Live Music

Recently Nathan Kahn, SSD negotiator, posted an article on ICSOM’s Orchestra-l list-serve that was published in The Guardian in February 2006 about why so many musicians are quitting their orchestra jobs for… According to Anna Price, the author, The money’s terrible, the stress is awful and the music is plain boring. No wonder so many […]

Whatever airline horror story you have about lost or mishandled luggage, I’m pretty sure Robert Black can top it. Robert, as many of you around here know, is a brilliant, nationally recognized double bass player and teacher. He is perhaps best known for being a founding member of the avant-garde music ensemble, the Bang on a […]

How many times have we musicians heard those phrases? Do they mean that we should try to be like Janice Martin, the violinist who plays while hanging upside down?  My most recent experience is not quite that dramatic….. “What time is the lunch break?”  I asked the stage manager, knowing that he was the one […]

Orchestras need to offer compelling reasons for millennials to make live symphonic music a part of their lives.  After all, millennials are the largest generation in human history, and at nearly 90 million people they will very soon make up the vast majority of our orchestras’ stakeholders, constituents, audience, staff members and supporters – and […]

It has been said that though the "educational" kids’ concert is merely a symptom of the general malaise in programming and concert presentation in the main orchestral season. It seems to be down to asking what audience and audience development do we want?

Go out to hear an orchestra concert tonight and chances are the orchestra will be playing Beethoven.  The most recent Orchestra Repertoire Report, from ’09 – ’10, details that 137 orchestras in America performed Beethoven’s music 457 times that season.  His ninth, seventh, and fifth symphonies were ranked first, second and third respectively among the […]

  Orchestras should raise their voices to be heard amid the din of noisy modern culture and promote themselves as socially conscious public institutions. They need to embrace a more inclusive posture in society, and demonstrate an identity more nuanced than silent anonymous conservative tuxedo-clad white male.  While the price of participating in American culture […]

Although maybe it’s the hair? Keira Knightley is working with violist/conductor Yuri Bashmet as a narrator: Keira Knightley and Yuri Bashmet again on one stage! When, in 2010 at the Winter Arts Festival in Sochi after the second intervention with Maestro Bashmet, Keira Knightley asked – not whether he is now developing the genre and […]

[Nick Kitchen is the founding first violinist of the Borromeo Quartet, ensemble in residence at NEC. In addition to receiving the Artist Diploma from NEC, the quartet has gone on to win the 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Lincoln Center’s … Continue reading →