At its best, a symphony orchestra is more summer blockbuster than art-house flick. Orchestras make music on a big scale and consequently demand a big audience. Filling the house affirms why orchestras exist in a way that half-empty performances, regardless of their intrinsic merit, simply cannot.
Year: 2011
The model, one year later…Even deader, or still not dead yet?
Thank you, Drew, for inviting me to be a guest contributor now for I believe the fourth time (counting TAFTO). Sometime I have played it safe by sharing thoughts on the practical (and not particularly exciting) side of orchestra management. But last year I tackled more ambitious “what the much maligned orchestra business model really is” and “whether it’s really dead” topics (plus one more related article from Drew here), and I felt like it might be useful to revisit some of these issues in light of what has happened in the past twelve months.
It's Guest Author Time
I’m away at the Grand Tetons Music Festival through August 16 and that means you’ll be treated to a series of posts from gust authors. We have a good mix of returning guest authors alongside some new faces and from what I’ve seen from some of them so far, it going to make for some good reading.
Upgrading Habits
If you’re anything like me, you have a rather large list of blogs and other online news RSS feeds. For some time now, I’ve used my Google homepage to aggregate those feeds but it has never been a perfect solution. But not long ago, I started using the news reading application from Pulse on my Droid Smartphone and iPad and after several months of regular use, I have to say that it is the best solution I’ve found to keep on top of all my regular sources. The only hitch is that, as of now, it is only available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Board
Denial is a crazy thing; particularly when it comes to crisis management. One tip on knowing when your organization might be taking the first step off of a very large cliff is when more stakeholders focus on insignificant items to the detriment of obvious, high priority tasks. For example, if your orchestra’s senior management team becomes so consumed with figuring out how to replace copier toner to the point of starting the institutional meeting to announce reorganization bankruptcy 25 minutes late, then you might have a problem (true story, but from years ago).