Blog: Page 40

A few weeks ago I got a call from concert pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who wanted to tell me about a new consortium commissioning project he’s working on. At the end of a rehearsal with the Minnesota Orchestra, a young composer approached him about a piece he’d like to write for piano, chorus and orchestra. Jeffrey […]

Jose Luis Hernandez-Estrada is a member of the third class of The Sistema Fellows at New England Conservatory. An accomplished pianist and conductor, he studied at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, the Conservatori del Liceu in Barcelona, and the … Continue reading →

Japanese scientists have succeeded in making violin strings out of spider silk: Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan has studied the properties of spider silk for 35 years. In the past decade he has focused on trying to turn the silk into violin strings, even taking lessons on what was required of a […]

The Flanagan Report has recently been resurrected by its author, Robert Flanagan of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as a book, recently published and currently being promoted by the Yale University Press. The promotion has not yet paid off in reviews outside our field, but is beginning to cause reactions from industry groups. The […]

When I was younger I’m sure I didn’t think “Big Picture” as much as I do now, but today with countless projects under my belt, I’m always thinking big.  I suppose it’s also a function of my job at the Eastman School.  As a senior administrator and Director of the Institute for Music Leadership, it’s […]

The most recent attempt by the board and management of the Louisville Orchestra to appear to be trying to settle what has turned into the orchestral equivalent of WW3 was to propose an interesting form of arbitration; one that would have required the Louisville Orchestra musicians to agree in advance to several provisions that they […]

When I was a doctoral student, I was in a class that had an assignment that asked us to think into the future twenty years and forecast what the music profession would look like.  I wish I still had that paper.  It would be fun to see how far off I was.  Anyway, one student […]

Just about one year ago, I wrote an entry to this blog in which I praised the continuing acuteness, love of life, intellectual curiosity, and wonderful humor of my friend George—aged 99. To me, he was a real-life hero. My … Continue reading →

The situation in Louisville continues to make for colorful reporting. Today’s development was that the Music Director of the Kentucky Opera, Joe Mechavich, is bowing out of this week’s production of Merry Widow because the company hired replacement musicians instead of the musicians of the Louisville Orchestra: …“Given these circumstances, I am unable to continue […]

The major function of Twitter appears to be enabling people to write things that, after 24 hours or so of reflection, they probably would rather not have written. Case in point is an outpouring of frustration on the part of the violist Jennifer Stumm, who wrote on her Twitter feed last week: Bigwig last night: […]