Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
While it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that the pandemic has seen numerous arts administrators and musicians leave the field entirely, it’s one thing to look at it as a statistic and something else entirely to humanize it. To that end, Jeremey Reynolds wrote an excellent article for the 7/22/21 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that examines a cross section of musicians and their decision to stay or leave …
Recently, a colleague turned me onto the Song Exploder podcast, which is produced and edited by host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway. The show premise is straightforward: Where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Hirway takes a deep dive into a single song and often breaks things down even more by diving into specific tracks from the original recording session. Each …
Season 2 comes out of the gate at full speed and my captivating guests include a group of stakeholders from the Toledo Symphony Orchestra who were brave enough to talk about one of my absolute favorite topics: contracts. More to the point we talked about how this orchestra went about navigating the waters of COVID era agreements. We all know about the organizations that decided to shut down and force as …
If there’s one thing the pandemic has demonstrated, it is agreements aren’t nearly as rigid as conventional wisdom dictates. At the same time, they’re only as flexible as the people involved, the choices they make, and the process they embrace. Tomorrow’s post will be the inaugural episode for Season 2 of Shop Talk, it features a candid discussion with executive decision makers and musician representatives from the Toledo Symphony, a group …
Even though they required patrons to demonstrate they were vaccinated, had recently had a Covid infection or had a negative Covid test a music festival in the Netherlands became a super-spreader event that led to 1,000 COIVD-19 infections. You can find details in an article by Holly Ellyatt in the 7/15/21 edition of CNBC.com. What jumps out is the realization that while the music festival went to great lengths to protect …