Phew... honestly, one of the most stressful times in running a small music ensemble is the year planning for the coming year. As a smaller fish, you have to dodge all the big budget organisations or run the risk of getting stomped on in terms of audience, player availability, and venues.
We run about 20 concerts a year... but 4 of those are our headline chamber concerts. The main event for us in terms of concerts... we have guests from all around the country and internationally... and we have to be really careful in planning them.
The first thing is that we need the draft schedules from the national large Early Music groups... these groups will always have the first choice of players as they offer more money than any other group.... plus both of us need to keep those dates clear so that we don't lose that facet of personal professional work. That said, Early Music is still a freelance field... so, there is NO guarantee of work either!
After collecting those dates... we need to move fast to finalising our featured guest artist list... the ones that are not possible to substitute out for other players as they determine the genre type and artistic direction of the concert.
Then the next step is moving onto our preferred venue availability ... and this is also quite critical as audiences HATE going to different venues! It is weird, but if a group moves around venues... they seem to take a huge audience hit?!?!?! Strange... but it is a thing...
The last date filter is any local groups that would likely have some sort of crossover in audience due to similar genres... and many of their players in amateur and professional groups do come to our concerts as well. However, we do have an advantage here... as we tend to run way earlier than all the other local groups, and so there is generally relatively open field here.
However, there was a special wrinkle for this coming year... the local big fish symphony orchestra was going to dip their toes in our niche of Early Music with a small concert. And they had asked us to play... and even if we couldn't, it would be at the same time and day (Sunday afternoon) as our concerts... and well, we don't have the marketing budget to go up against them... so, there was a good deal of nagging them to see when they would run with their concert. But big orgs move slowly...
And from here... we generally have roughly 15 weekend options for the whole year if we are lucky... and then it is a FAST SPRINT to get replies back from the featured musicians so that we can lock down 4 dates that work with availability of artists and venue... AND are well spaced throughout the year! And I don't know if you know any creative types... they are generally really really annoyingly slow at replying to things... thankfully, I am really really annoyingly persistent with follow up emails, SMS, and if it comes to it... in-person reminders!
This year's batch of featured artists were pretty quick though ... and we had the last sprint wrapped up in about one week. And immediately after we had the venue locked in...
... but still, a stressful week of running fast in stealth before claiming dates. Pffff... a yearly event. But we have survived another one!
Now to build out the rest of the year around those four pillar concerts!
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