How to book 251 concerts, Part 2: Charge no money

This is actually a bit nuanced. Many, maybe most solo recitals I’ve played have been without a performance fee and without an admission charge. (Again, I have a day job teaching, and performing at my school and elsewhere is considered part of my creative work and service.) Yet even so, I’ve often had to rely on personal connections, or nag, to persuade people to host concerts, at least at spiffy venues. 

Why is that? A couple of things are in play. One is that performing, even for free, lies somewhere on a spectrum between a selfless sharing of God-given talent and an exercise in self-aggrandizement. A presenter receiving a cold call isn’t sure where on that spectrum an unfamiliar performer lies. And of course, even if a performer is not being paid, 

Then—maybe more for audiences than presenters—there’s the Chivas Regal effect: the perception that you get what you pay for, and that when it comes to luxury items, where non-experts may feel insecure about making quality judgments, the inexpensive option can’t be very good.

So people’s enthusiasm for hosting Play Every Town concerts has to do with the intersection of the freeness and the story I’m telling. It’s not just that it’s free, but that I am doing a Generous and Good ambitious thing and not asking to be paid. I must be pretty good if I’m playing every town in the state...even though that’s a circular argument. The story serves as a substitute for name recognition. “Hmm, why is this person doing this for free?” is replaced by appreciation that I’m doing a grand thing and not charging for it.

On a similar note, this is framed as a Project that I am serving, not a personal concert tour. That makes it feel less like we’re asking presenters to do something for me personally. It’s “can you support this project?” not “please give me your space and attention”. Hopefully this will even convince fancier venues to waive normally hefty rental fees.

How to book 251 concerts, Part 1: Tell a simple story

 

This is not a closely-guarded trade secret. Every presenter I’ve ever engaged with has told me each show and recording needs to have an angle, a title, a theme, a hook. Unless you’re pop-star-famous, in which case your theme can be “I’m Yo-Yo Ma.”* Otherwise, without a story, few people will come to your concert.

In this project, though, the theme is central and came first; it’s not the result of a tacked-on branding effort. As a result, I’ve been almost caught off guard by how much the project resonates with people, which I think accounts for the greatest part of their eagerness to sponsor shows and  do even more: suggest venues in nearby towns, help me find local collaborators, pour on the concert publicity, and write or broadcast feature stories.

Actually there are two themes. One is: I’m going to play every town in Vermont. This has immediate appeal to the Vermonter’s characteristic pride in a small-town sense of local place. While Vermont’s communitarian ethos is easily exaggerated and often idealized, like most myths it has a basis in truth. Town Meeting Day is still a thing, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns is active (unprompted by me, they’ve apparently circulated info about my project, which has already led to offers to host concerts), and the state runs a Village Center designation program. It is equally true that the sense of locale is under threat here as everywhere by Dollar General, Netflix, and social media, and that threat makes people even more keen to get behind anything that bolsters the vitality of local centers.

The other theme is the absurdity and unsustainability of long-distance touring. I’ll say right off that I don’t pretend to have the answers. As someone with a day job (university teaching) who does not depend on performing to earn a living, I’m not telling anyone what they should do. That would be in especially poor taste now that streaming services, which pay musicians ridiculously little—Spotify is believed to pay about 1/3 of one cent per stream—have made live music once again the (by far) main source of musical income for performing musicians.

I just know that routine jet travel (among many other things) is incompatible with the survival of civilization, and with the continuation of a great portion of current life on earth. And that staying alive is, you know, an even higher priority than “making a living”. Apparently this strikes a chord with lots of other musicians and audiences. 

We’re all carrying a lot of cognitive dissonance: I don’t fly and I’m vegan, but (like virtually all US-ians) my greenhouse gas emissions are still far higher than the global average, and far above what is estimated to be the maximum for a livable future. (US average = 16 tons CO2 per person per year; current global average 4.5 tons per year; max for livable world, 2 tons.) Still, most people recognize that a lot of things are going to have to change radically, and radically quickly, or the consequences will be even more catastrophic than is already ensured.

Well, that got heavy. The footnote is light-hearted, anyway.

*There’s a great bit from an interview with composer Benjamin Boretz, where he said (something like) “To achieve real commercial success in classical music, you have to be Yo-Yo Ma. And I don’t mean that metaphorically.”

How to book 251 concerts (intro)

The title of this post may be presumptuous. As I write this, I’ve confirmed exactly 3 concerts, or 1.2% of the project total. Maybe it should be “How on earth am I going to book 251 concerts?”

But I’m well into discussion for the next dozen or so dates, and I’m surprised at how eager people are to participate. People have been quick not just to make their venues (and living rooms) available but to seek out others for me, jump on local publicity, and offer lodging. I think I can identify several things making this go more smoothly and handily than I anticipated. So, here’s my advice for booking Vermont expeditiously:

• Tell a simple story with broad appeal
• Charge no money
• Tap into key networks: music educators, piano technicians, town clerks
• Cultivate project publicity
• Have a support team

I’ll expand on each of these in its own post in the coming days.

Repertoire, Installment 2: Scarlatti post 2 (of 2)

Yesterday I wrote that on concert number n, I will play the nth Scarlatti sonata. Astute readers will have noted that this does nothing to make each concert specific to its place, which was my goal. But actually I’m going to play two Scarlattis in each program: one for the ordinal number of the concert in my state tour, and one corresponding to the town’s 2020 population rank. [note: see update 2, below](Burlington, with 44,743 residents, is no. 1; Lewis is no. 251, with 2 residents—that’s two with a “t” [see update 3, below].)

And in a nod to the number 251, I’ll precede each sonata with a brief jazz improvisation on the so-called II-V-I harmonic progression. This progression consists of the chord built on the second note of the scale, followed by the chord built on the fifth, followed by chord built on the scale’s key note. It is far and above the most common progression in jazz standards; playing II-V-I’s is a core practice ritual for jazz musicians. And despite the contrast in musical styles, it’s very much in keeping with Baroque musical practice to combine improvisation with carefully worked-out written compositions, a practice which is mostly defunct in the world of classical concertizing (though it’s slowly coming back).

For the first concert, these intros will consist of just a single three-chord II-V-I progression. For the second concert, I’ll do two II-V-I cycles, three in the third, and so on, up to 251 II-V-I’s in the final concert. Maybe. Like a lot about this project, plans may evolve.

It turns out I’m not the first to think of the jazz-Vermont 251 connection. My colleague, the indispensable Vermont jazz pianist Tom Cleary, has a wonderful II-V-I blog post in which he muses on the connections between the journey of the musician and that of the traveler looking to visit all of Vermont’s 251 towns.

UPDATE

In April 2022, Essex Junction voted to become Vermont’s tenth city, separating it from the Town of Essex and bringing the number of recognized Vermont municipalities to 252. I have a post about this here.

UPDATE 2

That bit about learning two Scarlattis for each concert? That lasted exactly two concerts. Now I’m playing just one, the nth Scarlatti sonata on Concert n. (One nice thing about a project with so many ambitious components is that I can pare them down and still have something left.)

UPDATE 3

Actually, Lewis, whose land is mostly wildlife refuge with the balance belonging to a timber company, pretty clearly has zero residents. The 2020 Census number reckoning of 2 must be an artifact of differential privacy.

Hyperactive Text Making Loco, Can’t See Straight

The project website is still evolving, but it’s live, functional, and reasonably attractive. It took a solid couple of weeks of thinking about content and organization, and learning enough html and css to code it myself. (I have issues with Content Management Systems, with anything that puts thick layers between me and the end result.) 

Funny thing though. I sent my first email announcement to 400+ personal contacts yesterday, with a link to the site. Just after I hit send, one of the recipients, my quasi-cousin Rick Perlstein, tweeted a nice plug. That prompted the realization that I had not yet set up site analytics...and I wanted to see how many hits I was getting from Rick’s tweet (he has 38k followers). Somehow, in pasting in the magic html code that enables Google to track my site traffic, I broke the most important pages on the site, leaving them unfunctional for several hours before I noticed. 

Oh well. People love to complain about modern technology, but making a goof like this and being able to fix it a few hours later beats noticing a mistake on a poster after you printed 500 copies.

Anyway I’m glad to turn most of my attention from site-building back to practicing and also booking, which is turning out to be surprisingly fun (more on that in a future post).

Repertoire, Installment 1: Scarlatti post 1 (of 2)

From the earliest woolgathering stage of this project I’ve been pondering repertoire. How much should I try to make the programs Vermonty in general? And how can each concert be specific to its particular location? (At least in some small way; I’m not planning to prepare 251 completely different programs.) 

I’m still thinking about both those things, but I’ve come up with some ideas. This is one of the more abstract and geeky ones:

Like a lot of composers, I get excited about numerology. (J. S. Bach was particularly big on it.) So for the first concert, I’m playing a lot of firsts: Beethoven’s first sonata, Bach’s first published suite (it’s actually marked Opus 1, though Bach was 46 at the time; composers did not publish much in those days), and Domenico Scarlatti’s first keyboard sonata.

Scarlatti was a contemporary of Bach (born the same year) and, like Bach, a keyboard virtuoso and insanely prolific composer. He wrote 555 mostly single-movement keyboard sonatas. That’s important here, because I had come up with the notion of playing the nth piece of some kind on the nth concert of this project. And there are just not a lot of sets with 251 or more members of anything decent for keyboard. 

So, unless and until I give up this obsessive part of an already obsessive project, I’m going to be learning almost half the Scarlatti sonatas across a few years. If that sounds ambitious: the great harpsichordist and general bad boy Scott Ross, in what is still considered the definitive recording, put all 555 sonatas on disc (35 CDs, to be exact) in just eighteen months in the mid-1980s. And he was already suffering the effects of AIDS, which would take him less than four years later.

A funny thing is that, unlike virtually anyone who is even sort of a concert pianist, I have never prepared or performed a Scarlatti sonata before.

Hello world

4 weeks and 4 days until the launch concert. Frantically trying to get the project website presentable enough that we can include it in our initial press release, which should go out this week. Eager to move past this startup stage with all its non-music administrative work, and looking forward to when I can focus on playing the concerts and getting to know people in every corner of the state through the process of booking them. 

I’m very grateful, though, for my support team of UVM Music Technology and Business major undergraduate interns—all working for free up to now—Brady Jalili, Elizabeth Indorato, and Willow Phoenix, and for the guidance of Katie Masterson, a recent MTB grad currently working for the UVM Lane Series.