One of the central topics in The Entrepreneurial Musician course and an area that all musicians inevitably confront is marketing and publicity—the work of crafting a compelling story about your music that will help you connect with audiences, collaborators and supporters. We have all met challenges in this department—it’s time consuming, requires resilience, and demands confidence and creativity to sell your story with conviction. Lara Pellegrinelli joins us to talk about publicity from the perspective of a freelance journalist who writes about the arts for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, Time Out New York, WNYC, and National Public Radio. She’ll talk about what makes a story or artist grab attention, how we can tell stories about our work that move beyond the basic who, what, when and where, how to build on the coverage you receive, and much more.
Dr. Lara Pellegrinelli is an arts journalist and scholar. She received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Harvard University in 2005, focusing on jazz studies. She currently teaches at Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Village Voice, and Time Out New York. She currently contributes arts & culture pieces on a wide variety of topics to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. Her long list of interview subjects includes Edward James Almos, Jo Boobs, Asha Bhosle, Wafaa Bilal, Vince Clarke, Eileen Fulton, James Galway, Ed Koch, Wynton Marsalis, Sara McLachlan, Meredith Monk, Michael Musto, Bobbie Lee Nelson, Anita O’Day, Penny Palfrey, Angie Pontani, and Jacques Pépin.
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DUKE ELLINGTON