Photo sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove – legendary classical music audience builder – back in 2016 on an old blog. I’ve lightly updated these posts from their original form. This is the Final Part of Five. It is interesting to reread this article in 2023, after my own work now in the audience-building space and seeing the clever work of others in this area. I would probably be more optimistic in tone if I was writing this now, but I thought I would leave it mostly as I wrote it back then, as most things I still stand by. If you’r ..read more

Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove (my classical music hero) back in 2016 on an old blog. I’ve lightly updated these posts from their original form. This is Part Four of Five and I’ll post the rest of the story in coming weeks. If you’re just joining me, here are the other parts: A Guy Named George – Part 1: The Book That Changed My Life A Guy Named George – Part 2: The Man Who Changed My Life A Guy Named George – Part 3: The Engineer Who Brought Classical Music to the Masses? If you’ve been following along with the previous posts then you’ll know I’d ended up i ..read more

Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove (my classical music hero) back in 2016 on an old blog. I’ve lightly updated these posts from their original form. This is Part Three of Five and I’ll post the rest of the story in coming weeks. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. One of the great things about reading history is that, if a historian is a particularly good writer, a window can open on the past, and the people and situations start to rise off the page and you can picture them and understand them. But then there are other times, where the writer just doesn’t tell you what you ..read more

Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove (my classical music hero) back in 2016 on an old blog. I’ve lightly updated these posts from their original form. This is Part Two of Five and I’ll post the rest of the story in coming weeks. The genial mutton chops of Sir George Grove In my last blog post on the Book That Changed My Life, I explained how I picked up a copy of George Grove’s Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies in a second-hand bookstore. It so fired my enthusiasm for Beethoven symphonies and then classical music in general, that I lay the blame for my subsequ ..read more

Archives Bookstore – my favourite second-hand bookstore and the place where I was to pick up The Book That Changed My Life. (Photo Copyright Google 2016, sourced from Google Maps.) Note: I originally wrote this blog post series about George Grove (my classical music hero) back in 2016 on an old blog. Back then I had been in the industry a few years and was thinking about a lot of big questions like: How do we make people like classical music? How do we grow audiences? But it was theoretical back then, and not yet practical. But now after 5+ years of running an orchestra Marketing team, I have ..read more

I know it’s been a while between articles on this site, but I’ve come out of blogging semi-retirement because I’ve been fascinated by the various thought-provoking interactions between members of the classical music community as we try to process everything the year 2020 has thrown at us. At this stage, the winner for summing up the year does appear to be David Taylor, who I suspect shall be regarded as the prophet of the industry after his insightful prediction for how the year would pan out. Amongst other writers, some see hope for change, many see devastation, but one of the most well-writ ..read more

This is an outstanding piece of musical scholarship about the psychology of music, but also really important if you’re in my line of work, which is classical music marketing. I first heard about David Huron’s work a decade ago, when I read that he had done experiments that proved that audiences hated Schoenberg’s music because it was harder to follow than random music. (Which was the article that first inspired my concept of Pattern Matching, which you can read about elsewhere on this blog.) I finally bought his book about four years ago and only now – which shows the speed of my reading ..read more