Orchestra Management: Page 8

One of the best metaphors in recent years was coined by Matt Taibbi, who wrote one of the great articles on the financial crisis of 2008: The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face […]

Just like Rip Van Winkle, American orchestras have been asleep for twenty years. Season after season of the same repertoire, played again and again for generations until the idea of an orchestra participating in modern musical life seems outrageous. Last week, the League of American Orchestras focused their annual conference around the idea of “Imagining Orchestras in […]

I attended the League of American Orchestras’ annual conference last week in St. Louis. The conference was the usual mix of plenary sessions, constituent meetings (I attended the musician sessions), workshops and smaller presentations, a master class with David Robertson, and a concert by the St. Louis Symphony. I will be writing about the various […]

ICSOM (the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, which represents over 4,000 musicians from 51 major symphony orchestras throughout the United States) recently released a documentary titled “ICSOM: The First Fifty Years.” Filmed during the 50th anniversary conference in Chicago, the 38-minute film contains numerous interviews on the founding of ICSOM, telling the fascinating […]

It’s conference season again, and musicians attending the League of American Orchestra’s annual conference this week in St. Louis will have the chance to learn some of the basic principles of orchestra management from one of the masters, former San Francisco Symphony and St. Louis Symphony CEO Peter Pastreich. Those not lucky enough to hear […]

The Wall Street Journal for Friday, June 7, 2013 carries an article in the “D” Section, “After Orchestras Strike: A Tale of Two Cities” by Terry Teachout. The article compares the ways in which two orchestras – The Minnesota Orchestra and the Detroit Symphony – are dealing with their financial problems.   In Minnesota there is […]

You might think musicians would be at the top of a symphony orchestra’s food chain. So did I. When I joined the Boston Symphony violin section in 1975 at the tender age of 22, fresh out of college, bursting with enthusiasm, I was under the naïve misconception that the management of the orchestra worked for […]

Half of the fun of watching Mad Men is observing how dramatically American society has changed since the 1960’s.  The characters’ constant drinking and homophobia make us blush, and we notice how far attitudes have shifted towards everything from smoking to sexism.  Our lives in America have changed so thoroughly since then that looking back […]

My Editor’s Choice for this go-round is from 1997—sixteen years ago. Here’s a little background just to put it in context. Our website, Polyphonic.org is part of the Orchestra Musician Forum, that was created in 2004 when Paul R. Judy made a gift of the financial and intellectual assets of the Symphony Orchestra Institute to […]

Jerry Elias, former violinist with the Boston and Utah Symphonies and author of four murder mysteries with a blind violin pedagogue as the protagonist, has agreed to be an occasional blogger for Polyphonic. In addition to writing mysteries Jerry has much to say about classical music, performance practise, playing violin, and much more. His fourth […]