the importance of publicity

I have a stack of flyers and a couple of posters for my next concert and must distribute the remainder in appropriate places. I feel very guilty when I find publicity after a concert that I never got round to giving out.

All too often I’ve been in a choir that has performed ‘away’ and got a very disappointing audience because there was not enough local advertising for it. It can’t be emphasised enough how important this is. Recently a distinguished choir performed in a local church, in an area where a large number of music lovers live. Their carefully themed programme was promoted by a poster with a complex design, produced in several sizes at I would imagine significant expense and effort. The church only received posters a few days beforehand – too late for the congregation to see them when they came to church on Sunday – and late in the afternoon on the day of the concert choir members were seen asking for posters to be displayed in local shops (there having been none before). As at least two people connected with the choir lived near the church, it would not have been hard to get one of them to distribute some publicity a couple of weeks beforehand.

So I’ll make an offer here. If you are putting on a choir concert in lower Lansdown, and need some publicity to be done, I am willing to help get posters into local businesses, and/or to put flyers through the doors of known local music lovers. I would only ask in return that if I am on your books as a singer who is available to boost numbers, (for example because I have sung with you in the past) that I remain there and perhaps get an invitation to sing at an appropriate point in the future.

I’m singing Duruflé’s Requiem a couple of times in early November and I make my annual appeal. If you encounter vocal scores of this work stamped as belonging to St. John’s Bathwick, the church is waiting for them to be returned, as they were borrowed some years back and haven’t been seen since. It is as wrong to hold on to this set of scores as it would be to steal silver from the church worth over £200 (the cost of replacement). They can be left at either of the Bathwick churches, no questions asked. No one would want in their choir library music which rightfully belonged elsewhere.