Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
While it’s heartening to see nonprofit performing arts organizations demonstrate an ability to roll with the punches throughout the pandemic, it’s good to see municipalities begin to step in and provide guidance in the wake of the latest variant,. New York City will become the first city to require vaccinations for indoor activities, which include concerts. According to an 8/2/21 article in Rolling Stone by Jon Blistein, NYC’s plan is to …
While it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that the pandemic has seen numerous arts administrators and musicians leave the field entirely, it’s one thing to look at it as a statistic and something else entirely to humanize it. To that end, Jeremey Reynolds wrote an excellent article for the 7/22/21 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that examines a cross section of musicians and their decision to stay or leave …
Even though they required patrons to demonstrate they were vaccinated, had recently had a Covid infection or had a negative Covid test a music festival in the Netherlands became a super-spreader event that led to 1,000 COIVD-19 infections. You can find details in an article by Holly Ellyatt in the 7/15/21 edition of CNBC.com. What jumps out is the realization that while the music festival went to great lengths to protect …
Usually, these posts focus on how the pandemic generates dynamic expenses and considerations for the organization but today we’re going to focus on musicians; specifically, string musicians. This dynamic cost consideration is really more of a double-edged sword. On one hand, if a string musician was playing considerably less over the pandemic, the need for regular maintenance items like changing strings or getting bows rehaired has been lower. At the same …
In early April, 2021 the U.S. Small Business Administration announced it was expanding the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and EIDL Advance program and as this last weekend, they announced another program that might help some arts and culture organizations. The new programs are called the Targeted EIDL Advance and Supplemental Targeted Advance. Compared to the previous programs, these are actual grants and have more narrowly defined qualifications. Full program details per …