Author - Robert Levine

1
The AFM is still wrong about the League
2
St. Paul settles
3
News from the North
4
In memoriam 2012
5
In Memoriam – 2012
6
A normal strike
7
Fun with Financing in Nashville
8
A Bold Experiment
9
Are dinosaurs falling? Are deficits “structural”?
10
Are Three Legs Appropriate? Or Even Sufficient?

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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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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News from the North

There have been been several developments in the Twin Labor Disputes in the State Least Likely To Experience Labor Disputes (Or At Least Not-Nice Ones). None of them offer much visible hope for quick resolution of either situation. On the Minnesota Orchestra front, Graydon Royce of the Minneapolis StarTribune, who has done as good a[…]

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In memoriam 2012

The more-or-less annual tribute from Polyphonic.org to our colleagues who left us in 2012 is finally online; my apologies to those who were waiting for it and no doubt lost patience many weeks ago. I knew a distressing number of those on this list. Some I knew just in passing (Mark Flint, Geoffrey Fushi, Bob[…]

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A normal strike

It’s a measure of just how bizarre is the state of labor relations in the orchestra field that only now, months into the most brutal negotiating season in memory, are we seeing the the first “normal” labor dispute – by which I mean a strike (and not a lock-out), not immediately settled (and thus more[…]

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Fun with Financing in Nashville

Some rather alarming headlines have appeared in the past few days in the Nashville Press, the best of which was WDEF’s Nashville Symphony Mired in Debt: The Nashville Symphony is in danger of defaulting on $102 million in bonds that were used to build the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. Symphony CEO and President Alan Valentine told[…]

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A Bold Experiment

Events in the Twin Cities this season have both horrified and fascinated those who care about orchestras and orchestra musicians. Events of such magnitude usually have a backstory, and the months-long lockout of the musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has a very rich backstory indeed. In 2002 and 2003, the board, staff and[…]

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Are dinosaurs falling? Are deficits “structural”?

NPR had a story yesterday morning on Morning Edition that, rather than commit what used to be considered journalism, rounded up the usual suspects on the subject of whether orchestras in their current form are unsustainable (come to think of it, he said/he said different is what’s considered journalism these days): 2012 will go down[…]

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Are Three Legs Appropriate? Or Even Sufficient?

Henry Fogel was one of the best orchestra CEOs of the past thirty years, and his understanding of the intricacies of orchestral governance is profound. I learned a great deal from this article, even though I didn’t agree with all of his conclusions, and I think his insights about how our institutions function still ring[…]

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