Uncategorized: Page 33

A left-leaning political blogger in Philadelphia, age 37, is not happy with his concert-going experience: I go to about half a dozen concerts per year, and the problems the orchestra faces are pretty obvious to me. Their marketing is horrible, their ushers and ticket sellers treat people like crap (not all, of course, but many), […]

Most readers of this blog will know of Greg Sandow, if only for the work that he’s done for Polyphonic. But he’s done a great deal of other stuff, including writing a blog for ArtsJournal.com. He recently did a post on something that Ray Ricker had written for this blog, and it’s worth reading in […]

Musicians are the only people who use “and” as a noun: Do you want us to do a crescendo on the and of three?

From our colleagues in Minnesota:

Auditions are a big subject; Polyphonic did a virtual discussion panel on the topic about three years ago and barely scratched the surface. We had two days of violin auditions at the beginning of the week, which gave me both a lot of time to think and some material to think about. So I thought […]

Over the past couple of months, many of you have followed the plight of the musicians of the New Hampshire Music Festival here on the Polyphonic blog.  Senior Editor and Blog-Meister, Robert Levine did an outstanding job of bringing the musician’s case to the broader public, and was undoubtedly instrumental in the favorable outcome for […]

The Cleveland strike, and the rapidly-ensuing settlement, were the subject of more coverage in the media since… the last round of Big Five orchestra strikes. And the coverage was pretty much the same; talk of how the strike was symptomatic of fundamental issues with the health of orchestras (it wasn’t), talk about how the musicians […]

It seemed to me that this might be a short strike; in the end, it came as close as a strike could be to not being a strike at all. The only work canceled was a concert in Bloomington IN, which will likely be re-scheduled. What is reported about the settlement makes it sound like […]

The Cleveland strike was still ongoing as of late Monday night, at least according to Google News. The New York Times had a long article on the subject by Daniel Wakin, which seemed generally balanced and well-informed. It did include this tidbit, though: Many of the nation’s top orchestras have reduced staff positions and administrative […]

I’m going to riff a bit on Robert Levine’s January 15th blog post, Sometimes it’s hard to have a screened audition, where Robert points out the absurdity in the New York Philharmonic’s decision not to identify clarinetist, Burt Hara, who was playing what most musicians would call a trial week.  The NY Phil is looking […]