Trends: Free for All

By Jacqueline Taylor and Omus Hirshbein

Our idea was, and remains, a simple one: to make it possible for any person to walk up to the box office of a great concert hall, ask for excellent seats to a recital by a world-class musician, and be given the tickets for free. With “Free For All at Town Hall,” a series of four concerts in New York early in 2003, we did just that. The diverse and wildly enthusiastic audiences in our first season were evidence enough that more people are interested in classical music—but evidence also that one of the reasons we don’t see them at live concerts today is that tickets are often too expensive. While we are not on a mission to “save” classical music (it doesn’t need to be), and we don’t believe we have found a cure-all for the myriad challenges facing classical music presenters today, we do think that free concerts are an excellent way of reaching new audiences and sharing the gift of great music.

We kept the organization simple. We formed a small board of people who shared our passion, incorporated under the name Twin Lions, Inc., and set up an office in the spare bedroom of Omus’s apartment. Omus found seed funding from our founding patron, Patti Cadby Birch, and we booked our first concerts. Like any other independent producer, we paid the artists and rented the hall. It was fun to see who wasn’t playing a recital in New York. That we ended up with four terrific duo teams was just a thrill.

We then looked for partners in the areas critical to our success: marketing, public relations, and grass-roots promotion. We found our charter sponsor in radio station WQXR, which gave us phenomenal support and exposure. With the help of the arts marketing expert on our board, we created a flexible and diverse media plan that included ads in many languages in a range of publications not necessarily regarded as the normal “targets” for New York’s classical music audience. Our public-relations company expanded its usual “hit” list for press releases to include over 100 new ethnic and community-based outlets. We found companies who built our web site and provided hosting gratis. We distributed flyers to libraries, coffee shops, community music schools, and stores to as many places and in as many boroughs as we could. And of course we continued to fundraise like mad—from individuals, foundations, and corporations. It was not easy, but we found the support we needed to make our first season end in the black.

What was the return on our investment? The smallest member of a family of four tapping his hand on the edge of the stage to the sound of David Finckel and Wu Han playing Beethoven Sonatas; two African-American children heard arguing over who would get to play the violin like Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, and who the piano like Anne-Marie McDermott; a $20 contribution from a woman with a note saying she had never been able to hear Joshua Bell live before; a double bass student from the Manhattan School of Music explaining to the minister sitting next to him why Edgar Meyer playing solo Bach was a miracle; an audience that would not stop applauding; and artists who walked away smiling and saying, “I’ll do this again, any time I can.”

Omus Hirshbein has served the arts in the United States since 1969 through a variety of prominent positions: Director of Arts and Humanities at New York’s 92nd Street Y; Director of Music, Opera/Music Theater for the National Endowment for the Arts; President, Meet the Composer; President, the New York Chamber Symphony.

Jacqueline Taylor served as the Executive Director of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from 1994 to 2000. Prior to that she was the Managing Director of the Performing Arts Department at the 92nd Street Y. In 2001, Hirshbein and Taylor co-founded the non-profit concert production company, Twin Lions, Inc.