Here's a great posting at Song of the Lark, a blog that I have read sporadically and need to be reading all the time.
It is a thorough takedown of a particularly egregious blog post by Greg Sandow. He starts from the straw man premise that audiences read press releases. No, they don't! Press releases are...wait for it...directed to the press. If he were seriously writing about new audience development, he'd look at orchestral marketing materials, not their season announcements.
Also, starting out with "I don't mean to beat up on X" means that you are about to beat up on X.
The rest of the carnage I leave to Emily Hogstad. Somebody please hire her to write about music. She's that good.
Well, there are times when a list of soloists might be more readable in bullet point format, like when that list includes a lot of subordinate clauses. And the blogger's own formatting might be clearer: at a couple points I couldn't tell where she was quoting Sandow or someone else.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, though, right on. Sandow can be pretty fat-headed. And converting press releases into something that might attract new listeners is - wait for it - the press's job. You ask the orchestra's publicity people to do it, they'll write awful boilerplate.