Some major orchestras and Philharmonic societies have an average patron age that tops 60, and that’s just not a business model that’s going to keep working forever.

So leave it to Greg Sandow, a Live 2.0 favorite, to compile innovations in classical music, and here are a couple of my favorites:


“The Baltimore Symphony announced a four concert circus festival next March (one pops concert and three otherwise normal subscription programs), for which their concert hall will be transformed into a three-ring circus. This is more than a gimmick. The programming is quite serious.”

“The Pittsburgh Symphony also – before a concert where a new piece would be played – put musicians in various rooms and lobbies in the concert hall an hour before the performance, so that audience members could talk to them, and hear them play excerpts from the new piece. The audience liked this so much that the symphony management wished they’d planned to have the musicians return to the various places in the hall after the concert, to talk to the audience again.”

“Simone Young, music director of the Hamburg Philharmoniker, conducts the Brahms Second Symphony from a tower in that city, with the musicians scattered in 50 different locations. They watch her on video, and sound technicians mix the sound so we hear the whole orchestra. On another website, we can watch Young, hear the performance, and see all the musicians.”

I can’t say that I feel that all of these are likely to be effective innovation, but you can’t exactly get to effective innovation without first going through some pretty ineffective innovation.  So I applaud it all.

It also reminds me to say that innovation can come from anyplace on the value chain:  programming, marketing, performance, box office, ticketing.  Anywhere.

In fact, some of the most high impact innovations are in areas where nobody’s paying much attention.  Take Starbucks, for example.  At the time of Starbucks’ rise, no one in the coffee business was focused on physical location.  It was all about retail distribution and keeping costs (mostly on the purchase of coffee beans) low.

By focusing their innovation on a part of the value chain (the place where you buy the coffee) that others were ignoring, they succeeded.  Big time.

I predict that some organizations in classical music will do the same and become a major part of the pop culture lexicon in the next several years, while others will fiddle around with change at the margins and continue their slow, graceful decline.

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2 Comments

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