Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
As of today, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association (CSOA) has cancelled events through April 9, 2019 and as the work stoppage marches toward the one-month mark, you can bet both sides will be turning up the PR rhetoric. To that end, let’s look at one recent talking point that crosses the spin line. Labor Disputes In The Age Of Gaslighting For decades, it’s been common to see both sides in a …
Several years ago, I was part of Opera America’s Building Opera Audiences Grants panel and one of the recipients designed a program to “insert opera into popular media culture through an entertainment-based content marketing campaign, also known as product placement.” In short, they wanted to get opera into more television and film scenes (more details). While I haven’t seen any formal results from those efforts, I did notice a recent episode (s02 …
In light of Tuesday’s rant about artist images, it seems fitting to bookend it with a callback to another content management rant from 2017 about delivering bio and related promotional copy in PDF format. PDF files are the bane of a content manager’s work day. In a nutshell, they are impossible to use for copy/pasting the content into web or social media formats without taking as much time cleaning up a …
While I am all kinds of happy to see service organizations and foundations allocate increased resources to addressing meaning change on issues related to diversity, it still feels a bit like trying to catch up by going slower. All the planned efforts are excellent; providing mentoring, audition prep, financial support, and highlighting minority musicians to potential employers are necessary programs. At the same time, there are options capable of catapulting the …
Anyone with more than a handful of time working in this field has encountered one of several progress roadblocks in the form of hearing about why something can’t be done. Recently, Ceci Dadisman published a bit of an arts admin rant at Medium about three of the more frustrating examples that are practically mantra in this field: “We’ve always done it that way,” “We don’t have the budget for that,” and …