Introducing the new, music-driven brand identity of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra
The full renewal of the brand image of Hungary’s leading chamber orchestra took over a year and was based on international market analysis and extensive, representative consumer research. The music-driven, dynamic logo system for the orchestra is a unique innovation by Brand Bar that visualises soundscapes in a completely new way. “The orchestra wanted a deep, fully comprehensive rebranding that goes beyond the mere revision of visual and verbal communication,” says Dr Judit Körmendy-Ékes, President of the Board of Trustees of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra Foundation in the launch video of the new identity. From January 2020 cellist star István Várdai has taken on the professional training and the artistic concept development of the orchestra as its new Artistic Director. The crystallization of the orchestra’s trademark sound has become an important part in the new artistic strategy that had started with the selection of the finest instruments. After a year-long quest they came upon five excellent master violins in January. The rare instruments give an unmistakable tone to the sound of the entire orchestra.
The renewal of the brand strategy was based on a large-scale market analysis. At the very beginning of the project the comprehensive understanding of the target groups was made possible by an extensive consumer research conducted by Ipsos. In parallel, a global market analysis on the international classical music scene was carried out by Stratlog consultation company. The research offered insight into Hungarian and international practices for all aspects of the functioning of a chamber orchestra. It examined over 6000 concerts, works by more than 200 composers, and nearly 100 music festivals. The results highlighted that building a distinctive brand in this market is truly challenging since most chamber orchestras operate on a very small market and offer a very similar kind of “product” to their niche customer base.
The repositioning of the orchestra, as well as the development of an integrated communication and marketing strategy was carried out by FleishmanHillard Café and Stratlog.
As no brand can be a truly new brand without a brand new brand identity, Brand Bar took on the visual aspects of the project. Below is our interview with the team responsible for the cutting-edge design.
Márkamonitor: With the results of the market research and a comprehensive strategy in your hands you had a strong foundation for the design process. How did the project start on your side?
Attila Simon: During the preparation to the project a detailed schedule was made with realistic timeframes for each successive subtask. If everything would have gone accordingly to this plan, we would have had all the necessary information at hand, right at the necessary moment. But that’s not what happened. Barely two weeks after the fire from the starting gun the pandemic reached Hungary. The whole country shut off. Not only out ideal little planning was shattered but the whole world went haywire. After a short rescheduling period a new plan was adapted to the new situation. This already had many parallel steps and we also had in mind starting the design work already during the research phase. In this scenario the strategy and the research aided not the design process, but rather the selection of the most suitable design from several design alternatives.
MM: Did this approach work out in real life?
AS: I would say mainly yes. At the beginning of our work, we already had some parts of the customer research available. Making in-depth interviews with our clients has also always been an important preparatory step in our work process at Brand Bar, and luckily such interviews we could also make with the musicians of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra. In addition, an extensive collection of visual identities of internationally renown orchestras and concert halls had also been compiled. We paid special attention to the rebrandings of the recent years because they paint a vivid image of the current trends and tendencies in the global classical music industry. The collected material was organised into an over 100 pages slideshow, simultaneously illustrating possible directions and alternatives for the new brand identity with international examples. This presentation already touched upon the idea of a music-driven design, although we could not find an already existing example for this concept. Thanks to all these prep steps we already had a good basis to get started with.
MM: You also complied an inspirational material for the design team to ensure the conceptual background for the project. How did this research work go?
Kata Fodor: “Trendsetter” was the keyword defined by the interviews and the brief, so we tried to look for something that is very innovative, yet still related to classical music. Inspired by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who is also known for his experimentations with new graphic systems for sheet music writing, we decided to dig deeper into the topic of alternative music notations. From the 1950’s this has become of interest to many composers. Their experiments with colours, shapes, and artistic media such as collage, photography, and painting aimed to expand the toolset of the traditional 5-line notation system. These experiments often resulted in pieces of fine art and pioneered a new interdisciplinary field between music and visual arts.
MM: Did you find anything inspiring?
KF: We went through open-source archives and forums for musicians and collected images worth for an inspirational presentation over 100 slides. We started with the big names such as György Ligeti (visual listening score by Rainer Wehinger for the piece called Artikulation), John Cage (a flexible “collage” on transparent sheets for the Fontana Mix), Iannis Xenakis, who turned digital tablet drawings into music, and the graphic designer and composer Cornelius Cardew, who created a monumental, 193 pages graphic score for his own piece, the Treatise. They were followed by lesser known, but no less exciting artists such as Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (geometric sheet music compositions inspired by the kinetic sculptures of Alexander Calder), Cathy Berberian and her sound comics, Wadada Leo Smith and his inspiration-paintings for trumpets, and 5-line photographs by Dick Higgins.
SA: The research material also included some visual artists such as Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and George Valmier who all had strong ties to music. Graphic works like concert posters by Josef Müller-Brockmann couldn’t be left out either. This part of the presentation was also welcomed by the orchestra. István Várdai, the artistic director liked the featured works of Tihamér Gyarmathy, a Hungarian painter who passed away in 2005, so much that he even started to consider hosting a competition for contemporary composers to put his paintings into music.
MM: These musical compositions are exciting, yet style-wise not quite matching the strictly classical repertoire of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra.
KF: Even though the orchestra does not play contemporary music, we all found these innovative graphic notations visually inspiring and saw a strong conceptual link to the desired “trendsetter” image. The inspirational material was presented to the orchestra and to the other participants of the rebranding project and was given a green light to be used as our starting point. Our graphic designers, each accordingly to their own interpretation, turned the inspiration into sketches with colour rhythms, lines of dynamic thicknesses symbolizing strings of instruments, coded music notes… The final design also originates from here: it reinterprets the 5-line sheet as a system of concentric circles.
MM: Now a question to the creator of the “winner” design. How did you get started on the project?
László Herbszt: One of my associations to the idea of a music-driven identity were traditional audio players: vinyl records, CDs, tape cassettes. They all make circular movements. This gave the inspiration for the circle as the base shape of the logo. In the very first, sketching phase I examined different compositions with the concentric and radial divisions of the circle. I experimented with divisions of fixed widths, varying widths, and the combination of those. I showed the digitalized versions of these sketches to Dániel Zelenák, who could immediately see the possibility of these grids for the notation of actual music. We had tested them on Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik and we saw that the concept would work. Of course, many versions had to be made until the logo obtained its final form.
MM: Dániel, what is it that you saw in László Herbszt’s initial drawings, and how did you develop them?
Dániel Zelenák: László’s first designs made me wonder about the possibilities of a circular, rotated version of the 5-line sheet music. 8 concentric circles represent 8 notes of an octave. If the piece of music to be visualized requires a range wider than that, the register can be shifted as the logo rotates and thus adapted to the musical composition. I would liken it to the mechanism of a music box, where the rotation of a cylinder with protruding pins plucks individual prongs on a steel comb to create sound.
MM: So how exactly does that look like on the logo?
ZD: In a circle divided into 64 the smallest unit equals a semiquaver. Consequently, in 4/4 time signature, any note exceeding that shall be represented by a multiple of the smallest unit. The notes are marked as line segments on a circle, while rests are left as blank spaces. The different colours indicate whole tones and semitones.
MM: Which music pieces have you tried to visualise with the logo? How was the final one chosen?
LH: Once the adaptability of the circular system had been proven, it was time to adapt it to works from the actual repertoire of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra. Countless fragments of countless classical hits were tested out, but Bartók’s Divertimento, the piece we see on the final logo, had us interested from the very beginning. Just like our musician clients, we also see a symbolic message in Bartók’s oeuvre. But it goes without saying that we had also tried out various works by Franz Liszt himself and works by Schumann and Mozart that are regularly performed by the orchestra. Finally, an animated version for the Divertimento was created to show the concept in motion. In the meantime, the possibilities of the visualization of polyphony were also explored. Layering 3-4 parts on top of each other often resulted in overlapping notes. We proposed to differentiate the parts with colour codes. As it can be seen in the video about the logo, polyphony does work with the logo when placed side by side, but a 3D version could also be designed in the future.
MM: Was this logo already “dynamic”, or is that a feature that you added to the identity only later?
LH: Definitely, the logo was already dynamic because it could visualize any piece of music, meaning that theoretically endless versions of the same logo can be generated. It is like an audio-visual fingerprint that is unique only to that very segment of music to which it is adapted to.
AS: We were especially pleased to notice during both the in-house discussions and on the final presentation of the design that it sparked the creativity of people. Everybody saw opportunities in it, everybody had an idea about how to use it. The best thing about it, of course, is that a part of these great ideas has already came true by now.
MM: Could you explain to the people less familiar with graphic design terms: what is exactly a dynamic brand identity?
AS: It has become clear to us already during the project that this term had to be explained. From the perspective of graphic design, a dynamic identity does not equal a logo that can be animated. In that case the logo would remain the same logo. A real dynamic identity, on the other hand, is built around a logo that in itself has many different versions. A dynamic logo is not a rigid, immutable mark but rather a set of rules with which multiple (or endless) versions of the same logo can be constructed. The versions are new, but the rules regarding structure, silhouettes, etc. ensure that the brand always remains recognisable. Thus, a dynamic identity can renew itself, adapt to different situations, and have unique versions for various purposes.
MM: Is that what’s happened in the case of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, too?
LH: Having simultaneous versions of the logo was something that we had in mind from the very beginning. It only seemed natural to propose that each member of the orchestra could have a unique logo depicting a segment from their favourite piece in the repertoire, or to create an app that makes the logo-personalization available to all music lovers. Such an interactive feature can only be characteristic to a truly dynamic identity. It also plays an important role in the communication of the orchestra because it invites the audience to take part in the creative process.
MM: Does every musician have their own logo now?
LH: Yes, and behind each logo there is a personal story. Every musician explains their choice of music in a short video on the website of the orchestra.
AS: Once the musicians had become a part of the identity, the involvement had to be elevated to the level of the public. With the help of our easy-to-use application with a clear interface all music lovers and innovation enthusiasts have the opportunity now to generate a custom logo from the repertoire of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra.
“The long-established link between the orchestra and our audience finally obtains a visible form now with the help of this app. Innovative solutions are key in our artistic mission and we look forward to surprise our audience more and more in the future.”, said István Várdai.
“The bond between the musicians and their audience strengthens with its visualisation and the users of the app can experience a sense of community by being a part of the audience. The long-term goal of the orchestra is to give the unique logos a QR-code like, direct or indirect information-bearer function.”
MM: How does the app work in practice?
Boglárka Izsáki: The process of the logo construction appears on the screen as an animation with music. This can be shared on social media or in email, too. Once the logo is ready, it can be downloaded in different formats. Currently the users can choose from 27 fragments of 8 classical compositions, but more options are planned to follow in the future. Besides its community building quality, the application also supports the educational intentions of the orchestra. Each fragment is accompanied with a short description of the composition and a recording performed by the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra.
MM: It is an exciting idea, but wasn’t its development overly complicated?
IB: Every logo is generated from an audio track stored in a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) file. The file only contains the main part of the chosen music fragment. The MIDI file ranges 10 octaves and since it differentiates whole tones from semitones, the logo can also use two colours to visualize the difference. The app takes the information from the MIDI file and draws it into the circular grid system of the brand identity, which is technically a rotated version of the 5-line sheet music. The drawing algorithm behind app was developed by the team of the Datalytix Solutions software company.
Péter Fülöp: This innovation combines two already existing things in a novel, unseen before way.
With the precision of an algorithm and some creativity the app makes the logo customization available to the public because it can display the shapes that are coded into the notes of musical compositions.
Our whole developer team was delighted that along with the usual programming tasks we had the opportunity to work with things like notes, sheet music, and music drawings. Even though we have just finished the first version of the app, we already have a lot of creative ideas for its further development.
BI: It was important that as the audio information from a digital MIDI file and the actual, artistic performance of the same piece by the orchestra are never perfectly the same, each track had to be “fine-tuned” for the app.
MM: The preparation of a brand book is always a crucial part of big identity design projects. It is a sort of manual that contains rules and guidelines that ensure the uniform look and recognizability of the brand across all platforms and enfiroments.
Bianka Földi: We made a nearly 180 pages long brand book for the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra. Its most voluminous chapter, of course, codifies the construction principles of the logo and its possible variations. Guidelines for the common on- and offline brand materials are included, too. The brand book also has a large attachment with the editable versions of these materials, but to make it easily usable even for international purposes, a clear and consistent file naming convention had to be developed, too.
AS: It was Bianka Földi, my former student from the Visart Academy of Arts and Design who had carried out this whole heroic task. If it hadn’t been for her patience and systematic thinking, we would have probably been lost in the details. She also came up with some innovations that break with the conventional layouts that we see in most brand books. What’s the point of, for example, displaying every character of the brand fonts? Or why do most brand books show the brand colours as tiny circles or rectangles with colour codes? These fossilised practices are from the times when letters were still photographed and copied from the originals in the brand book, and colour swatches had to be torn out and physically handed to the printing houses. Things are done differently now, but the creators of brand books still tend to use these layouts out of sheer habit. Now we had decided to break with them. We show the headline fonts only as headlines and the body fonts as textures, just as we would use them in real life.
About the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra
The Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra was established in 1963 by the graduating students of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Throughout its nearly 60 years long existence the orchestra has gained an international recognition and has entered the elite of the classical music scene. During its first half-century – under the leadership of Frigyes Sándor and then subsequently János Rolla – the orchestra has performed in more than fifty countries, at venues such as the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Sydney Opera House, the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and the Théatre de la Ville in Paris.
From 2016, led by concertmaster Péter Tfirst, the orchestra has continued to fill the most prestigious concert halls around the world. Prominent soloists often perform with the orchestra and praise its high level of precision, wide repertoire, and great flexibility. In January 2020 world-famous cellist István Várdai joined as the new artistic director of the orchestra to take on its professional training and develop its fresh artistic concept.
