Author - Robert Levine

1
The Cult of Youth
2
NHMF and the Union
3
Klemp, you talka too muich
4
Does the Vienna Phil discriminate?
5
He has a dream
6
It's an ecosystem, Maestro
7
Nice little pension plan you got there…
8
Resistance is apparently futile
9
The hottest seat
10
TMI and the cult of personality

The Cult of Youth

Mathew Gurewitsch had an interesting article the other day in the New York Times on The Cult of Youth: IN the world of the contemporary symphony orchestra, youth is not so much a stage of life as it is a battle cry. Youth orchestras! Young conductors! At times it begins to seem that nothing else[…]

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NHMF and the Union

The March 2010 edition of the International Musician, the official publication of the AFM, contained news of the AFM’s most recent success in influencing a recalcitrant employer: Several managers and directors of New Hampshire Music Festival (NHMF) have left their posts, following overwhelming opposition to their plans to implement a “new artistic model” for the[…]

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Klemp, you talka too muich

That was the punch line of what is likely an apocryphal story about an interaction between the great German conductor Otto Klemperer and an Italian principal oboe. Sadly, Klemp is not alone. It must be hard to be a conductor, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. But one of the hardest things – judging by[…]

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Does the Vienna Phil discriminate?

The Vienna Philharmonic is touring the UK, and The Independent has re-visited the question of whether the orchestra discriminates on the basis of gender or national origin: Bernstein called it “that unbelievable orchestra, which plays like one hundred angel-fingers growing out of my hands”. Yet once Stravinsky immolates into silence, pause, for before you is[…]

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He has a dream

The General Director of the San Francisco Opera has a vision for the future of the company, and it’s…a multi-storied annex? David Gockley has a dream, and it’s to transform a parking lot behind the Veterans Building into a multi-storied annex for the San Francisco Opera. Of course, like any dream, there is a reality[…]

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It's an ecosystem, Maestro

Riccardo Muti, who last week taught us (and the Met Opera orchestra) about Verdi, this week is teaching us about the value of some American orchestras: The Riccardo Muti era at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra officially began Thursday at Symphony Center, as the CSO’s 10th music director announced plans for his first season. He did[…]

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Nice little pension plan you got there…

It’d be a a shame if something happened to it. Oh wait… something just did: The Pension Protection Act of 2006 requires the funding “zone status” for defined benefit multiemployer plans like the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund (the “Plan”) to be certified each year by the plan’s actuary. The actuary for[…]

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Resistance is apparently futile

This article on composer/programmer David Cope and the compositional software he’s created is absolutely amazing: It was here, half a dozen years ago, that Cope put Emmy to sleep. She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not[…]

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The hottest seat

My BBB Charles Noble wrote a good post the other day on the perils of being an assistant principal string player: This morning, at the dress rehearsal for this weekend’s classical program, my principal had to leave midway through the rehearsal for personal reasons. It took place during the middle of the first movement of[…]

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TMI and the cult of personality

The other New York Times piece to which I referred in the last post was on Manfred Honeck, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and focused to a remarkable extent on his religious beliefs: Manfred Honeck, the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, is a Roman Catholic who prays before every concert, sometimes in[…]

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