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I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends

The article that follows my comments is from The Minnesota Daily, the newspaper of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/St. Paul.  It’s the first in a series profiling drug use on the UMinn. campus, and they start with music students. Since the readers of Polyphonic.org are familiar with the orchestra world, it will be no surprise[…]

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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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New Article: Selling Bartok's Blackbeard's Castle

We’ve published another article — about an amazing marketing success with a program that should have been hard to sell. Now, of course, our own Robert Levine, with Ilana Setapen, was featured on the first half playing the Mozart Symphonie Concertante, so that must have done it right there! But seriously (no offense meant, Robert…),[…]

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Is Concert Clothing Tax Deductible?

Question: Posted February 22, 2010 at 1:39 PM by Brittney Stanton Mr. Hunt, I’m a young musician filing taxes as an independent for the first time and could use your help. Can I deduct any of the concert attire or music that I purchase? Brittney, There are two parts to your question: for the answer[…]

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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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Conductors and the cult of personality

Two conductor profiles in the New York Times in recent days highlight the dangers of thinking that conductors are special people. The first was on Riccardo Muti, and was an unadulterated puff piece: Realizing that the Met musicians might not have been familiar with the opera, he occasionally paused to clue them in on the[…]

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1
I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends
2
He has a dream
3
It's an ecosystem, Maestro
4
Nice little pension plan you got there…
5
Resistance is apparently futile
6
New Article: Selling Bartok's Blackbeard's Castle
7
Is Concert Clothing Tax Deductible?
8
The hottest seat
9
TMI and the cult of personality
10
Conductors and the cult of personality