I recently received word from San Antonio Symphony musician and union representative Ron Noble about the results from their New Year’s Gala concert.  He said the event had such a large turnout that the gala made money, the concert paid for itself, and all of the musicians were paid their regular union wages.  So it

In response to the orchestra in-school program entries from earlier in the week, I received an email from Beth, a cellist in a southwest orchestra.  She related her experiences growing up as a public school student and having been exposed to the orchestra through an  education initiative.  However, her experiences didn’t include in-school programs, only

Orchestra musicians are better than they have ever been in this country.  And it’s high time everyone started to recognize that higher level of artistic excellence.  It’s also high time for us to establish a system of artistic evaluation.  Awhile back fellow AJ blogger Greg Sandow wrote about the idea of orchestra competitions.  And not

To continue from where we left off in Part I, this is second half of a comparison of the efficiency and effectiveness of in-school programs from two orchestras: the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the Richmond (VA) Symphony.  In Part I we heard from the education directors of each orchestra and in this part we will hear

Ok, you hear me verbally beating up on orchestra in-school programs quite a bit in this blog.  However, that doesn’t mean I feel that in-school programs should be completely eliminated.  On the contrary, I believe that in-school programs are a necessary component of a much broader overall education and outreach program. That being said, I

One of my adult piano students tipped me off to a recent episode of Meet the Press, where one of the discussion topics was the effectiveness of blogs in politics.  Although I missed the episode, I did visit the Meet the Press web site and dug up some of their articles about blogging. In particular,