Category - Miscellaneous

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Resistance is apparently futile
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New Article: Selling Bartok's Blackbeard's Castle
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The hottest seat
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TMI and the cult of personality
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Conductors and the cult of personality
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New Article: Spokane Symphony's Endowed Chair
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Better seen than heard
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Why we won't die of Baumol's Disease
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What Do You Consider Success?
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Devil's Trill: A Murder Mystery for Classical Musicians

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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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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New Article: Spokane Symphony's Endowed Chair

Julie Ayer, author of More Than Meets the Ear, How Symphony Musicians Made Labor History, a history of the founding of ICSOM and symphonic unionism, has written a very moving tribute to her mother and sister, both violinists in the Spokane Symphony. They overlapped in the orchestra for 12 years, and both held the 4th[…]

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Better seen than heard

Norman Lebrecht thinks conductors should STFU: By some intuitive affinity or massive failure of imagination, both Gramophone and BBC Music magazine asked ’10 leading Mahler conductors’ to explain in their current issues what his symphonies mean to them. Three maestros – Zinman, Jansons, Tilson Thomas – took part in both features. The rest included most[…]

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Why we won't die of Baumol's Disease

I was at work one night a few weeks ago, waiting for the 3rd movement of the Shostakovich 1st cello concerto to end (no slap at our soloist, Johannes Moser, who played wonderfully, but it’s a long sit with no need to count), when, for some unaccountable reason, I began to think about Baumol’s cost[…]

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What Do You Consider Success?

I visited the website, Extra Criticum. As it states on the homepage, “performing arts pros trade opinions, ideas, questions and obsessions.” The bloggers published here cover a wide range disciplines in the Arts, so it’s not just a music site. And I was interested in a posting by Rolando Teco, since he writes about “success.”[…]

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Devil's Trill: A Murder Mystery for Classical Musicians

While wandering through the local Barnes & Noble recently, I noticed a violin on the cover of a book called Devil’s Trill in the Staff Picks section. On reading the inside back cover, I saw that the author, Gerald Elias, is indeed the violinist I knew at Yale who left New Haven to join the[…]

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