Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
Back in 2018, I replaced the native WordPress comment functionality with Facebook’s blog comment tool to eliminate anonymous comments and control spam. It worked great until last summer during the national election, when Facebook began making massive changes to their API in response to pressure over their lack of control over disinformation. Since then, the feature has been in steady decline and as of last week, I decided to jettison the …
Almost a year ago, I published an article asking why some conductors seemed to be exempt for mask requirements during performances when on-stage musicians were required to be masked. Now that we’re looking at an extension of CDC recommended strategies to help control the Delta variant that clearly indicate the need to be masked indoors in public spaces, I’m still seeing some of the year-old arguments from conductors about why they …
It should come as no surprise that performing arts orgs are playing a combination of push and pull when it comes to establishing required vaccination policies. On one hand, they want to push decisions back as far as possible to see how rapidly changing pandemic conditions change. At the same time, they want to pull decisions from venue owners and guest artists on whether they insist on having vaccination requirements to …
Granted, no one likes staring down the barrel of salary concessions, but I’m especially concerned about where things are going to fall for substitute musicians once the current round of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) become public. If early reports about The Met’s recent agreement are accurate, we’ll see the trend of shortchanging substitute musicians expand to paying incoming contract musicians less than their veteran colleagues. With so much salary pain to …
On Tuesday, 8/24/2021, The Metropolitan Opera announced it had reached an agreement with the musicians’ union that will get the opera company back up and running by early September. While a copy of the final agreement has yet to be released, I did manage to secure some details from inside sources with firsthand knowledge. The four-year term generates a 20 percent cumulative cut for existing musicians that comes from a variety …