Labor relations

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 […]

Things have gotten dire indeed in Hartford. Management issued a statement recently that unless a settlement is reached within the next few weeks, they will close down the orchestra at the end of January. In an unprecedented move, management added a service to the musicians’ schedule, requiring all contracted players (and paying them) to attend […]

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 […]

James Stewart, author of Den of Thieves and many other prize-winning investigative works, has turned his talent to exploring the recent contract negotiations at the Metropolitan Opera. In the March 25, 2015 issue of the New Yorker magazine, Stewart presents an amazingly detailed analysis of these negotiations and what led up to them. As one […]

As I write this introduction to my Editor’s Choice for this month, at top of mind for me is the former Director of the Eastman School of Music, Robert Freeman. In 1972 he was named director of Eastman, a position he held for 24 years. He returned to Eastman this week to be formally honored […]

The folks at soundnotion.tv hosted a discussion with Drew McManus and myself on the subject of substitute pay and how it was handled in last year’s Minnesota Orchestra settlement. The discussion was moderated (very well, I thought) by David MacDonald and Sam Merciers. It can be watched on YouTube here. I felt the discussion covered […]

There was an unusual amount of feedback on my post last week about the pay disparity between full-time musicians and subs in Minnesota and how that might have come about. Some of the feedback confirmed my suspicions that the root of the problem was a “new model” mindset on the part of some board members. […]

One of the issues at play during the Year of Three Lockouts continues to reverberate around the symphonoblogosphere – the question of pay for substitute and extra musicians, and in particular the reduction in that pay that was part of the Minnesota settlement. Drew McManus called attention to it in a year-in-review post, where he […]

The Danish cartoonist Robert Storm Petersen famously said that “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Saying what mattered in 2014 is essentially making a prediction about what people in the future will think about our present. But it’s worth trying nonetheless; 2014 was a pretty dramatic year in our business, and merits […]

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 […]