Inside The Arts Podcasts Have Arrived

After months of talking about it, the new series of Inside The Arts podcasts have arrived. The inaugural episode, entitled Battle Of The Brahms, is available at www.insidethearts.com/podcasts. Guest panelists Frank Babbitt, Collins Trier, and John Rosenkrans (all members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra) do a brilliant job at demonstrating how to un-stuff the stuffiness of a classical music review program. You’ll feel like you’re part of the "in …

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Too Much Of A Good Thing

Although this notice could be filed under "better late than never" I wanted to take a moment to point out an article which appeared at The Partial Observer at the beginning of April by Holly Mulcahy which examines the realities of numerous job openings in one orchestra. Holly does an excellent job of walking a reader through reasons why copious numbers of openings in the same ensemble should serve as a …

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Because Shut Up, That’s Why!

Ita_podcasts
Back in the beginning of April, 2008 Jason Heath (Arts Addict and Double Bass Blog author) and I recorded the first three episodes of Inside The Arts’ new series of podcasts and next Monday, the first episode from that session goes live. This inaugural series is a music review podcast where a panel of guests listens to recordings and then offers comments. Did I mention there’s a catch? In order to make things more interesting, panelists typically aren’t told what or who they are listening to until after they’ve heard the selections and offered comments…

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The Internal Governance and Modernization Project

For the past season, I have had the pleasure of working with the Musicians of the Phoenix Symphony on a program dubbed the Internal Governance and Modernization Project. I published some early information about the project last summer but I wanted to take a moment to publish a few additional documents in advance of some detailed articles which will appear in the near future. One is an as-of-yet not released version of a press release outlining the program’s early accomplishments and the other is a letter I composed to the Musicians of The Phoenix Symphony at the conclusion of the project…

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Columbus Season To Continue Unabated

According to an April 28, 2008 press release issued by the Columbus Symphony Orchestra (CSO) board, the organization will not cut short any of the scheduled classical or pops concerts from now through May 31, 2008. This decision was reached during a board meeting following the unanimous decision by the musicians of the CSO to reject the board’s last, best, and final negotiation offer and an individual donation from an unnamed board member. It is good to see that the board has taken the first of two
necessary steps to avoid institutional collapse. The first was to move
away from threats of canceling any of the current season and now all
that remains is to enact step two: an independent review of the board’s
proposed financial plan…

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