VAN is currently looking for pitches of investigative reporting, insightful artist profiles with multiple sources, and ambitious pieces on big ideas in classical music. Please take a look at our archive to familiarize yourself with our content and style.
We also accept pitches of short-form video. Check out our Instagram for an idea of the kind of thing we are interested in.
And yes, we pay, with rates of up to €400-500 for reported work.
Pitches that use generative AI will be deleted.
Who to pitch
All pitches should be around 300 words, and include the word PITCH in the subject line of the email.
- For written stories, email Jeffrey Arlo Brown
- For video, email Hugh Morris
When to pitch
Unless your piece is time-sensitive, we generally work on a lead time of four to six weeks.
What we look for
VAN is a magazine for classical music fans. Many of our readers work in the industry as artists, administrators, journalists, or academics—but not all do, so please keep this in mind. We also cater to a wide range of tastes, from early music and Baroque to opera and vocal music to electronics to jazz or non-classical musicians whose work still touches on the big amorphous form that is “classical.”
We are most interested in work with a reporting component.
One pitch we never need to hear again is that classical music is dying, dead, bereft of a future, extinct, pushing up daisies, over, spent, comatose, or on life support.
Academics
We love musicologists, theorists, and historians and publishing your work. Please keep our audience in mind when pitching and writing. Helen Sword puts it best in this article on stylish academic writing.
Publicists
We’re happy to consider pitches for features and review and work regularly with freelancers in the EU, United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. Please have a look at our notes on Interviews and Profiles (below) to see what we’re interested in, and please note that we have a four-to-six–week lead time for any stories that aren’t time-sensitive.
Due to the volume of communications we receive, we can only respond to story ideas we are interested in pursuing. Please do not put “PITCH” in your subject line.
Pitches by section
Profiles
If you read one piece before submitting a pitch for an interview or profile, please make it this one.
We want to go beyond the typical puff-piece when talking with artists, and to write in ways that expand or question traditional interview formats. We also love featuring people in our world who don’t normally get featured, or people from other disciplines whose work touches on classical music: authors, choreographers, painters, movement artists, dramaturgs, internet personalities.
A few representative pieces: Perri di Christina shadowing Instagram provocateur Haus of Shmizzay at the Met; Ty Bouque profiling Steven Takasugi through the medium of postcards; violinist Christian Tetzlaff on why children should never be forced to practice; alto Dina König on leaving the music industry to drive a tram; Composers Doing Normal Shit’s curator John Nolan; orchestral travel booker Guido Frackers; author Garth Greenwell.
Profiles should have more than one interview with the subject and at least a handful of secondary sources.
Reports
Investigative reporting on the classical music sector is our specialty. For hard news and other reported topics, we generally require at least two to three sources, and many more if the sources are anonymous. Pieces in this category include Jeffrey Arlo Brown and Hartmut Welscher on Daniel Barenboim’s culture of fear at the Berlin Staatsoper and Hugh Morris and Jeffrey Arlo Brown on Alexey Shor and classical music’s lucrative parallel world.
Essays
We publish a range of essays, including personal, reported, and historical. In most cases, it’s good to at least have one or two quotable sources. Recent pieces in this category: conductor Vitali Alekseenok on the 2020 protests in his hometown of Minsk, Olivia Giovetti on queer women and #mezzosexual culture in opera, Eli Zeger on Bang on a Can’s cameo on the PBS series “Arthur,” Adam Behan on the fantastical life of pianist Maria Yudina, and Micaela Baranello on orientalism and Léhar’s “The Land of Smiles.”
Video
We are currently in the early phase of producing video content that aligns with VAN’s editorial approach, but some formats include the video essay; Listen for This, a series on decisive musical moments; and video concert reviews by two people in the bar, called BarTálk.