I’ve known composers who were exceptionally skillful self-promoters / marketers. And I’ve also known composers who were uninterested / awful at that part of the game. There have been times when I’ve thought a skillful self-promoting composer of mediocre music got more attention / recognition than a composer not very adept at self-promotion but who wrote ‘better’ sounding / crafted music that, in my opinion, deserved the attention much more than the savvy marketer. I’ve known musicians who have some really interesting / inventive ideas about how to present music but lack the skills on their instrument to be a truly engaging, powerful, and respectable proponent of that music, yet they insist on ‘promoting the shit’ out of themselves instead of spending time actually perfecting their craft. I’ve also known some ridiculously talented musicians who toil away in practice rooms and end up completely unnoticed despite their considerable gifts. I realize that this is subjective to a certain extent, but I’d bet that you’d be lying to yourselves if you didn’t think the same exact thing at some point in your musical career whether you’re a composer or a musician.

Can you blame the clever marketer for promoting his/her music with great skill so that they get ‘mad press’ even though you might think it’s half-baked?
Is it the ‘better’ composer’s fault for not taking the time to get their stuff out into the world?
Is there a correlation between hours spent self-promoting and the quality / skill of someone’s work?
What is the optimum balance between developing / creating / mastering your art / music / craft and promoting what you do?
Do you wish you had a manager or is it more fun to DIY?
What does the model musician in 2k10 look like?

Should we make more Charles Wuorinen cat picture memes?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In advance of Lady Gaga’s appearance on Good Morning America last Wednesday, George Stephanopoulos issued a call for questions:

To which Shia Kapos, a lifestyle reporter/blogger for Crain’s Chicago Business, responded:

Then Kristine Farra (N.B. I don’t know these people) replied to Shia Kapos’s reply to @GStephanopoulos and also made an interesting pronouncement about classical music:

I wasn’t really sure how @KristineFarra made the jump from Gaga to classical music, but it appears to be widespread public knowledge that Gaga took some classical piano lessons and may or may not be an actual classically-trained pianist. I Googled that.

Which ultimately led me to this article from the FemaleFirst website which talks about how Lady Gaga hated her real name. After she tells you why she despises her real name—she was “fed up with people yelling about 800 names at me every day”—she talks about the impact classical music had on her. There’s also this pullquote:

WHOAWHOAWHOA there, classical music cognoscenti! Before you go all ganging up on Gaga for her “grossly misguided statement” about the relationship between popular music and grand master Bach, consider for a moment that she’s digging on Bach and taking something away from it. Just cuz there are no free counterpoint or false expositions in “Just Dance”—or that she might not be able to composer a bona fide fugue—doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s some kind of source of inspiration. That’s cool. Hey, I’ve heard that a lot of new music composers these days are maybe like using their pop music influences in their music. I don’t hear Lady Gaga or Ke$ha bitching at you.

But let’s get back to @KristineFarra’s decree that classical music only gets u success after death. I know that there are some people in the classical music field who actually believe this. It’s a way for them to reconcile the fact that nobody pays attention to their music now—well, they’d tell you that it’s “overlooked.” It’s a delusion that promises them fame in the afterlife when some musicologist in the future tries desperately to find a composer from the past nobody has ever heard of so he/she can publish an article in some journal only other musicologists read in order to display their prowess in the library stacks. Then, based on this innovative research discovery, there will be renewed interest in this composer’s music. More scholarly articles will be published. People will discuss performance practices related to this composer’s music. Their obscure duet for flute and bassoon will enter both instruments’ standard repertory and be included in countless doctoral music students’ annotated bibliography dissertation projects. There will be festivals of their music. One of their melodies will inspire a composition student to compose a “Variations on a Theme by…” piece that will be performed exactly once on their university composers’ forum concert. But none of this will matter to the composer whose music all this fuss is over because they will be DEAD! Hey, whatever keeps ya going.

But now onto the second part of Ms. Farra’s tweetcree:

Talent + uniqueness + marketing = now.

That’s an equation I assume she was applying to Gaga’s supposed background as a classically-trained pianist, which she supposedly ditched to be a famous pop star now. There’s no reason that equation needs to follow logically from the I-won’t-make-it-in-classical-music-until-I’m-dead-and-gone-so-I’ll-become-a-pop-star train of logic. No, I think that equation can be applied just as well to someone who wants to try and make an impact in classical/new music. More and more folks in the industry are starting to get the hang of that. Is anything wrong with that or are we just becoming a bunch of sellouts?