I’m going to indulge myself today and go a little off topic. I’m not going to talk about management issues or any current industry events.  Instead I’m just going to write about a concert I recently attended.  I don’t want to write a critique of the performance, so I won’t.  What I want to do

Before I left for vacation, I posted a few articles (here and here) about the San Francisco Symphony’s outreach program that was produced and aired by PBS.  In the second article I called PBS member station “affiliates” and I wondered why they didn’t choose to broadcast the Keeping Score program.  Thankfully, one of Adaptistration’s readers

Upon returning from vacation this week I was very pleased to find a few articles about orchestra executive and music director compensation.  One was from last Sunday’s New York Times by Blair Tindall, the other by fellow AJ blogger Andrew Taylor. In Blair’s original article, she went into many of the topics that have been

It’s not uncommon to hear managers and musicians alike espouse how their orchestra is “unique” among the landscape of American orchestras.  They use this to justify why an idea that is successful at Orchestra “A” wouldn’t be transferable to their situation. And to small degrees this is usually true, but the larger picture shows us

 I’m back from the Tetons and I already miss being there.  It never ceases to amaze me just how good an orchestra can play when everyone is happy, healthy, and talented.  There was a fantastic concert where the first half featured music entirely by modern composers (although the modern music purists would be upset to

I’ll be away from blogging for the next week or so unless I find a cyber caf

A number of readers sent in their thoughts about the San Francisco Symphony’s “Keeping Score” program and everyone had very positive impressions.  However, I did see an odd theme reoccurring through some of the responses. It appears that in a number of PBS markets throughout the country, “Keeping Score” was either not broadcast or aired

To wrap up the series of concert hall follow up articles, I finally have some news about the final orchestra from the original concert hall study Kansas City.   Unfortunately, the KCS management still declined to participate, but fortunately, the musicians were willing to share some of their developments.  Over the past six months there have

Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article about a dispute between the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra and their board and executive management over the extension of their music director’s contract. Since musician involvement on governance issues is a strong topic here at Adaptistration, I contacted John Koen, a Philadelphia Orchestra cellist and chair