Archive - 2013

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Where no orchestra has gone before
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Yo-Yo Ma’s Address to the Americans for the Arts Summit
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Making Room for Leadership
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Happy Birthday Polyphonic!
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Friday April 19, 2013
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The Role of the Orchestra Librarian
7
The AFM is still wrong about the League
8
Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Musical DNA
9
St. Paul settles
10
Protect Your Hearing

Where no orchestra has gone before

The Minnesota Orchestra has once again made history; this time with a public threat by its music director to leave unless things are settled very soon: Osmo Vänskä says he will resign as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra if the ensemble loses a prestigious engagement at New York’s Carnegie Hall because of the current[…]

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Yo-Yo Ma’s Address to the Americans for the Arts Summit

On Monday, April 8, 2013, Yo-Yo Ma, along with former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum and Damian Woetzel, former principal dancer at New York City Ballet and the director of the Aspen Institute Arts Program, participated in the Americans for the Arts Summit in Washington DC, discussing the need to develop strong public policies[…]

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Making Room for Leadership

I was in Washington DC last week, waiting for the cherry blossoms to bloom. Spring has inspired me to write again, thinking about rebirth and opportunities for change. I recently lost a strong teacher in the el Sistema program in Durham, NC that I run, called KidZNotes. She was from Venezuela, had the authentic experience of growing up[…]

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Happy Birthday Polyphonic!

Polyphonic.org was founded in April of 2006, making this month our 7th birthday!  We thought that a fun way to celebrate would be to interview our editors and give you a peek into the lives of the folks that curate the content here at Polyphonic.org.  Enjoy! Dr. Ramon Ricker – Editor-in-Chief How long have you[…]

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Friday April 19, 2013

This terrible week will stay in our memories. It is with us now. Unresolved. A scream like the mighty dissonance of that Mahlerian scream in his 10th Symphony. But we will conquer its summit and plumb its depths.

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The Role of the Orchestra Librarian

Karen Schnackenberg of the Dallas Symphony has been a contributor to Polyphonic for many years. I’d like to pay tribute to her in this Editor’s Choice blog post. The article I’m calling attention to was about librarians as copyists, and included some comments from my own librarian in the Hartford Symphony, Ron Krentzman. When should a[…]

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The AFM is still wrong about the League

It’s hardly a secret that the relationship between the League of American Orchestras and the AFM and its symphonic player conferences has become publicly contentious since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008. The latest manifestation of that is an article in the March 2013 edition of the International Musician written by Joel LeFevre,[…]

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Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Musical DNA

Roland Tapley, Alfred Krips, Harry Dickson, George Zazofsky, Clarence Knudsen, Laszlo Nagy, Eugene Lehner, George Humphrey, Misha Nieland, Henry Portnoi, John Barwicki, James Pappoutsakis, Pasquale Cardillo, Bernard Zighera, Charlie Smith.  What do these 15 men have in common?  They were all musicians in the Boston Symphony who, with some 80 of their colleagues, performed the[…]

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St. Paul settles

After an extremely confusing few days reading the press coverage of whether or not a deal brokered by St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman would be accepted by the musicians, it appears that it was: The agreement came even as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Board was meeting in executive session to discuss canceling the rest[…]

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Protect Your Hearing

Mary Plaine, Principal Librarian with the Baltimore Symphony, recently posted a New York Times article  by Jane Brody on Orchestra-L, ICSOM’s list-serve, about what causes hearing lost. (Thank you, Mary!) The article cites a new book by Katherine Bouton, “Shouting Won’t Help: Why I — and 50 Million Other Americans — Can’t Hear You.” According[…]

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