The recent news that the Honolulu Symphony will receive a $4 million matching grant from the state of Hawaii is welcome relief for an organization that has been skating on thin ice as of late. How thin? At the end of 2003, the musicians accepted a 20% across the board pay cut in order to

The Lost But Not Forgotten section has been updated. In particular, a recent settlement surrounding the former Florida Philharmonic leaves the musicians with approximately $0.22 for every dollar they should have been paid as creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings. Read more about that situation and as well as updates for the other ensembles at Lost

I’m moderating a Virtual Discussion Panel this week at Polyphonic.org about the expectations vs. realities of winning and maintaining a position in a professional orchestra. Of course, it wouldn’t be quite as interesting if the panelists were all professional musicians, it would end up sounding more like preaching to the choir. Instead, the eight member

A number of readers weighed in with their opinions last Friday…

On average, I’m not the kind of individual that finds most of the humorous content sent to me via email all that funny. The operative word there is “most”.

In December, 2005 I published an article at the Partial Observer which examined the impact Yale School of Music’s decision to go tuition-free for graduate students would have on the classical music business…

Just a short post today because I want to put something up letting everyone know that I’ll be releasing some really fascinating material toward the end of May or beginning of June. I’ve had the good fortune to work with an accomplished systems expert who came up with an idea that should go a long

Apparently, it’s no longer The Shadow; instead, it’s Blognoggle, which professes to shadow the top 100 classical music blogs. Blognoggle comes straight from the mind of none other than Jerry Bowles, the editor of Sequenza21.com, a hotbed of contemporary music discussion and just about anything else cutting edge related to classical music (assuming that’s not

Phishing scams are a pain the ass. Not only for the millions of email users who wade through a regular tide of them every day, but they’re an equal pain in the ass to I.T. professionals. Unfortunately, nonprofits are becoming easy targets for the criminals out there bent on using the internet to fuel their

It appears that the Take A Friend to Orchestra (TAFTO) concept is taking root among other art forms…