Commendably the Queensland Symphony Orchestra’s management wants to experiment with innovative and experimental marketing tools like AI.

But the QSO’s release on February 22 of an ugly, out-of-date AI prototype image, uninformed about its subject matter, has caused considerable offence.

The picture, branded a “hot mess” in some media, was sourced from Shutterstock, with the AI brief of “two people having a date at an indoor classical music romantic concert”.

Condemned by The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance as “the worst AI generated artwork we’ve seen”, it is viewed as disrespectful.

For instance, the random, elderly mostly male players occupy the stalls of an unknown concert hall and don’t look as if they know how to play, judging from the bizarre, wrong-fingered ways they are clutching the violins.

The tasteless optics are not as alarming as the attitude of the QSO towards those musicians justifiably offended by it.

Gone are the days where orchestral players were voiceless soldier ants ruled by a general’s iron fist in a zealous top-down management structure.

In recent years, it’s been recognised that if a player is to remain an optimal contributor, they need to fulfil a diverse range of roles. And yet, those who voiced a complaint were directed to “stay in your own lane”. Except that crossing lanes is an essential component of every orchestral player’s working brief.

As ambassadors for classical music, they travel across Queensland to give a recital, a masterclass or a workshop in a school, or to judge an eisteddfod, present a chamber music series or participate in a cross-genre concert with, say,  Ngaiire or Birds of Tokyo.

In all of these capacities, the orchestral players are championing the QSO and embodying a major public relations function.

Similarly in concerts, when the concertmaster plays a beautiful violin solo in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade or the QSO invests Wagner’s introductory Tristan chord with a magical shimmer or in scaling the lofty heights of Mahler 7, they are gifting the audience with meaningful live performance and demonstrating QSO’s artistic worth.

Imagine performing several times a week  a concert program of three different pieces from start to finish without a single blemish or error. The pressure is intense. Relentless. I know from my experience of running a music conservatorium in Melbourne, musicians get ever so touchy if their enormous emotional, intellectual and physical contribution isn’t appreciated or portrayed in a positive light.

An orchestra is a community, an artistic village, and the most important residents are the instrumentalists because they are the orchestra’s voice. These rigorously trained specialists are QSO’s gold. Not to heed their advice on promotional content is like an architect designing a hospital’s operating theatre without input from surgeons, anaesthetists and nurses.

Canvassing the musician’s point of view becomes acutely relevant.

Research across the UK, America and Australia has shown that audience numbers for symphony orchestras, chamber music and classical music festivals increase when there’s a more personal engagement with individual musicians.

In recent years, QSO has been at the forefront of publicity trends with promotional materials featuring not just the conductor but individual players and section principals, a strategy even more effective when backed up by opportunities to greet and meet QSO’s rank and file.

Orchestral performance produced in a culture of fear, in which a cone of silence is imposed on the distressed, is unlikely to sustain the QSO’s reputation or achieve the orchestra’s artistic goals in the long term.

Because when musicians feel happy and empowered, the more they leave the running of an organisation to those appointed to do it. Surely, it makes sense to listen to them.

Gillian Wills was associate professor and dean of the Victorian College of the Arts Music School, 1991-2000. Her forthcoming novel Big Music (Hawkeye Publishing) is set in a music conservatorium and is about a young director who learns the hard way how not to manage musicians.

This article is republished from InReview under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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