Abstract

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    The changes and development in the cultural industry has made an impact on all fields of art. The commercialism and its innovations made significant changes in the way classical music artists represent themselves today. Almost every well-known musician has the necessary promotional materials, such as websites or social media profiles and pages. These marketing tools were adapted from the business and popular music industry, however, the analysis of how these adaptations work in the classical music context is not investigated enough. 

    The lack of research in the discourse of academic art, especially in classical music, is based on division between two main opinions of this matter: while younger generations of performers are more eagerly experimenting with various self-management and entrepreneurship strategies, there are still others who consider those strategies to be unimportant or even dangerous to art. Due to this separation between art and commercialism, it was decided to use the concept of persona as the main object of this research. 

    The term persona, first being used already in the times of ancient Greece as prosopon, was later discussed in a variety of contexts: different types of art, psychology, and even marketing. While trying to sum up the meaning of the term, it would be beneficial to point out its main quality – the publicity and sociability of one’s identity. Persona’s usage in the context of classical music can be very beneficial, since this term is helpful in analyzing both artistic and commercial questions, such as how one expresses their identity on stage, or how one does it while forming a personal brand in various digital media. 

    The aim of this artistic research is to identify how artistic and commercial aspects of an artist’s persona relate to one another; how they are being expressed on the stage as well as in the digital world, and how they can be strategically created in the context of classical music. It is expected from this research to form a basis for self-reflection on both artistic and commercial levels, which would help musicians to successfully integrate themselves into the various processes of nowadays’ classical music industry.

    The aim of the creative part of this artistic research is to identify the aspects of researcher’s persona and to analyze its alterations in different performance settings. Employing self-analysis, the objective is to form a strategy for creating a personal brand in the field of digital media that would be closely related or even beneficial to the artistic aspects of performance.