Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
The 4/9/18 edition of ArabNews.com published an article that reports a new agreement between Saudi Arabia and the Paris Opera “to help Saudi Arabia set up a national orchestra and an opera.” The article doesn’t provide many details other than mentioning “the Paris Opera company help the Kingdom produce its own classical music and shows.” Consequently, this will likely be more of a wait and see type of scenario. Having been in …
On two occasions this past week, I had colleagues reach out with questions about how to recover login credentials for a Google account because the organizational email address set as the account owner was either deleted or no longer accessible. In both cases, the groups gave up and simply started new accounts. The result was losing multiple years of valuable metrics data. It’s an unpleasant situation to be in and in …
In the wake of yesterday’s April Fool’s day prank, several readers wrote in to say how similar it was to the AF prank from 2016. The 2016 article focused on a fictional “Scholarship Indemnity Program” where in exchange for receiving free tuition, students must meet one of the minimum career accomplishment goals, set by the school within a certain number of years following graduation. If students fail to meet those career …
Rising tuition costs and crippling student debt continue to occupy the heart and minds of emerging classical musicians. But one major conservatory believes they have a solution to not only control costs, but begin easing them down for most students. The Juiliard Institute plans to begin offering its students financial aid with repayment in the form of securing a percentage of their future earnings. I spoke with Juliard’s vice president of …
Saturday, 3/24/2018 was a sad day with the news that El Sistema founder José Abreu passed away. I was fortunate to experience the program first-hand in 2005 (thanks to Ben Zander and the New England Conservatory Youth Orchestra for inviting me along to chronicle their tour). That visit included an interview Abreu, which became the source for an article in a four-part series about El Sistema. Back in 2005, Venezuela was …