Author - Roger Ruggeri

1
Positive, Yet Perilous Potentials of Musicians on Orchestra Board Committees

Positive, Yet Perilous Potentials of Musicians on Orchestra Board Committees

Mar 24 2006
Browse archives for March 24, 2006
Roger Ruggeri
Roger Ruggeri

A member of the Rochester Philharmonic and Dallas Symphony before joining the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in 1962, Ruggeri served as Principal Double Bassist from 1963 until stepping back from that position in 2005. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Ruggeri has been featured as a soloist and a composer with a number of organizations, including the Milwaukee Symphony and the Grand Teton Music Festival (WY). He has taught at Southern Methodist University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Without double bass in hand, Ruggeri is active as a composer, program annotator and lecturer. Since beginning as the MSO’s program annotator in 1968, Ruggeri has gone on to provide concert notes for major arts organizations throughout the country. Ruggeri is a former vice-president of the International Society of Bassists and a past Double Bass Forum Editor for the [i]American String Teacher[/i].

Ruggeri was elected by his colleagues in 1994 as a Musician Representative to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra Board; he is active on several Board committees. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Executive Board of Milwaukee’s musicians’ union (Local #8). He served as chair of the Grand Teton Music Festival Players’ Board from 1997 to 2003 and since 2004 as chair of the MSO Players’ Council. Ruggeri was also a panelist-consultant to the Music Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

All posts from Roger Ruggeri
0

No comments yet.

Add your comment
Posted in

Spread the love

“Unless musicians sit on the board, they’ll never have any influence in their organization.” A fashionable phrase among a noticeable segment of orchestra musicians today, but what impact will musicians on the board of directors or board committees accomplish. How much influence can one or two musicians have when most boards are comprised of anywhere from 20 to 200 members?

Then there are the issues surrounding representation, are musician board members representing their fellow musicians or are they there to express their own opinions. Even if the musicians have a clearly defined understanding of their presence on a board are the non-musician board members aware of those parameters or even agree with them?

Whether or not musicians should participate on their orchestra’s board is, at best, a sticky issue. Although there’s no universal answer one thing is certain: learning from other musicians who have a long sense of history in the business can shed a great deal of insight onto an otherwise murky subject. Milwaukee Symphony Bassist Roger Ruggeri fits that description perfectly and draws on his more than 45 years of experience (the last 12 of which have been spent as a musician representative to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra board) to illuminate this discussion.

Read More