1. Know your “customer”. Since you can not contact everyone, you have to make a choice. Gather information about your potential prospects and evaluate whether or not you could fit their plans. Contacting an opera festival to book a violin-piano duo is a non-sense. With a good targeting, you will avoid plenty of rejection and loss of time and money.

2. Contact the right person at the right time. All the festivals or seasons have their own schedule. For each potential organizer you need to know who handles the booking of artists and when are the good times to contact him/her. Sending a promotional kit to the wrong contact or after the deadlines often lead to the same result: At best your kit will be forgotten in a drawer somewhere, at worst it will be immediately discarded.

3. Have something to sell. Put yourself in the presenter’s shoes: Why should they book me and not someone else? What are the benefits for him/her? What am I offering? Would my proposal be really interesting for a presenter?

4. Prepare your pitch call. Write down what you have to say in order to not babble on the phone and stay understandable. Moreover, you will not forget anything. Practice with a friend to be comfortable with your pitch calls. This seems unnecessary, you do know your product well, but believe me, you can easily be disturbed and lose the thread.

5. Be persistent without becoming boring. You’ll rarely reach the person you want at you first call. You can leave messages, but most presenters get far too many cold calls and are far too busy to return them. 3 calls are enough: if after 3 attempts to interest them you still get nothing, move on. Keep the presenter on your mailing list and invite him/her to performances in his/her area and send information about the major events of your career. I call this the passive prospection.

Booking concerts is an exhausting process. We musicians have not been trained for it and we must learn to introduce and sell ourselves. This is far from easy, and for some of us became a full time job. But some have achieved great carrers while being self-managed, so why not you?

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My first act was to open up space for a deep introspection. Trying to discover what direction I really want to take, what is really interesting me in the pianist’s job. In addition to the tip of the iceberg, namely concerts, I discovered that transmission of knowledge is an area which is attracting me very much. So I developed a series of workshops around the piano and music of our time, in parallel with traditional master-classes, and refocused on educational programs as a core activity.

These last six months, I also discovered lots of things. Newly self-managed artist, I must say that this experience, even if extremely rewarding, is not a picnic. It is a totally new aspect of the job for me and I did a lot of rookie mistakes which have made me feel a little ashamed. Booking concerts, contacting presenters, selling myself, all this is far from easy, even with a wide experience in the music business. When not swimming (sinking?) in, the management may seem pretty simple. When confronted to it, we get lost easily, and you get discouraged very quickly.

I also found time to adjust my repertoire, at last! Some scores out and some new pieces as Debussy’s studies or Incises of Boulez (whose birthday was yesterday!). New concertos, like Bartok third, enrich my repertoire with orchestra. Sometimes, spring cleaning is good! Spring Cleaning for my technique also, since I practiced a lot and radically changed my technique (I wanted it for a while !). The result is very interesting and I hope you’ll see this in a few months!

These last six months are very positive. I was finally able to think on and confront myself to the music world as it is in reality. I do not regret at all this “suspension” of (public) activity . Occasionally you need to take a bit of distance and change the way of doing things, and that’s what I wanted to do during this break.

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From Gramophone to The Sun, there’s only a short step… The free artist, making his own choices disappeared beneath marketing. To reach a new public and sell more than ever is one of our leaders’ main ideas. In our world of image, the most important is not the contents anymore but the container. In their race, the labels do not bet anymore on musician’s quality of interpretation but on his appearance, and his actor’s skills.

Anna Netrebko in a famous quizz show is, according to Deutsche Grammophon, a success: the head of international marketing points out that 70.000 discs were sold in the two months following the broadcasting. But is this really a place for Anna Netrebko?

They now sell us Grimaud’s lovely face, the lips of Renee Fleming, the plunging neckline of Angela Gheorghiu, and so on… Arièle Butaux, producer for France Musique, stated: “at equal talent, a pretty girl with blue eyes will prevail over an ugly oily-haired girl.“ And went on: “And what is certain is that in the 21st century, Clara Haskil would not pursue a career!”. This proves that with higher talent, a chubby person does not have any career opportunity.

In our perfect world, the box-office diktat gained the upper hand on musical thought. It’s now essential to sell discs. The time when the record label bet on an artist and let him progress fifteen or twenty years is behind us. People need stars. A young singer enters the marketplace, O.k., but he must sing all the repertoire immediately. Producers make him believe that he can do it, and finally he looses his voice.

Today, there is no time to wait. Everything is going faster and faster, but towards where? We need time to build and grow a repertoire, but nobody wants to wait anymore. “It becomes difficult to think about the meaning of a music when reigns the race for contracts and planes. But perhaps we cannot mix anymore the current life style with the internal rhythm of the serious music.” said Rostropovitch. But who wants to know the meaning of a music? Who wants to understand music? Surely not a large majority of professionals, who only see in it one simple product which can bring them glory as well as money.

The keyword now is : marketing. You have to sell. Tickets for example: so you’re frequently asked to play a program with only classical hits, and pay attention to communication: Your career depends on it. A new spirit was born, art is becoming a huge company adapted to the customer. I hope that all is not lost and art is not a company. Should it be otherwise, then art would be dead.

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Indeed, once the conservatory is over, we are confronted to stewardship problems. Most of the time, not enough supported, we must manage everything by ourselves: solicit concerts organizers, manage press relations, deal contracts…

However, at school, we never heard about this at all. I know our studies are already very heavy but a little training to music management wouldn’t have been too much and would have enabled many of us to save some precious time.

I’m thus asking the question: Why did no one have the brilliant idea to integrate management modules or an overview of the different jobs we’ll deal with through our career and which will help us in our course. I think it has become essential in our education.

When will there be extra courses in conservatories?

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