Month: July 2004

All That’s Fascinating About Classical Music

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I’m going to indulge myself today and go a little off topic. I’m not going to talk about management issues or any current industry events.  Instead I’m just going to write about a concert I recently attended.  I don’t want to write a critique of the performance, so I won’t.  What I want to do is simply tell you a story. It was this past July 2nd and I was set …

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Reader Response: Keeping Me Accurate

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Before I left for vacation, I posted a few articles (here and here) about the San Francisco Symphony’s outreach program that was produced and aired by PBS.  In the second article I called PBS member station “affiliates” and I wondered why they didn’t choose to broadcast the Keeping Score program.  Thankfully, one of Adaptistration’s readers wrote in to correct my nomenclature and clarify how some of the programming at PBS works.  …

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Making Sense Of The Salary Issue

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Upon returning from vacation this week I was very pleased to find a few articles about orchestra executive and music director compensation.  One was from last Sunday’s New York Times by Blair Tindall, the other by fellow AJ blogger Andrew Taylor. In Blair’s original article, she went into many of the topics that have been covered here regarding the disparity in pay between musicians, music directors, and orchestra executives.* In Andrew’s …

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The Honolulu Symphony – An Island Unto Itself

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It’s not uncommon to hear managers and musicians alike espouse how their orchestra is “unique” among the landscape of American orchestras.  They use this to justify why an idea that is successful at Orchestra “A” wouldn’t be transferable to their situation. And to small degrees this is usually true, but the larger picture shows us that they are probably more alike than not.  One orchestra which can legitimately claim that it …

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The Controversy Over Commissions

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I have to start off this article by employing the use of a shockingly dirty word.  A word so heinous that it’s mention can curve an arts administrator’s spine, infect the soul of a donor, and cause America’s orchestras to fall into ruin.  If you have a child reading over your shoulder you had best cover their eyes.  This filthy word is: commissions…

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