Legal

Even casual followers of employment law know that the issues around religious liberty and the employment relationship in the US are becoming more contentious; the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision and the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue licenses for same-sex marriage, are only the most prominent recent examples. […]

What a wonderful story we heard on NPR’s Morning Edition today – the Stradivarius violin stolen from Roman Totenberg 35 years ago was to be reunited with the family today. Nina Totenberg, famous NPR reporter, tells the story as only she can – how the violin disappeared after one of her father’s performances, how her […]

One of the things that mystified me about the Dallas situation was the involvement of the NLRB; generally disputes between the union and management over contract administration are handled through the grievance arbitration process. Not this one, apparently: The union intervened after a January incident in which DSO management suspended without pay an associate principal […]

Those handful of us in the orchestra blogging community can always count on some conductor, somewhere, doing or saying something really dumb to rescue us from having nothing to write about. Our latest benefactor is Jaap van Zweden, music director of the Dallas Symphony: Conductor Jaap van Zweden has won international praise for elevating the […]

Long-time readers of this blog might remember an article I wrote in 2009 on the subject of discrimination in orchestras. I thought at the time that my survey of the rosters of ICSCOM orchestras demonstrated a marked differential between the number of men and women, especially in principal positions. Someone else has done much the […]

An interest in the law inclines me to surf amongst the legal waves on the Internet, leading to the occasional odd discovery relevant to my day job. This post from the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money caught my eye: Recently Kyle Graham, a professor on the tenure track at Santa Clara Law School, announced on […]

This post originally appeared on the blog Mask of the Flower Prince.  It is reprinted here with permission. You know, over the course of the Minnesota Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera labor disputes, I’ve seen a lot of ugly things. Managements in both the disputes resorted to hard-ball tactics and inflammatory rhetoric as part of a […]

At a seminar at Mondomusica New York on April 11, 2014, Heather Noonan of the League of American Orchestras joined with violin and bow makers, an international environmental expert, and government officials to discuss the recent tightened restrictions on bringing ivory into the US, resulting from an Obama Administration Executive Order issued on February 24, […]

Michael Barar is a violist with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and serves as their representative to ROPA. Exactly one week ago from the time I am writing this, the board of directors of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra was holding its regular quarterly meeting. Most readers who follow arts journalism and the blogosphere surrounding goings on […]

Many years ago a colleague of mine was pressured by management to retire after allegations of sexual misconduct against him became public. I remember being bothered about that at the time, as the specific allegations were about conduct that had happened in his home and had nothing to do with the workplace. Management’s reasoning was […]