symphony

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 […]

While there’s been some public discussion about the Flanagan book, as I mentioned here, there’s been almost none about its genesis, with one exception that I’ll discuss below. This is unfortunate; how and why an analysis originates can be very informative about the substance of the analysis. So I will try to rectify that and […]

The Flanagan Report has recently been resurrected by its author, Robert Flanagan of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as a book, recently published and currently being promoted by the Yale University Press. The promotion has not yet paid off in reviews outside our field, but is beginning to cause reactions from industry groups. The […]

My orchestra did, and it was kinda fun: When Joshua Phillips signed on this season as a French horn player in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, he had no idea the job description included taking a snowball to the head. “I was trying to do what I was told,” he explained. The instructions were coming not […]

It’s hard to read most of the arts reporting in this country and not wonder what else the media gets wrong. The latest example of this, an article on the Dallas Symphony’s current situation titled How Long Can The Dallas Symphony Afford To Play In The Red? popped up yesterday: That the symphony is in […]

In what may be the last NLRB decision in a long time, a few days ago the Board ruled that musicians in several per-service orchestras were employees and not independent contractors, and thus could force their employer to recognize their union as bargaining agent: The National Labor Relations Board has found that musicians playing for […]

There was a story the other day on our local public radio story that got me thinking about one of the key differences between choirs and orchestras: their relationship to the beat: We revisit our conversation with classical choral composer Eric Whitacre, who has just been nominated for a Grammy for his latest CD “Light […]

Drew McManus rather raised the profile of the current controversy in Colorado with his post last Friday: Since the Denver Post published an opinion piece written by former Colorado Symphony Orchestra (CSO) board members Heather K. Miller and Bruce Clinton, the field has been abuzz with backchannel discussion over the tone of the letter (in […]

Reactions to the opinion piece written by former Colorado Symphony board members Heather Miller and Bruce Clinton have been quick and generally angry. They fall into three lines of thought; the first was best summarized by Drew McManus at Adaptistration, who wrote: …But the question that should cross your mind at some point while reading […]

I don’t find myself in agreement with Michael Kaiser very often, but he sure hit the nail on the head when he wrote this a few days ago: It is difficult to see a way out of a chronic deficit, and board members — who are volunteers after all and rarely sign up for a […]