Facepalm

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Found all over the place, on social media, in email, and elsewhere:

Crude as a gut punch, tender as a kiss, Verdi’s Requiem translates the medieval Latin mass for the dead into the vivid and visceral idiom of Italian opera.

Very seriously, who writes this stuff? That first clause is ridiculous, inaccurate, a likely turn-off to potential audience members, and frankly embarrassing. SF Symphony can certainly hire better people than this....well, wait, maybe they just can't afford to these days.

 

Mysteries of Publicity

Throwback Sunday?

• I'm reminded of an older post in which I lamented that I'm much more likely to attend a concert if I know what you're playing. I've now received two emails from a small chorus that not only don't tell you what they're performing, except in general terms, but which don't contain a link back to the group's web site. And if you look up that web site, it doesn't even contain a list of composers whose works will be performed. This...is not a way to get people to your concerts.
• Email from a different small organization identifies it as "the San Francisco Bay Area’s premier professional chamber choir." Did this come from Volti? SFCA? the chorus of PBO or American Bach? No, it came from a chorus that has not yet performed in public. This, too, is the kind of publicity that makes me want to stay home.
• Lastly, I received a Facebook invitation to a concert, but the page for the concert.... doesn't appear to mention who the performers are. Come ON. 

This is really basic who/what/where/when stuff, ya know?? Check out my publicity basics page for basic information about publicity!

Publicity and Its Discontents

If you're a smallish, but reasonably well-funded, opera company, why would you go to the trouble of printing a fancy eight-page, folding, color brochure for your four-opera season....and omit any mention of who the singers are? Yes, I am looking at you, Opera San José.

I mean, the question applies to any opera company, and it seems inexplicable. For one thing, the casting was included in the season announcement in March. (Although I have to say that it's weird that the title character of one of the operas has not yet been announced, and I'd bet that there are many, many lyric baritones with this particular role in their repertory.) For another, this is a company that largely features singers whose careers are centered in the Bay Area. The opera audience knows these folks, and honestly, the presence of certain singers IS enough to get me to a performance that's 50 miles away.

Another thing about this brochure is that the artwork for each of the four operas completely dominates the sections of the brochure dedicated to the opera. I'd prefer more information and less graphic design, as in, tell me who the singers are.

Don't Be This Small Non-Profit 3

In 2018 and 202, I posted about issues I had with trying to renew my membership in a small nonprofit organization (SNP) and then about what I saw as some issues in that organization.

Today I received this from SNP, and JFC. This organization hasn't followed basic principles of record keeping, considering that they are missing legally required documentation. I really have to wonder what will happen when they've been audited. I'll note, in passing, that Pro Publica's Nonprofit Explorer's last 990 for this organization is from 2011. It's possible that the IRS is behind in processing whatever they've submitted, but I wonder whether anyone on the board knows what a 990 is.

When we, your 2023 Board, took the reins this year, 3 of the 6 of us noticed an alarming amount of past mismanagement and financial discrepancies. The other 3 Board members have since resigned. The three of us remaining have been working hard to investigate and clean up our compliance and financial issues and had hoped it was all a case of innocent naivete on the part of past boards and not the intentional Theft by Transfer that our organization has been threatened with in recent months.

Unfortunately, this is not or at least not entirely the case. SNP has been the target of an intentional, attempted takeover event from inside the organization. We are not at liberty to say who at this point in the criminal investigation, but we can tell you that the core breach happened in the last half of April this year and the only people with access to our accounts were 2023 and 2022 board members. We are frustrated, angered, disappointed that someone(s) in our community who we elected to protect this organization has broken the trust we all put in them.

We know that member names were taken, along with email addresses, and any other contact information you supplied to SNP; phone, physical address, etc. Due to how our web host works, we do not have reason to believe that individual credit card numbers have been stolen, but our thief(s) have, since the breach, had the ability to charge/refund charges if you had payment on file with us. So if anything suspicious shows up, please let us know.

Separate from this breach, SNP is also missing a great deal of legally required documentation from the past 5-7 years. If anyone, past board member or otherwise, has any copies of old board meeting minutes and especially financial records, please send them to either [email address1] or [email address2].

While this breach of trust from some of our own is very serious, we and our legal counsel know SNP has the law on our side and we are working hard to bring about accountability and ensure the security of this organization and your information going forward. 

SFS Ticketing Update

 

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by me

So I managed to buy my SFS tickets today, on the last day of their free ticket offer. The process was painful:

1. Log in.
2. Proceed to subscription page.
3. Pick the day you want your tickets on. (Note: Fridays are more expensive than Saturdays, so I picked Saturday.)
4. Click the button for the subscription you want.
5. Pick your first choice section. (Note: You can't choose your seat because people who already hold subscriptions get to keep their seats. So until their orders are committed and fulfilled, SFS doesn't know which seats are unavailable and can't give you options.) 
6. Pick your backup section, in case your first choice is full.
7. Click Add to Cart. That takes you to your cart.
8. Scroll to the Add another series button and click it.
9. Go through steps 3 through 8 again. And again. And again. Because there's no way to select all four series and sections that you want at one time.
10. Select a couple of other concerts you want to see. Go through section choice flow for each of them.
11. Decide you can't stand it any more even though you know your missed something you want to buy.
12. Realize that there was nothing about free tickets, even though the SFS web site says that when you buy 18 or more tickets, you get eight free tickets. (Click through and scroll down.)
13. Call the box office, where what you find out leaves you shaking your head.
1. The free tickets aren't offered as a discount on your subscription, that is, buy 28 concerts, get eight of them free.
2. They are add-ons. Sometime after you buy, you get a voucher or something like that enabling you to request eight additional tickets at no charge. Yay, you can take friends free. 
3. That's nice, but none of the advertising makes this clear, nor does the web site.
14. Buy your seats.
15. Write this blog post.

The Cardinal Sin

Okay, maybe it's not the worst, but it's pretty bad: your organization provides a contact email on your web site, in an email, or on a brochure, but you don't reply to email sent to the address.

Friends, Romans, arts organizations: don't do this.

It's like lying to your patrons, by implying that the email address is monitored. Your patrons buy tickets and make donations to your organization. They are people you want to keep happy. If they have a question or comment or even a complaint, they deserve an answer from you.

You undermine their trust by not doing this, and you might piss them off enough that they reduce their donations or ticket purchases, or stop entirely. (An organization I donated to for years and years didn't respond to two direct communications I sent them, one of which included a donation. My third letter got a perfunctory apology from its executive director, the addressee of the second letter, and I have not donated since.)

So: if you have a contact email, make sure you read and reply to comments from people who take the time to contact you. It's a great way to earn the trust of the people who care about your organization.

CSO Boasts About Its Music Director's Disinterest in 20th c. and Contemporary Music

Speaking of messages from orchestras, the Chicago Symphony's latest promotional email includes this gem:

(Text in screenshot reads: Riccardo Muti, Champion of Italian Repertoire. View: One of the great benefits of having an Italian music director is that he is no more than one or two degrees of separation from great Italian composers himself. A living disciple of Arturo Toscanini through his own teacher, Antonino Votto, Riccardo Muti has conducted the CSO in many symphonic and operatic works by Italian composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Cherubini, Rossini, Verdi, Boito, Catalani, Martucci, Puccini, Mascagni, Giordano, Respighi and others.)

Wow, what a list: while Mascagni and Giordano lived into the 1940s, that's about as conservative list of Italian composers as I can think of. They're all popular opera composers, and sure, Muti is great in that repertory (although amazingly rigid about 19th c. practices such as ornamentation), but it's as though his aesthetic interest barely exists past about 1924.

What about Nono, Dallapiccola, Berio, Scelsi, Donatoni, Sciarrino, Scodanibbio, and many others?? Well - the CSO has had some of the most boring and conservative programming of any major US orchestra over the last few years, so....

Dear Mr. Gelb:

Lincoln Center Plaza Fountain

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Dear Mr. Gelb:

I received the following appeal from the Met today:

Support the Met Now and Protect Its Future

Dear Ms. Hirsch,

As you know, we recently had no choice but to cancel performances in order to protect our audiences, artists, and staff from the spread of the coronavirus. As devastating as it is to have to close the Met, this was the rare instance where the show simply couldn’t go on. 

But we are determined to weather this storm and are looking ahead to the 2020–21 season, opening in September, since it is now clear that we will not be able to resume operations before the scheduled end of our current season in May. The financial threat to the Met is immense, and we cannot ensure the future of Met performances or seasons without your help. I am writing today to ask you to consider making an urgent gift to the company to help us address the overwhelming economic implications of the pandemic.
In these extraordinarily challenging times, opera and the arts offer solace to a frightened nation and our fellow citizens around the world. That’s the reason why last week we began streaming a different encore performance from our Live in HDseries each night, for free. It’s a reminder that the arts are part of the soul of a civilized society, and without cultural institutions like the Met, our lives would be diminished. 

While we are cutting expenses in every way possible in the coming months, including my own decision to take no salary, we need your help now. The stock market is down, but it will rebound. The Met will recover too, but only with the assistance of our most loyal fans and donors.  

I am forever impressed and grateful for your passion and support. We need it now, more than ever before. Thank you. 

With great appreciation for your help,

And my answer is that you can fuck right off. Because the right way to do this would have been to tell your audience members that you want to continue paying the orchestra, chorus, and union crew members, so please send money to help. Instead, you laid them all off, effective the end of March, and then you sent out an appeal for $60 million to tide you over.

As I'm sure you're aware, the Met's Board of Directors (or Trustees, or whatever the title is) is packed with wealthy people, worth millions to billions. They're the ones who should be coughing up the money. I mean, to a billionaire, $60 million is fairly small change. Former Mayor Bloomberg just dropped at least $500 million on a presidential campaign that was likely intended just to keep Sanders and Warren out of the White House.

He's an opera fan, which I know because I passed him in the halls at the Met a couple of times on my last visit. Suggest you have a chat with him, stat, instead of me, well-off wage earner who lives 2500 miles away.

Yours truly,

Lisa Hirsch

Note to Publicists

After I've told two of your publicists that no, I am not going to post about your organization, product, or service, I'd rather not hear from a third.

I'm also going to suggest that you be careful about whose endorsements of your organization, product, or service you quote. If I have a justifiably low opinion of the endorser or that person's institution, well, you might find me writing a blog post about that.

Blind Faith

It's best if your web site lists the works you are playing on a particular concert. I can't begin to tell you how much I won't buy a ticket if you don't even tell me in advance which composers are on the program.

An Email Error You Don't Want to Make

I've gotten emails recently from two organizations that left me dismayed at the lack of thought that went into the email.

One is from an extremely famous contemporary music ensemble. Their name does not appear anywhere in the email. Oh, wait - actually, it's in 4 point type in the email footer,  next to their street address and below the email preferences and unsubscribe links. And if you're familiar with the group, you can probably guess from a couple of links in the body of the email which group it comes from.

The other came from an equally famous presenting organization. You have to open the email to see who it's from; nothing in the subject line or sender makes it clear.

Organizations, don't do this. The people you send email to should be able to tell from their inbox who the mail is from! You can't count on their knowing the name of the artistic director or director of marketing. PUT YOUR ORGANIZATION'S NAME IN THE FROM FIELD OR ON THE SUBJECT LINE. It's really not that hard.

Don't Be This Small Non-Profit

[July 14: Pushing this to the top of the blog because of follow-ups.}

Stuff that happened to me when I tried to renew my membership in a small non-profit organization (SNP, hereafter); an object lesson in how not to treat your members.

1. I received a renewal notice by email on February 2, 2018. I sent a check to SNP on or around February 8, because I had canceled my credit card owing to a fraudulent charge and I hadn’t received the new card yet. The check went to the post office box listed on SNP's web site and in the email I received.

2. February 16 - I received another emailed renewal notice. I replied to the email, which came from info@SNP. I did not receive an answer.

3. March 4 - I received another emailed renewal notice. This time, I forward that email and a reply to membership@SNP. I did not receive an answer.

4. March 7 - I received another emailed renewal noticed. This time, I forwarded that email and a reply to treasurer@SNP. I did not receive an answer.

5. March 23 - I sent a printed letter to the president of SNP at an address where I thought the president would receive it. I was confused about something and sent it to the wrong address, but it got to the president anyway. (Small world effect, here.)

6. April 3 - I hadn't heard anything, so I sent email to membership@SNP, president@SNP, vicepresident@SNP, and treasurer@SNP just saying I had a question and could anyone answer it.

7. April 9 - I heard from the president by email, who had gotten my printed letter. The president was very apologetic and promised to contact the treasurer on my behalf.

8. April 25. - The president checked back with me to see whether I had heard from the treasurer. I had not yet heard from the treasurer, who could not find 2 minutes before heading out of town a couple of weeks ago to send an email saying "I'm on this."

Apparently my case will be discussed at the Board meeting on April 29, nearly three months after I got the first renewal notice. My check hasn't cleared my bank yet, nor has the envelope containing the check come back to me.

Update: May 3 - The Board meeting was on April 29, and several days later, nobody has gotten back to me about the status of my membership renewal.

Things that went wrong:

• Organization says it's okay to send a check to a physical mail box that nobody monitors.
• Organization has multiple email addresses listed on its web site that nobody checks.
• Officer of the organization is asked to get in touch with a member, doesn't do it in a timely fashion.
• Renewal process, which should be simple, stretches out over three months even though member attempted to pay on a timely basis.
• Update: Board meets, is supposed to talk about this, nobody gets back to member with status report even after she sends an email the day after the meeting.

As I said, don't be this organization. No, I'm not going to tell you which organization this is.

Update: July 14, 2018

• On April 30, I followed up.
• On May 3, having heard nothing, I sent another follow-up.
• On May 8, the president of SNP asked me to tell her again where I had sent my check. Note: she had this in writing and I had sent it to the address on the org's web site.
• I told her I'd just pay my dues on line.
• On May 10, SNP finally told me they couldn't find my check and also that they were changing the PO Box address because the person who checks it does check regularly but doesn't communicate regularly with SNP. What. The. Fuck.
• Today, I got an email transmitting links to the quarterly newsletter of SNP, and it starts "Normally, the newsletter is only delivered to members whose dues are current, but we want to make sure that everyone is included in the excitement leading up to [event]. Enjoy this issue and plan for [event, which conflicts with an event that it's more important for me to go to]." I honestly can't tell what the problem here is: their database still thinks I haven't paid, or their cover email is totally guilt-trippy and ham-handed. I'm still trying to decide whether to send outraged email, curious email, ignore, or what.
• SNP did indeed switch the contact address, which is now in a different city and state.

While I'm not going to disclose the name of SNP, it has 137 members in it because it does nothing to increase membership....and there are a few obvious things it could do. 

Pet Peeve

I've got one (I know, you're thinking "SHE HAS 27 PET PEEVES WE HEAR ABOUT THEM ALL THE TIME SHUT UP ALREADY"):

Organizations that send me email, usually repeatedly, and hard copy mail about their productions.

Especially when I'm a subscriber and I have a season subscription. Yes, I'm looking at you, Shotgun Players (I already have my tickets for Dry Land, yet here's an oversized postcard for it) and you, San Francisco Opera. I already paid for my subscription tickets and made healthy donations to you both!

You can work around this by segmenting your postal mailing list! I don't need post cards telling me about Cav-Pag / Arabella / Rusalka / Carmen / Tosca / Roberto Devereux / Wonderful Life / Orlando. (Or the Domingo concert, which I will not be attending.) Isn't there some way to opt out??

How to Construct a Press Release

I have in my hot little hands a press release that is making me slightly crazy. It's got the usual copy about how fabulous the organization is, plus various bios and a fair amount of information about the works to be performed.

But - and this is a pretty big but - I had to scroll through about four and a half screens of text to get to the most critical information in the press release: dates and locations of the performances.

Put that stuff at the top! I read performer bios in programs! A mere listing of the performers at the top of the press release is sufficient, with maybe two lines of bio at most! The more I had to scroll, the more I wondered how far I'd have to scroll until I found what I was looking for.

Noting in passing that this is the second time I've blind-itemed this org in the last year, and there was a third post I never wrote, when a press release of theirs let slip information that I hope they had permission to let slip.

We Can't Scare People Off

I gotta say, I am discouraged to see concert write-ups like this on the SFS web page:

DVOŘÁK’S CELLO CONCERTO WITH THE SF SYMPHONY

Conductor Krzysztof Urbański leads an exhilarating program of virtuosic showpieces, featuring Dvořák’s celebrated Cello Concerto performed by Sol Gabetta, whose “wit, aristocratic poise, and elegance” (The Herald) lend themselves perfectly to the elaborate grandeur of this romantic work. Then, hear Mozart’s charming overture to his iconic opera, The Magic Flute.

It doesn't even mention the Lutoslawski. Look, consider actually OWNING that there's a recent piece on the program and then get excited about it! It's a wonderful piece! People will enjoy hearing it!

Especially since, you know, there's all this stuff in the email publicity and in the program book about how cool it is to have conductors playing music from their native lands (or whatever phrasing it is that you're using). I look forward to hearing Charles Dutoit conduct some Frank Martin one of these days, y'know?

Why???

I got a rather odd email this morning, one that is unique in my experience, from a Bay Area organization whose mailing list I've been on for a long time. Years, not sure how many.

Here's the text of the email:

We're tuning up for the new season and we noticed that you haven't opened one of our emails in several months.


We understand that everyone needs a break sometimes, and that you probably get a symphony of emails, so we've made it easier for you by taking you off of our email list. 


We would love to welcome you back if you'd like to continue hearing about our phenomenal concerts, performers, educational resources, and music. Just click here to resubscribe:

They must consider the information they will get about people who re-up to be more important than the downsides. But this isn't something I would do, for these reasons.

1. Every email sent by Constant Contact or Mail Chimp or other mailing list management software has an unsubscribe link. Presumably, people who really don't want to receive the emails will click that link.

2. It costs the sender little or nothing to send the email. I admit, I have not checked to see what the paid versions of mailing list software cost, so maybe I am wrong about this.

3. It definitely costs the recipient nothing to receive; email providers don't have quotas on mail you receive, though they may have storage fees.

4. Honestly, they really don't know why someone isn't reading their marketing emails. If the situation is that a family member is ill, or someone has died, or the person is traveling the world and can't attend concerts in the Bay Area, well, throwing them off the mailing list is a big mistake. The mind-reading, we-know-better-than-you-do aspect of this is mildly disturbing.

5. Describing your own concerts as phenomenal: quote a critic or it's not true. I would find complimentary quotes much more persuasive than self-description.

6. Possibly most importantly, does it make sense to call attention to the fact that these emails phone home? I know perfectly well about this function, and even I got that creepy "YOU ARE WATCHING ME" feeling from receiving this email. It is possible that most of the other recipients of this morning's mail don't know that the emails they receive send status back to the sender.

7. If you're sending email like this, an org might as well ask why its emails aren't being read, the equivalent of the question you get when you actively unsubscribe. Wouldn't that be useful to know?

I'm actually somewhat surprised to have received this particular email, because I've read plenty of emails from the org in the last year - but those were probably all press releases. I think it's a while since I attended one of their concerts, alas, but one does have to make choices. 

I don't think I'd do an auto-purge of this type myself; it seems like a gamble to get a response, or attention, or something, from your potential audience. I don't remove people from my dojo's mailing list because I send email to it only three or four times a year, and I figure people can unsubscribe if they don't want the mail - and they do, too: I get three to five unsubscribes annually. (Okay, if I knew someone had died.....)

So, in short, this seems like a gamble and not necessarily one that will pay off. Anyone else have thoughts?

When Databases Don't Communicate

I received the following somewhat amusing email from San Francisco Opera:

We noticed you were looking into Rigoletto. We're thrilled to present a dazzling cast under the baton of Music Director Nicola Luisotti, who infuses this classic masterpiece with "breathless urgency" (San Francisco Chronicle). Home | Contact Us

Dear Lisa, We noticed you were looking into Rigoletto. We're thrilled to present a dazzling cast under the baton of Music Director Nicola Luisotti, who infuses this classic masterpiece with "breathless urgency" (San Francisco Chronicle). We look forward to seeing you at the Opera House soon!

LISTEN TO THE MUSIC BUY TICKETS Questions? Our friendly and knowledgeable Box Office staff are here to help!

Only somewhat amusing, because

1) It's ambiguous whether this is trying to sell me a ticket, but I bought a Rigoletto ticket last year
2) most people don't understand how an email such as the above even gets sent
3) some percentage of SFO customers will find it upsetting to receive email such as this

Either I was logged in to the SFO web site when I last looked around at who was singing what or the site deduced my identity from a tracking cookie. That information went to the marketing software that sent me the email above, but there is no point in this process where the ticketing database is checked to see whether the target (that's me) already has a ticket. (I think, because it's ambiguous.)

I'll probably be sending this email along to the right person at SFO to suggest adding such a check, but in the meantime, I've got an addition to the publicity basics page: Don't Make Your Customers Think You Are Stalking Them.

Stop, Already!

Found in my in-box, and this is just a sample:

• Her program, the complete Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, is one of the most beloved works in the piano repertoire (SF Performances)
• Best known for the beloved children’s novels A Series of Unfortunate Events he wrote as Lemony Snicket – and which he has recently adapted into an acclaimed series for Netflix – Daniel Handler brings his relentlessly mischievous style to a new play for adults. (Berkeley Rep) 
• Violinists Itzhak Perlman, Cho -Liang Lin, concertmaster of Philadelphia Orchestra David Kim and Midori have put together special video greetings to celebrate the centennial of their beloved teacher - Dorothy Delay.  (Dorothy Delay tribute)
• Members and alumni of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program will also perform a variety of beloved arias, duets and ensembles. (LA Opera)
• The Princeton Symphony Orchestra (PSO) is a cultural centerpiece of the Princeton community and one of New Jersey’s finest music organizations, a position established through performances of beloved masterworks, innovative music by living composers, and an extensive network of educational programs offered to area students free of charge. (PSO)
• For the first time, this original jackets edition brings together all of the recital albums this beloved American mezzo-soprano recorded for Columbia Masterworks from 1974 to 1998.  (ArkivMusic)
• The Bay Area’s beloved former SF Symphony violist Geraldine Walther, now violist of the world-renowned Takács String Quartet, will join forces with superb pianist David Korevaar to perform the Chopin Sonata for viola and piano, Schumann’sMarchenbilder and David Carlson's True Divided Light, commissioned for NVCM.  (Noe Valley Chamber Music)
• The beloved biblical story of Noah's ark set to music,
  featuring nearly 500 performers of all ages 
  at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on May 6 (LAO - again)
• Beloved Virtuoso Kyung Wha CHUNG Returns to Carnegie Hall,
  Tackling the Highest Peak:
  The Complete Solo Sonatas & Partitas of J.S. BACH in a Single Evening (Kathryn King Media)
• First are the beloved outdoor Symphony for the Cities concerts from July 3 to 9. (Minnesota Orchestra)
• Don’t miss Sonya Yoncheva as one of opera’s most beloved heroines, the tragic courtesan Violetta, opposite tenor Michael Fabiano as her lover, Alfredo. (Metropolitan Opera)
• The Aram Khachaturian International Competition has aimed at identifying talented young musicians since 2003 when it launched as part of the centennial celebrations for the beloved Armenian composer. 
• The composer, a true Romantic, became desolate and enraged, hatching a plan to return to France and murder his former beloved, her new suitor, and her mother, then kill himself. (Boston Symphony Orchestra - describing Hector Berlioz)

We need a few more adjectives.

Awaiting the Correction.

An opera company I won't name just made an entertaining error in the email announcing their 2017-18 season. And I can tell you exactly what happened, too.

The email announces four operas. One of them is by a composer who is also represented in this year's repertory. The header area of the announcement names Opera A, which will be done next year. The body of the email, with details about each of next year's operas, lists Opera B...which is in the 2016-17 season.

I'm pretty sure that they used last year's season announcement as a template and somehow didn't update all of the text in the body of the email. The composer name was the same, the costumes might be interchangeable (depending). The link in the header goes to the 2017-18 season, the link in the body goes to 2016-17.

The moral of the story is that your mailing list management program contains a feature that allows you to send drafts to yourself and anyone else you think should proofread outgoing email before you send it to the thousands of email addresses on your mailing list. You should use this feature liberally.

I obviously don't know exactly what happened; maybe someone inadvertently skipped that step or maybe someone thought they were sending the email to 10 people rather than the whole mailing list. But I spotted the error about 2 minutes into reading the email, and probably a few other recipients did too.

I Can't Even.

Good grief:

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - The San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) begins Spring Semester with a new logo and brand that showcases the boldness, vibrancy, and relevance of the Conservatory's reimagined curricular initiatives in connected learning. The new brand was revealed in a new website, sfcm.edu, designed for prospective students and their families by capturing the passion of current students, alumni, and concertgoers attending the Conservatory.

"We need to think about brand because we need to model for our students how they should think as artists," says SFCM President David H. Stull. "What's interesting about this new brand is the transparency, clarity, and the aspects of whimsy, joy, and creativity that come forward in a beautiful, animated logo. This new direction serves as an example for our students as they develop marketing savvy through a curriculum that highlights the professional development necessary to succeed as a musician in the twenty-first century."

That animated logo, and the "marketing savvy" students will develop, are surely just as important as who will teach them and the gazillion hours of practice they'll put in.

More grief, or something:

Replacing existing professional biographies, faculty profiles were created in a "question and answer" format revealing faculty members' personalities and diverse interests, in addition to highlighting their musical achievements. The new content was written to provide prospective students richer and more robust information to assist them in selecting their teachers.

And yet...you can't tell whether you're a good match with a teacher until you get into the studio with the teacher.

UPDATED, Thursday, 2/2/2017: Okay, I got some question after Drew McMcanus linked to this on Facebook. The press release is full of marketing language about the impact of a new logo and the Q&A format for teacher biographies.

Look, I do not think most people can market themselves into a career in music. If your goal is to play in an orchestra, you practice like crazy and still have a tiny chance of making it. If you want to play chamber music, you practice like crazy and form a group, or hope to join an existing group.

This is all really hard: in the end, if you're a good enough musician, having the right publicity and marketing can help, but that if? It is huge. You can't focus on marketing and hope to make it.

So the question arises: should an institution such as SFCM have this much of an apparent focus on marketing? Tell me what you think.

Below the cut, the full text.