Blog: Page 73

Something fun for the weekend.<a href="

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 […]

Did you know that getting flu shots doesn’t actually mean that one can’t get the flu? Me neither. We’re doing Petrouchka this week. It’s my least favorite of the big ballets that Stravinsky wrote almost 100 years ago, I suspect because it’s the most programmatic. But it works wonderfully well as a ballet, as this […]

Because I teach the course, “Entrepreneurship in Music” at the Eastman School, I am frequently asked for advice from students who are contemplating setting up a business entity for their chamber group.  They often begin the discussion by saying that their plans are to set up a 501(c)3 (not-for-profit).  They usually say something like, “That […]

In my previous two posts on the state of the classical recording business here and here, I talked about Anne Midgette’s observation that even top-selling classical recordings aren’t notching up impressive sales numbers: The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales […]

This might be related to why orchestras seem to have so much trouble in the Sun Belt: “It was like an invitation to a date,” says Sarasota artist Pablo Rodriguez of his painting, “Modern Venus,” which he installed in early January in the Sarasota Orchestra’s Harmony Gallery as part of his exhibit, I’ll Be Seeing […]

Here’s a Ciara Pressler blog from fracturedatlas.org.  Makes sense to me.  And so timely. . .

This past week has been one meeting after another devoted to various personnel issues (not, thankfully, any terminations, in case you were wondering). The cumulative effect on me has been that I feel as if I’d gone 5 rounds or so with the front line of the Green Bay Packers. Orchestras are villages. We orchestra […]

One of the problems with looking at historical trends in recording sales is that such sales are driven to a significant degree by technological change. Over the 100 or so years since the first recording of an orchestra was made, there have been constant improvement in the technologies for both producing recordings and playing them […]

Alex Ross of the New Yorker wrote an absolutely brilliant summary of the recent studies by the League of American Orchestras and the National Endowment for the Arts on the state of classical music audiences. It’s in print in the magazine’s February 8th issue, which is unfortunately behind a paywall. But Ross blogs about it […]