Symphony as Strategy

What can a 10-movement orchestral leviathan teach us about brand strategy? The next in our series looking at how strategy shows up in the world comes after attending Bold Tendencies open rehearsal of Messiaen’s epic Turangalîla-Symphonie, and considers how orchestral conductors are in some ways the ultimate brand strategists. By Luke Bell Strategy Director.

A few weeks ago I was at an open rehearsal of Messaein’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, performed by the Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra as part of Bold Tendencies’ Euphoria season. It’s a piece of music of epic proportions and a definitive contributor to the development of the classical symphonic genre not just when it was written in 1948, but still to this day.

The piece comes in at a massive 10 movements, and requires over 100 musicians including 12 percussionists and solo ondes Martenot (one of the earliest electronic instruments, where the player produces an ethereal, quintessentially spooky sound by wearing a metal ring that they slide up and down a keyboard- this in itself is about as bonkers as it gets). All this, combined with a synaesthetic narrative that interrogates humanity’s relationship with the cosmos, makes Turangalîla-Symphonie a huge spectacle - one that is rarely performed due to the resources required to make it happen, and a creative stretch for any orchestra and its conductor.

Okay, enough waxing lyrical about Messaien. Why I am telling you all this, and what does it have to do with brand strategy?

It’s a few years since I was sat in front of a conductor, one eye on their gesticulations, the other on the music in front of me. And seeing this huge and ambitious work in rehearsal, I was reminded of just what a job it is they have - not only coordinating and corralling a group of this size, but inspiring them with an artistic vision that takes the notes off the page, and translates them into a cohesive sound (that, in this case, has to hold true in the challenging acoustic conditions of a Peckham car park).

In this sense, conductors are kind of like the ultimate brand strategists. Their client the orchestra, the project the tome-like score that sits in front of them. They study it. They interrogate it. They research around it. They take a highlighter to its best bits, and figure out how to smooth out its inconsistencies. And then they find a new articulation for it that honours the intentions of both its composer and those who have acted as custodians throughout its history - and at the same time, that urgently needs to be heard by audiences today.

And then they have to sell in this new articulation. First of all to the players who are responsible for making it real, and finally, indirectly, to its consumers, audience, followers. Conductors do this with their words - the stories, metaphors, facts that involve, inform and inspire the orchestra - and with their actions - the physical gestures and expressions unique to each conductor, from the nuance of a baton flick to an almost convulsive lurch of their whole physicality. The conductor’s body quite literally keeping the score.

When I used to play in orchestras, non-musician friends of mine were always curious about the role of the conductor. When the notes are right there on the page, why do you need someone standing up at the front? And what are they really doing up there?

And now, as a Strategy Director, it’s not unusual to find myself having to explain or justify the importance of strategy - to clients (or more frequently to their stakeholders) and, as before, to my ever inquisitive non-industry friends.

The content of both answers is all about delivery. Seeing Messaein’s behemoth of a symphony tamed and subsequently untethered by conductor Oksana Lyniv and the Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra that day, I was reminded that strategy is a performance as much as any live art. Yes, the words matter - indeed they are the performance direction from which it all begins. But strategy comes to life through repeated action from everyone responsible for it. From the leader standing at the front building a shared understanding of vision, through to every voice that makes up the collective timbre of the organisation.

The ambitions of our strategic thinking might not always be quite as epic or indeed off the wall as Messaien’s (though perhaps they should be). But if we have any hope of making them real, we have to see the score in front of us as only just the beginning. Too often organisations mistake creating the strategy for realising it. But as every conductor knows, the beauty of the music isn’t in the score - it’s in the performance.