The Human Factor

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My summer concert season has officially begun! Currently, I am writing from the beautiful peninsula of Door County, Wisconsin, where I am once again in residence for the Midsummer’s Music Festival. As some regular readers may recall, I spent a good part of last summer here as an intern, and this year I’m pleased to resume that position and perform on several concerts as well (Midsummer’s is an exclusively chamber music festival). Door County is a slice of paradise, and after the grueling winter I spent in Rochester, this literal change of scenery is exactly what I needed.
A few weeks prior to the start of the festival, the directors asked me if I could write an article about the ensemble for a local newspaper. It was to be a human interest story, they explained–not an advertisement for our concerts so much as a piece to provide prospective audience members with a window into the musicians’ lives. I eagerly accepted the task, but soon found it was actually rather difficult. How could I write about our festival’s world-class musicians without delving into potentially obscure classical music jargon? What angle could I take that would not only keep readers entertained, but genuinely encourage them to attend our concerts? And most importantly, how could I, Zach “too-many-adverbs” Preucil, accomplish such a feat within the prescribed “900 words or less”?!
Then, I came up with an idea. It could be hard to help prospective audience members fully understand the nuts and bolts of our daily musical activities–rehearsing, practicing, and performing–since, for most of them, those were relatively foreign experiences. But non-musical audience members could definitely relate to the things we did when we weren’t playing our instruments–and as it turns out, the group of musicians up here is certainly active in this regard. Door County is essentially a vacation community, and it boasts a myriad of mini-golf courses, beaches, restaurants, and hiking trails that our cadre of musicians frequent annually. These are the things that make Door County unique, and that any local resident is intimately familiar with.
So, I set to work. Titling the piece, “We Have Fun, Too: The Non-Musical Adventures of Midsummer’s Music Festival,” I proceeded to enumerate the musicians’ cherished recreational pursuits. I wrote about our annual miniature golf tournament, the more unusual athletic endeavors we’ve undertaken (such as the time a few of the musicians biked the entire length of the peninsula all in one day!), and even about the many pranks that have transpired over the years (one memorable highlight was when my Dad, who also plays cello in the group, “accidentally” threw our pianist’s music over the side of a ferry and into Lake Michigan; he had, of course, copied the part in advance and had a replacement ready to go). Altogether, the article was a lot of fun to write, and I was heartened when several concert patrons mentioned it to me upon its publication. Everyone had really enjoyed it, and felt that they knew the musicians better after learning of their non-musical pastimes.
I share this not to boast of my writerly prowess (although if you’re interested in checking out the piece, you can read it here), but to underline the importance of emphasizing the “human factor” when searching for ways to relate to an audience. It’s no secret that many aspects of a classical music performance can be somewhat alienating to audiences, creating an communicative gap between performers and their listeners. One of our primary responsibilities as classical musicians is to seek ways to bridge that gap, and I was really glad I found a way to do that with our ensemble. Of course, not all of us have the opportunity to publish an article about our group (or have a group that regularly participates in local recreational pursuits), but considering we all have lives outside of our music (even if it’s simply watching TV after practicing all day), there is surely some shared interest we can take advantage of when reaching out to our listeners. We have more in common with them then we might think.