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Seattle settles

Seattle Symphony management and musicians have reached a tentative agreement: The 23-month, three-season contract — which could be extended for an additional eight months — would immediately cut musicians’ pay by 5 percent until the end of this season, with the current pay scale resuming in 2011. Musicians also would pay a greater share of[…]

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How AFM members can help in Haiti

UnionPrivilege, which is a benefits program run by the AFL-CIO for members of its member unions, is matching contributions made by union members for earthquake relief. Details are here.

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Reboot in New Hampshire

Apparently the New Hampshire Music Festival is doing a pretty thorough 180-degree turn: Less than two weeks after abandoning pursuit of a new artistic vision and restructured orchestra, which sparked bitter controversy last summer, the Board of the NH Music Festival shuffled directors and management when it met last week.

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Learning From The NFL

There’s a music blog on ArtJournal.com called Creative Destruction, but no author is indicated.  Instead this descriptor appears under the link, “Fresh ideas on building arts communities.”  I was curious so I checked it out and found that the blogger is John Thomas Dodson.  He’s a conductor.  You can find out more about him here.[…]

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An unhappy customer

A left-leaning political blogger in Philadelphia, age 37, is not happy with his concert-going experience: I go to about half a dozen concerts per year, and the problems the orchestra faces are pretty obvious to me. Their marketing is horrible, their ushers and ticket sellers treat people like crap (not all, of course, but many),[…]

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Sandow on Ricker on diversity

Most readers of this blog will know of Greg Sandow, if only for the work that he’s done for Polyphonic. But he’s done a great deal of other stuff, including writing a blog for ArtsJournal.com. He recently did a post on something that Ray Ricker had written for this blog, and it’s worth reading in[…]

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Thought for the day

Musicians are the only people who use “and” as a noun: Do you want us to do a crescendo on the and of three?

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Such a versatile instrument – Part 2

From our colleagues in Minnesota:

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Some thoughts about auditions

Auditions are a big subject; Polyphonic did a virtual discussion panel on the topic about three years ago and barely scratched the surface. We had two days of violin auditions at the beginning of the week, which gave me both a lot of time to think and some material to think about. So I thought[…]

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1
Seattle settles
2
How AFM members can help in Haiti
3
Reboot in New Hampshire
4
A tiny perfect strike
5
Learning From The NFL
6
An unhappy customer
7
Sandow on Ricker on diversity
8
Thought for the day
9
Such a versatile instrument – Part 2
10
Some thoughts about auditions