Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
During my July break, an engaging discussion took place at my LinkedIn wall about Arts Admin Jobs and whether or not it would require employers to include salary or hourly rate figures. Regular readers already know that I’m a large proponent of salary transparency and including compensation figures in job listings. But some voices advocated requiring employers to provide salary information and I agree with every one of the reasons listed …
The Black Orchestral Network (BON), a newly formed organization comprised of Black members from more than forty orchestras, announced Monday, May 9, 2022, as a Day of Solidarity. The campaign has received early support from Gateways Music Festival and Working IDEAL along with community support from the Black Music Action Coalition. BON lays out their goals in an open letter to American orchestra’s stakeholders and right out of the gate, they …
The 4/6/2022 edition of SFCV.org published an article by Tom Jacobs that examines some of the aftermath of Long Beach Opera (LBO) and the mass resignation of Alexander Gedeon (minister of culture), Derrell Acon (associate artistic director), and Elijah Cineas (education manager). That resignation was due to those individuals feeling the LBO “a culture of misogyny, a sustained pattern of racial tokenism, a lack of defined values and principles, a structural …
In case you were wondering if process and diversity matter, just look at what’s been unfolding at the Art Institute of Chicago where they cut their entire 82-member docent corps go in an email on September 3, 2021. The Institute’s reason for dismissing the docents is they weren’t as diverse as they wanted. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bulk of those docents were white, retired, women of mid to higher financial means. Once …
July, 2021 saw three articles in traditional media outlets that examine how Asian classical musicians face discrimination at various points in their career. The New York Times published two articles on July 21, 2021. The article by Javier C. Hernández chronicles how David Kim, a violist in the San Francisco Symphony faces what he describes as being marginalized. “In March he resigned as the sole musician of color on an orchestra …