Today I received an email from Thomas F. Lee the President of the American Federation of Musicians. I suppose that it went to all AFM members for whom they have email addresses. It begins: Dear Member RICKER: I am pleased to announce that the Federation is developing a series of videos to educate musicians and[…]
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On Sunday, May 16, 2010, CBS’ news magazine 60 Minutes featured a segment on Gustavo Dudamel and El Sistema USA, in particular YOLA (Youth Orchestra LA) and the Baltimore Symphony’s OrchKids program. Gustavo Dudamel is, of course, the new Music Director of the Los Angeles Philhamonic, and the segment shows him at his first rehearsal[…]
Read MoreThe conference was hosted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to showcase their YOLA project: Youth Orchestra LA. On Friday we were bused to the Expo Center, which most of us assumed was some sort of civic center. Instead, it turned out to be a huge Parks and Recreation campus in South Central LA (now referred[…]
Read MoreThe highlight of the conference for most people was the presentation on Friday morning by the Abreu fellows, where nine of the ten fellows described their two months in Venezuela during February, March, and April, 2010. (Dan Berkowitz was hired by the LA Philharmonic to head up their YOLA program before the fellows’ trip to[…]
Read MoreThe conference opened this morning (May 6) with an extremely interesting panel discussion on Musicians as Educators: The Many Faces and Approaches of Teaching, moderated by Eric Booth, with panelists Robert Gupta, the youngest violinist ever accepted in the LA Philharmonic and an avid teacher, David Malek, an Abreu fellow, and Arlen Hlusko, cellist, student[…]
Read MorePolyphonic will be publishing a lot of information about the El Sistema USA project, covering many of its myriad facets, in the next month. I arrived in Los Angeles last night for “Composing Change: YOLA and the El Sistema Movement” conference. Today’s session, hosted by the League of American Orchestras, will be moderated by Eric[…]
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I don’t know that this has ever happened in an orchestra bankruptcy before: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Faris yesterday denied the Honolulu Symphony Society’s request to extend the period in which it alone could submit a plan for its reorganization. The decision allows the symphony’s musicians and other parties to submit competing plans for the[…]
Read MoreFor anyone who still believed that there was significant money to be made in selling recordings online, this chart will come as an unpleasant reality check. A dissenting point of view can be found here. Fortunately, more and more people in our business are realizing that the real value of electronic media to our institutions[…]
Read MoreA discussion has erupted on another online forum regarding the use of cell phones at auditions. My orchestra has had some very limited discussion about a related issue; the use of electronic devices by committee members, albeit in the context of doing anything at auditions other than listening. But that discussion (which manifested itself in[…]
Read More“The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men,” Charles de Gaulle once famously remarked. A rather public discussion of whether music directors can be indispensable is happening over the physical health of James Levine and its impact on the institutional health of the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony. At some point the[…]
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