The first Convention of the American Federation of Musicians since 2010 begins today. As a local officer, I will be attending as one of two delegates from Local 8. I’ll also be continuing a tradition I started in 2007 – live-blogging from the convention floor. If you want to follow along, here’s the link. For[…]
Read MoreThe Minnesota Orchestra lock-out – the longest second-longest formal lock-out in our industry’s history – may have entered a new phase, according to Graydon Royce of the Minneapolis Star Tribune: The Minnesota Orchestra’s management and musicians — now in the 11th month of a bitter labor lockout — are quietly talking again behind the scenes.[…]
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Elizabeth Merritt, the Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, gave the keynote address at the League’s 2013 Conference. You can watch a video of her address on the League’s website. Futurists – what do we do? We are at the collision of two fields: future studies and museum studies. The fertile[…]
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Well, Cecily and I have begun our annual cross-country pilgrimage from Salt Lake City to Tanglewood. This year, though, we’ve taken an unlikely circuitous route, stopping first in Portland and Seattle to visit our kids. As we’re so far north already we’ve decided to make our trek through Canada, stopping at a Canadian Rockies hot[…]
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The final musician session was a conversation with Peter Pastreich, a well-respected manager in the orchestra world, having served as Executive Director of the San Francisco Symphony for 21 years. Prior to that he served as Executive Director at the Saint Louis Symphony, the Kansas City Philharmonic and the Nashville Symphony. More recently he came[…]
Read MoreOne of the best metaphors in recent years was coined by Matt Taibbi, who wrote one of the great articles on the financial crisis of 2008: The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face[…]
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It’s time for another Editor’s Choice, and it’s 90+ degrees here in Connecticut, with the humidity soaring off the charts. Too hot to consider something serious, so I thought I’d draw your attention to a fun article I wrote a few years ago when the New Haven Symphony (NHSO) and yours truly were in a[…]
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Just like Rip Van Winkle, American orchestras have been asleep for twenty years. Season after season of the same repertoire, played again and again for generations until the idea of an orchestra participating in modern musical life seems outrageous. Last week, the League of American Orchestras focused their annual conference around the idea of “Imagining Orchestras in[…]
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I attended the League of American Orchestras’ annual conference last week in St. Louis. The conference was the usual mix of plenary sessions, constituent meetings (I attended the musician sessions), workshops and smaller presentations, a master class with David Robertson, and a concert by the St. Louis Symphony. I will be writing about the various[…]
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ICSOM (the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, which represents over 4,000 musicians from 51 major symphony orchestras throughout the United States) recently released a documentary titled “ICSOM: The First Fifty Years.” Filmed during the 50th anniversary conference in Chicago, the 38-minute film contains numerous interviews on the founding of ICSOM, telling the fascinating[…]
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