Archive - October 2012

1
Why Music Is Important: The Orchestra Crisis
2
Headline of the year
3
When bad boards happen to good orchestras
4
Hartford Symphony & Chorale on Chinese Television
5
Another day, another conspiracy theory
6
Why Music Is Important: Education
7
The curious incident of the Boards in the night-time
8
Minnesota nasty
9
I really should have practiced harder
10
The rest of the ugly

Why Music Is Important: The Orchestra Crisis

Musicians and orchestras are extraordinary treasures, and to deny them a place in our society is to deprive everyone of one of the most positive and magical experiences in life.

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Headline of the year

“US composer’s secretary suffers near-fatal beating October 25, 2012 by Norman Lebrecht.” That’s how it showed up in my email. I don’t think that came out quite the way Norman meant it too, though.

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When bad boards happen to good orchestras

There’s a very interesting story going around the Twin Cities, but this one’s about baseball. Apparently the management of the Minnesota Twins has decided that they need a retractable roof after all, for about a $100 million price tag. The chances of public funding are essentially zero, so the management is planning to reduce player[…]

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Hartford Symphony & Chorale on Chinese Television

I visited SymphonyNOW this morning, the League’s news website, and was pleased to see a video featuring my music director, Carolyn Kuan. I’m a violist with the Hartford Symphony in Connecticut. For our opening concert set last week, we performed four concerts of Beethoven’s Ninth paired with the Yellow River Cantata, written by Xian Xinghai[…]

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Another day, another conspiracy theory

Except that, of course, it’s the same conspiracy theory, only this time in the hallowed web pages of the Huffington Post: It’s the voodoo. That horrible, Kuru-inducing zombie voodoo. These are heady times for the League of American Orchestras (LAO) and their ilk. True, their suits have grown a tad more maggot-ridden since their early[…]

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Why Music Is Important: Education

Imagine if instead of spending billions of dollars on invasions and bombings, we had used the same resources to fund educational systems, build infrastructure, and provide medical care in the Middle East and beyond.

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The curious incident of the Boards in the night-time

These have been dreadful times for the musicians of the orchestras at the epicenter of the current epidemic of radical salary-slashing. Those orchestras’ audiences have been affected too, as have businesses in the areas around the concert halls. For students of labor relations, though, these have been very interesting days. No doubt pathologists during the[…]

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Minnesota nasty

Minnesotans are known for being averse to conflict, generous to arts and educational groups of all kinds, and generally plain-spoken (unless, of course, such speaking would lead to conflict). So, on top of the ongoing Minnesota Orchestra lock-out, this comes as a shock, even if not a surprise: The Twin Cities’ distinctive status in the[…]

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I really should have practiced harder

Although maybe it’s the hair? Keira Knightley is working with violist/conductor Yuri Bashmet as a narrator: Keira Knightley and Yuri Bashmet again on one stage! When, in 2010 at the Winter Arts Festival in Sochi after the second intervention with Maestro Bashmet, Keira Knightley asked – not whether he is now developing the genre and[…]

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The rest of the ugly

Although the guts of the Minnesota proposal (and the damage done by it) lie in the economics, there is plenty of other stuff not to like as well. In particular, there are loads of changes proposed to work rules; far more than one would expect in a normal negotiation, much less one in which the[…]

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