Category - Miscellaneous

1
Hiring outside the box
2
The dystonia horror show
3
Another explanation for gender imbalance
4
Oh Those Dress Codes
5
What happened in Charleston?
6
More on Vienna
7
Pain in Baltimore
8
Healthcare reform and orchestras
9
Gender and orchestras – another datapoint
10
Musician Plays Violin as Surgeons Operate on His Brain

Hiring outside the box

The Atlanta Symphony board has decided to hire someone without all that old-fashioned orchestra management baggage: The heavy odds were for an insider — a career symphonic administrator who’d already led one of the nation’s top orchestras and was looking for a lateral move. Instead, the board of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is naming Stanley[…]

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The dystonia horror show

Musicians don’t talk much about focal dystonia; perhaps it’s a superstitious avoidance akin to trying to ward off the Evil Eye. For dystonia really is a horror show; arguably the leading career-killing disorder of all.

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Another explanation for gender imbalance

It’s often forgotten that the core concept behind the World Wide Web (as opposed to the Internet, with which the Web is often confused) is the hyperlink. A hyperlink is that underlined word or phrase or image on a Web page on which one clicks to go there and find out more. The power of[…]

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Oh Those Dress Codes

I read with interest the thread that went through Orchestra-l recently about many symphony musicians who feel that orchestras just dress too formally to relate to their public. Well, I have the absolute opposite opinion — many of us dress way too informally. Yes, white-tie and tails are an anachronism from another century and perhaps[…]

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What happened in Charleston?

The board of the Charleston (SC) Symphony has decided to call it quits for this season: A significant drop in fundraising dollars, exacerbated by the recession’s “strong headwind” has forced the Charleston Symphony Orchestra to suspend its operations, effective immediately, board president Ted Legasey said Sunday. It is the first time in the orchestra’s 75-year[…]

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More on Vienna

So the Vienna Philharmonic finally recognized that women really can play the violin (or whatever instrument) and appointed a woman as Concertmaster. In honor of this occasion, which shouldn’t really have to be an occasion (if the Vienna Philharmonic lived in the same decade, or even century, as the rest of us), I asked a[…]

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Pain in Baltimore

Coverage of the impact of concessions on musicians is not usually as explicit as in this article by Tim Smith for the Baltimore Sun: Musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra have agreed to take yet another salary hit in an effort to help the organization weather the continued effects of the recession. The players accepted[…]

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Healthcare reform and orchestras

There doesn’t seem to have been anything in the press or blogosphere about the effect of healthcare reform (as of last night, and pending the signature of the President, the law of the land) on orchestras. One would think that the effect of HCR on 0.00002% of the national economy would be bigger news. No[…]

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Gender and orchestras – another datapoint

A fascinating article in the latest edition of Allegro, the official publication of Local 802 (NYC), adds some more data to the subject of gender balance in orchestras: Each year for Women’s History Month we crunch the numbers to see how our male and female members are represented on various contracts. The data below is[…]

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Musician Plays Violin as Surgeons Operate on His Brain

Here’s a wonderful, positive story about Roger Frisch, the Minnesota Orchestra Associate Concertmaster, who underwent brain surgery at the Mayo Clinic to correct tremors.  His story was featured  on national news with Diane Sawyer.  Find it here. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/fiddling-brain-10142847

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