Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
I am so looking forward to getting back into a productive work routine. Fortunately, all of the office renovations are officially complete, the furniture is moved in, office cats are settling down, and there’s a full weekend to get caught up. That means I can finally get back to writing the Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO) pension overview I promised back in June. There’s an existing draft that is mostly complete but …
If the Oregon Bach Festival (OBF) hoped time might soften its beleaguered status, a painstaking comprehensive review of their season written by veteran culture journalist Tom Manoff and published in the 8/13/2018 edition of Oregon ArtsWatch demonstrates those aspirations have yet to materialize. Manoff paints a picture of OBF as a group struggling to dig out of a year-old public relations mess. He takes particularly careful aim at the impact losing …
There’s a thoughtful post from Joe Patti that goes a long way toward reminding us about the serious repetitive text syndrome problem that exists through most nonprofit performing arts fields. Patti’s article highlights sound bites related to education efforts and I wholeheartedly agree that’s one area where repetitive text syndrome is at its worst. Here are a few more that seem to so frequent, : “Each year [ORCHESTRA NAME] inspires, engages, …
It’s great to see examination of compensation and work expenses within the field expanding, to that end, the 8/9/2018 edition of Ludwig-can.com published an article by Anya Wassenberg that takes a deep dive into the expense end of classical musicians. Another treat is seeing the issues through a Canadian perspective; while most issues are identical for US based classical musicians, there are differences such as health care costs (especially related to …
Jonathan Jensen isn’t just a bassist in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, he’s a terrific composer and arranger. He leveraged the latter skills to write Blast Off!, an anthem for the US Space Force, and posted a video of him performing the work on Facebook. It went viral the same day; at the time this article was written, it racked up 157k views and 3.7k shares. Regardless where you fall on the …