Experiential Music Design
Don’t Just Listen, Experience
Bring Classical Music to New Audiences through Multi-sensory Experiences
How do you engage an audience? Led by conductor Emily Isaacson, Experiential Music Design projects transform the concert experience and attract new audiences through immersive, multimedia music events. These accessible performances offer classical music for kids and first-time attendees in approachable and dynamic ways.
The performing arts are operating on societal conventions created 125 years ago: put your life on pause for three hours, sit quietly, know the etiquette (don’t you dare clap between movements!) to worship a bunch of dead white guys (I mean that lovingly) in the cathedral of a symphony hall. This format does not fit the 21st century, but the music is still powerful and speaks to audiences if you let it.
How can we maintain the artistic integrity and emotional authenticity at the center of great performances while bringing it to new places and including more people in the conversation?
Experiential Music Design creates immersive and interactive programs that engage the community and attract intergenerational audiences. These Experiences are in alternative performance venues, often outdoors with minimal fixed seating, making them the perfect concert as orchestras and performing arts organizations navigate returning to the concert hall.
Don’t just listen to great music, Experience art
Impact of Experiential Music Design
Build new audiences through experiences that connect with people currently untapped in the market: under 45, families, those who attend other cultural events but not music.
Increase Ticket Sales by creating intergenerational experiences that not only accommodate life’s professional and personal demands but celebrate them.
Attract new donors by becoming the talk of the town and generating earned media.
Reenergize current sponsors by doing meaningful, cutting-edge work that both benefits the local community and is part of a national movement.
Become a thought-leader in a national movement in the arts.
Productions
Thanks In Variations
An immersive, live musical experience (with no live performers). Based on Johannes Ockeghem’s 15th-century work “Deo Gratias” (Give Thanks), Thanks in Variations was reimagined for a modern experience by contrasting natural versus created sound, individual versus communal voices, order versus disorder, and loving-kindness meditation.
A holiday concert where attendees dance alongside ballerinas to a symphony orchestra; called the “ideal orchestra concert for young children” by WMTW Television.
A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Carnival Concert
Purcell's Fairy Queen staged as a carnival. The audience walks to different musical acts alongside actors, dancers, and giant puppets. The perfect family concert for kids of all ages.
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Five Senses
In this installation art piece meets musical adventure, the audience moves between four different environments, each transformed to look and feel like winter, spring, summer, or fall and paired with seasonal drinks and snacks. Smell, taste, see and touch Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in this immersive performance that will transform your experience of sound.
5 ounce pours paired with 5 micro concerts; the music matches the flavor profile of the beers to the sound profile of the music.
Queens of Sheba
Drag queens walk the runway to the “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” Act III of Handel’s Solomon.
TattOrchestra
Come inside the circus of animals, freaks, carneys, food, and revelry for Carnival of the Animals. Local tattoo artists create full-body painted costumes for “animals” who dance in and around the orchestra and audience.
Made-for-you Experience
Transform you local history or community tradition into an experiential classical music concert. We are happy to customize a program or design an experience to celebrate your organization’s milestone or local culture.
Reviews
One of the finest things about [Emily’s Productions]... is the movement from classical music as a spectator sport to a fully participatory activity for musicians, singers and the audience. - Gina Hamilton, Wiscasset Newspaper
There isn’t an ensemble...anywhere, really – that couldn’t re-energize itself, and its audience, by periodically jettisoning the supposed rules of classical concert presenting, and offering programs as inventive, enlightening, and moving as this one. - Alan Kozinn, The Portland Press Herald
Going to your programs and happenings has changed me. Have changed my experience of classical music. Now I see them as spiritually transformational opportunities. - P.H. Dodd
Emily deserves a national prize for innovation in bringing performance alive. The distance between listeners and singers evaporated. - E. F. Mooney
Something we’ll never forget. Bringing the Bach Festival to this unique, unexpected setting brings such vibrancy to the event—and to the community. In addition to classical music regulars, we bumped into friends from so many different places: families we know from our children’s school; surgical residents; even my in-laws! I can’t imagine another event that would draw together people from so many different parts of our lives. - M. Miller
Emily is creating breathtakingly beautiful music and weaves into it stories that have the ability to open, penetrate and transform hearts and minds. The music creates atmospheres where change happens and in these moments there is a shift that occurs. This is a winning combination. - P. Cummings
We haven’t taken [our daughter] to a lot of classical events in New York because of the attitude towards children at concerts. It is so refreshing to see your events be so welcoming to children. It IS making a difference. T. Ruff
Emily is doing amazing things that is shaking up the music world and making our town on the edge of classical music experimentation through expanding audiences and rewriting expectations. - Mark Bessire, Director, Portland Museum of Art