Back in 2013 we examined the trend of orchestras to include scant information about an event on the corresponding single event pages at their website.
Since then, not much has changed. Spend a little bit of time going through orchestra websites and odds are, you’ll find very little information about the works listeners can expect to hear.
Budget size doesn’t seem to have impact. Even some mega-budget groups routinely provide no more than one or two sentence long program descriptions. Here’s one that manages to begin the two-sentence description with the B-Word. Sentence #2 starts off only slightly better.
While you shouldn’t be expected to put something as lengthy as the full program notes, designing event descriptions from an empathetic perspective can help break out of the micro-description conundrum. For example, Wichita Symphony includes a “What’s interesting about these concerts?” section in many of their single event pages.
You can also swing by the article from 2013. Pretty much everything there is applicable today as it was then.
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