Marketing for classical music may very well be one of the most thankless jobs around. I can think of no better (worse?) example of a “damned if you do/damned if you don’t” kind of a situation than that experienced by these people who attempt to foment interest for a genre whose capacity to interest a wider audience becomes more difficult by the day. And rather than blame the irreversible historical processes which have led to this result, to say nothing of the endemic structural problems within the classical music business itself, it’s the marketing teams which are the first and most loudly blamed for any slump in donations and ticket sales.

Still, their often times shrill, tonedeaf, or just plain clueless approach to the promotion of classical music makes it difficult to muster much sympathy.

Case in point: The online calendar for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County. Did the person(s) who wrote this bother to actually read this before making their blurbs public?

“Filled with deep emotion, profound complexity and beautiful melancholy, Brahms’ 4th symphony finishes with a finale that will leave you speechless.”

This kind of hyperbole is self-defeating on a number of levels. Not least of which is that if somehow this kind of hype were to be effective in getting the kids to drop Lil Nas X and Lizzo, and come running to hear Brahms, they’ll more than likely be disappointed to find a work that is, at least on the surface to somebody who knows no better, a standard classical work, and a rather stodgy one at that. Then there is the performance itself which—unless Carl St. Clair has become the second coming of Mengelberg or Golovanov in the years since I last heard him—will definitely be neat, immaculately played, but hardly leave anybody “speechless” (unless they find themselves dozing off). I don’t think Brahms 4 left anybody “speechless” even while the ink was still wet. And as for Brahms’ “deep emotion” and “beautiful melancholy,” Tchaikovsky, for starters, would like to politely object, while Webern hardly saw much beauty in the composer’s “grey on grey” orchestration.

Even for somebody who enjoys classical music, Brahms can be a tough slog to understand; sort of like a musical oat bran or granola antipode to the luxurious culinary offerings of, say, Tchaikovsky or Wagner. I started listening to classical music at age 12, but couldn’t wrap my mind around Brahms until starting when I was 18. Even then, not all of it was immediately approachable or intelligible. It was only this year, for example, when I finally came around to understanding and enjoying his chamber music.

Well intentioned though it may be, marketing hype is dangerous in classical music because, let’s face it, to the uninitiated it’ll rarely live up to the actual experience of the thing itself. To a young listener reared on Top 40 and the various addictive aural hooks offered by a standard 3-minute song, what excitement can a middle-of-the-road interpretation of an approximately 130-year-old work by a composer who is on the record about prioritizing structural perfection over expressive power hold? And if the music doesn’t live up to the hype the first time, what are the chances that this non-classical listener will bother to try again?

Marketing hyperbole to leave anyone “speechless”. [www.scfta.org]