Category - Uncategorized

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Antidote for the Music Major’s Bridge to Nowhere—Use Your Legos
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Tab dump 12/7/09
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Tab dump 12/6/09
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I've got mail
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I Don't Know, I Still Prefer a Clarinet
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An important election you didn't know about
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College Music Performance Majors—A Bridge to Nowhere?
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The New (Model) Hampshire audition system
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Tab dump 11/30/2009
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Not Your Regular (Taped) Nutcracker

Antidote for the Music Major’s Bridge to Nowhere—Use Your Legos

Legos.  You know what they are, little pieces of plastic that have an interlocking system that allows the user to combine them in an infinite number of ways.  With Legos you can make things like buildings or vehicles.  If you don’t like what you make, you can continually try to improve it by rearranging the[…]

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Tab dump 12/7/09

Norman Lebrecht writes a really good column. Why would someone do this? My orchestra gets an endowment gift for a really good purpose. My orchestra also got nominated for a Grammy. Alex Ross thinks Dudamel is the real thing. The next step is records that spin really fast and need to be changed every five[…]

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Tab dump 12/6/09

Would this be called a gaggle of oboists? Happy birthday. Would have been more impressive without the pay cuts. Some coverage didn’t even bother to mention the musicians’ concessions, although they did, of course, feel the staff’s pain. The Chicago Lyric Opera orchestra has a new contract after threatening to strike. New Mexico Symphony musicians[…]

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I've got mail

In a blogging career lasting about 5 years now, I’ve learned not to expect much feedback. It’s not because people don’t read blogs about orchestras or the AFM – the two topics I write about – because the traffic stats show otherwise. And it’s not that people don’t care, because otherwise why would they take[…]

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I Don't Know, I Still Prefer a Clarinet

University Turns iPhones Into Musical Instruments NEW YORK (Reuters) – Welcome to an orchestra of the 21st century. iPhones are being used as musical instruments in a new course at an American university. Students at the University of Michigan are learning to design, build and play instruments on their Apple Inc. smartphones, with a public[…]

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An important election you didn't know about

Most orchestra musicians don’t pay much attention to union politics. That’s OK: most politics in the AFM is not worth paying much attention to. But there was an election the other day that’s worth noting. The two largest locals in the AFM are Local 47 (Los Angeles) and Local 802 (New York). Both are dominated[…]

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College Music Performance Majors—A Bridge to Nowhere?

Music educators have been doing a fantastic job. The level of musicianship of college-age music majors continues to rise each year. Jazz players are entering as freshmen at skill levels equal to graduate students of years past, and “classical” musicians always seem to raise the bar with their technical prowess. Of course, one can always[…]

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The New (Model) Hampshire audition system

At the beginning of the 2009 New Hampshire Music Festival season, the Festival’s musicians were informed that they would be required to re-apply for their positions in the orchestra if they wanted to return for the 2010 season. It’s hard to overstate just how unusual this is in our business. “Unprecedented” would not be too[…]

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Tab dump 11/30/2009

Pascal Rogé does good and does smart at the same time. Thanks on behalf of all of us. The Toronto Symphony posted a surplus for last season. Musicians in the Sarasota Orchestra have a lot of community support in their current labor dispute. The recession is hurting artists. (Did you think otherwise? Me neither.) This[…]

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Not Your Regular (Taped) Nutcracker

This weekend DFW area musicians began protesting the Texas Ballet Theater’s Nutcracker performances which will run in both Dallas and Fort Worth – without an orchestra.  For those of you who have been following this fiasco, you know that we have been protesting the TBT’s performances sans live music for more than a year now.[…]

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