The Other Half of Access
Representation, and the human structures around it, are one route through the profession’s narrowest door. There is a second — how an artist or an institution becomes known — and it now runs on different rails than it did a decade ago. This piece below is a companion to Ilona Oltuski’s article, “Call My Agent.”
In Ilona Oltuski’s account of the profession’s hidden machinery, a Japanese pianist living in Berlin asks a deceptively simple question: how do you persuade the managers you most admire to come to your concert? He had built a real career in Japan, was performing regularly across Europe, and had a growing stack of unanswered emails to show for his efforts to be seen. The obstacle, as she frames it, was not musicianship. It was access.
Her essay answers that problem with care, and I think correctly: through people. Through foundations like Berlin’s Althafen, through mentorship, through the patient work of building relationships and an artistic identity worth representing. Access, in her telling, becomes less accidental when the profession builds better structures to usher artists into it. That is true, and it is the more important half of the story.
I want to draw out a second answer her essay opens but does not fully follow — not to correct it, but because the two belong together. It concerns how an artist or an institution becomes known in the first place, and it surfaces in a single line from the pianist Drew Petersen, who remarks, almost in passing, that “publicity lives where the audience lives, and today that’s on the iPhone.” He says it warily, and he is right to be wary. But the sentence marks a genuine shift in the ground beneath the profession, and that shift is the subject of what follows.
Yuja Wang — one of the most successfully visible classical musicians living today.
Excellence is the floor, not the difference
Both of Oltuski’s management voices circle the same uncomfortable truth. Once artistic excellence is taken for granted — and at the level we are discussing, it is — excellence stops being the thing that distinguishes one remarkable musician from another. The system now produces more superbly trained players than at any point in its history. Command of the instrument is the price of admission, not the prize.
So the question becomes legibility. Of the many extraordinary artists a manager, a presenter, or an audience could choose, why this one? Two things have to be true, and they are not the same thing.
A clear identity, and a way for it to travel
The first is a clear identity. Katy Salomon of Primo Artists describes looking for artists whose work “feels relevant to our time” and who are “forward-thinking in the way they dream up long-term international projects.” That is the right instinct, and I would put it more strongly. What distinguishes an artist now is not only adventurous programming but a coherent sense of who they are — an identity legible enough that a stranger can grasp it in a sentence and repeat it accurately. Programming is something an artist does. Identity is something an artist is. The first without the second produces a busy career with no center; what audiences, presenters, and managers are really responding to is the second. Arriving at that identity — naming it, sharpening it, making it true rather than decorative — is its own discipline, and it happens well before anyone films a note.
The second is that the identity has to travel. A clear artistic self that no one encounters is not positioning; it is a private virtue. Which returns us to Petersen’s iPhone.
Where publicity now lives
For most of the profession’s history, making an artist known meant the press: the review, the feature, the profile placed with a critic at a paper of record. That work still matters, and the artists and institutions in Oltuski’s essay are right to value it. But the audience has moved. The people an artist most needs to reach next — the ones who will buy a first ticket, find a first recording, become the following that makes a career legible — increasingly spend their attention on video-first social platforms rather than the arts pages. Publicity, to do its actual job, has had to follow them there. The center of gravity has shifted from being written about to being seen.
This is neither the death of the press nor a licence to chase virality, and here Petersen’s wariness is instructive. He admits he is “not sure how much of the process the audience really wants to see,” and chooses to share only short, specific glimpses — a question of pedaling, a matter of tempo — rather than everything he practices. That restraint is not a retreat from the work of being seen. It is that work done with judgment. The craft is not volume; it is knowing how a message travels: how a piece is framed in its first seconds, what makes someone stay rather than scroll, how a format behaves inside systems built to reward attention, how a single interview becomes a dozen artifacts that each find a different corner of an audience.
Production quality is table stakes; a beautifully made video no one sees is a document, not distribution. The discipline that decides whether anyone is on the other side of the work is the deliberate architecture of how it reaches people — and it is, tellingly, the one thing a conservatory that can teach almost everything else still does not teach.
Why the stakes are highest for institutions
It would be easy to hear all of this as a young artist’s concern — a matter of social media for players who came up with a phone in their hand. That reading misses where the stakes are highest, which is with institutions.
Monica Felkel is blunt about the economics: “If presenters don’t fill their halls, they cannot pay the same fees they once could.” That single sentence is the business of classical music, compressed. In an era of thinner margins, shrinking subsidies, and risk-averse programming, the presenter, festival, or competition that can demonstrably move an audience — not an abstract online following, but people who buy the ticket, join the mailing list, and return next season — is not merely more visible. It is more solvent. Competitions understood this earliest; several now function, in effect, as broadcasters, reaching audiences across continents that no hall could seat, and that reach reshapes what a medal is worth and who discovers the musician who wins it. The organizations thinking hardest about how their work travels are not chasing vanity metrics. They are protecting the fees, the halls, and the careers that depend on both.
In service of the work, never the reverse
None of this is a licence to chase growth for its own sake — and here Oltuski’s essay supplies its own necessary caution. Marc Scorca, president emeritus of OPERA America, warns that artists should “grow their careers as slowly as possible,” that “growth should be a consequence of good work,” and that “growth as a goal, in my view, is an unworthy goal.” He is right, and the caution is the entire point. Reach pursued for its own sake produces exactly the hollow, market-chasing career he warns against. Reach in service of the work — carrying something already true about an artist or an institution to the people who would value it — is simply good work finding its audience, which is what Scorca says growth should be a consequence of in the first place.
The distinction is the difference between amplification and manufacture. The best-known artists worth knowing are not the loudest. Sonia Simmenauer’s insistence that an artist “does not see himself as an island, but as part of the world,” and Nicolas Namoradze’s argument that identity is fashioned by continued inquiry rather than fixed at the start, are not obstacles to visibility. They are its only worthwhile subject. There has to be something worth carrying before the carrying means anything at all.
Different work, not the same work
It is worth being clear about what this is and is not. None of it is management. The manager negotiates the fee, plans the season, and rescues the pianist who arrives to discover an electronic keyboard where the grand piano should be. That is representation, and it is indispensable. Defining an identity and carrying it to an audience is a different discipline, answering a different question — not who handles the business of this career but who is this artist, and how do the right people come to know it. The two are complementary, and neither substitutes for the other. An artist can have excellent representation and no legible public identity, or a vivid identity and no one to negotiate the contracts. The strongest careers, increasingly, have both — handled by people who understand that they are not the same job.
Access, from both sides
Oltuski ends on the hope that access might become “less accidental” — that better structures might let artists encounter guidance and relationships as part of their development rather than leaving them to find the system alone. The foundations and programs she profiles answer that hope from one side, opening doors inward toward the artist.
The work of identity and distribution answers it from the other side, giving the artist and the institution a way to be found. Neither replaces the other. The manager still negotiates and the foundation still introduces; the relationship still does what no feed can. But artists and institutions are no longer only waiting to be ushered through. They can also do the patient, disciplined work of knowing who they are and making that legible to the world — on the rails the audience actually rides now — so that when the door opens, and it still has to open, they walk through it already in motion. Access, worked from both sides at once, is finally a little less accidental.
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Jonathan Eifert is the founder of Gold Sound Media — providing brand strategy and video-first marketing for elite performing arts institutions and major-stage artists — and the creator of Classical Post. He is based in New York. Ilona Oltuski’s article “Call My Agent” appears separately on Classical Post.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do classical musicians build careers today?
At the highest level, excellence is assumed — it is the floor, not the difference. What distinguishes an artist now is positioning (a clear, legible artistic identity) and distribution (getting that identity in front of the right audience). Representation still matters, but it increasingly amplifies momentum an artist has already begun to build rather than creating it from nothing.
Do classical artists still need a manager?
Yes — management negotiates fees, plans seasons, and handles the practical machinery of a touring career, and nothing replaces it. What has changed is the sequence: visibility used to be the reward for being signed; today, some measure of visibility is increasingly what earns an artist a serious look in the first place.
Why does video matter for classical music careers?
Because the audiences an artist or institution most needs to reach next now spend their attention on video-first social platforms rather than the arts pages. Publicity has shifted from being written about to being seen, so reaching new people increasingly happens through video.