Discussion Panel: Page 29

My career since 1982 has been shaped by an event which no musician should have to experience – the demise of our orchestra. I joined the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra in Halifax, Nova Scotia, along with my wife, Anne, a violinist, in 1979. The day before our first rehearsal in September, 1982, our G.M. called all […]

What a wealth of issues to discuss in five days….where to start? Certainly, we all enjoy balanced budgets and the efforts by all that make that possible; we would welcome efforts on the part of the CBC to give us more air time, and loudly applaud all levels of government that would increase funding to […]

Board or Bored? In November, 2003 I was invited to sit on a panel at the Cultural Human Resources Council’s conference in Toronto. The conference was entitled Strategy 21, Cultural Human Resources for the 21st Century. There were many panels and presentations of interest at the conference, such as: HR Problems – How Do We […]

I have been the Manager of Outreach and Education for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra for the past three years. I joined the CPO in its first year back after having gone through bankruptcy protection. The Outreach & Education programme had suffered serious neglect by this time and it has been an interesting, challenging, and rewarding […]

It’s an honour to be here: I was a big fan of the work of the Symphony Orchestra Institute (does anyone else recall being especially happy the day their copy of Harmony arrived in the mail?), and I have been following and promoting Polyphonic.org since the site was launched last spring. Ann’s given our panel […]

The November VDP puts the spotlight on Canadian orchestras. Canadian and US symphony musicians all belong to the same union, and many Americans play in Canadian orchestras and Canadians play in American orchestras. But the nature of symphony orchestras is rather different in the two countries, in large part because of the amount of government […]

Robert Levine asked: “Given that orchestral performances have (as Garrison Keillor once described himself) a “face made for radio,” is there any real value in doing TV broadcasts? If so, why are there so few left?” TV broadcasts certainly have value for us. We are one of the few orchestras still with regular appearances on […]

“1. …What happens when every orchestra is able to put every performance up for sale (or for free) on its own web-based store? Or is the value of electronic media for orchestras dependent on it being an activity for only a subset of orchestras?” To begin with, there will be only a number of orchestras […]

Robert Levine asks, “What is the value to institutions and musicians of radio (local or national) vs CDs or downloadable files?” I think they fulfill very different functions, all of them valuable. Generally speaking, CDs and downloadable files are about collecting music. Radio is about programming. Radio can educate and inform. Radio has a tremendous […]

Some more questions for the panelists: 1. It is (as we’re finding out in Milwaukee) an order of magnitude easier and (even putting labor costs aside) cheaper to produce and “distribute” downloadable recordings than it is to produce any other form of media. What happens when every orchestra is able to put every performance up […]