Orchestra Management

Eight services into a nine-service week, and it was still only Saturday. Tempers were frayed further by it being the second of two consecutive days in the orchestra’s least favorite venue, an aging vaudeville palace with no backstage facilities except for a cramped below-stage crossover reached by steep but badly-lit staircases apparently designed more for […]

It’s no accident that the most influential book in our field may have been Danny Newman’s Subscribe Now!.  Selling tickets by subscription has long been the foundation of orchestras’ earned revenue stream. And most orchestra musicians who’ve had to pay attention to their orchestra’s finances have heard some variant on how the subscription model is fading […]

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 […]

Only people who serve on orchestra committees can really understand the impact of such volunteerism on their families. That impact can be substantial, both good and bad. One example of the positive impact of such service is this article by Jennifer Mondie, a member of the National Symphony Orchestra whose activism was clearly inspired and […]

John Williams is one of the most important and influential composers writing new music for orchestras today. In fact, the most exciting and anticipated new music for orchestra this year is John Williams’ new score to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Yet, despite his incontestably successful forty-year career writing new music for orchestra and his […]

As I suspected, there are two radically different schools of thought regarding the Great Carnegie Hall Governance War. The first is expressed well by Norman Lebrecht, who wrote: When Ronald Perelman took over as chairman from Sandy Weill in February, he announced he wanted changes – more rock music and contemporary culture, less of the […]

Added to the age-old question – “how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” – may be a new one: “how do you run Carnegie Hall?” It look as if the answer might turn out to be “don’t serve on the board of directors.” Two days ago the Wall Street Journal reported on a dispute between […]

It was with great pleasure that I read the news that the Portland Symphony in Maine has named Carolyn Nishon as their new Executive Director. Carolyn has been with the PSO since 2008, serving in a variety of positions, most recently as General Manager. Carolyn replaces Lisa Dixon, who had been in the position since […]

In a previous post (“Saving the Hartford Symphony,” July 9), I offered a few observations about the situation at the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Briefly, the situation is that the management, which is now essentially the Bushnell under an agreement struck 16 months ago, is proposing significant reductions in the number of services offered to many […]

An article came out a couple of weeks ago on Omaha.com with some positive news from the Omaha Symphony.  Attendance during the Symphony’s 2014-15 season was record setting, and even subscription packages to multiple concerts are on the rise. Pretty exciting.  Of course, the question is why. Why are more people coming to the symphony […]