Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
While it comes as no surprise, the recent announcement from the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund (AFM-EPF) heralding massive cuts to member benefits is sure to bring more than its fair share of angst among AFM members who are part of the plan. While the plan has to be approved by the US Treasury Department before it goes into effect, the 1/7/2020 edition of The New York Times …
There’s an excellent commentary article by Philip Kennicott in the 1/6/2020 edition of the Washington Post that examines the unrest following statements from President Trump about his intent to order the US Armed Forces to attack cultural sites inside Iran should tensions continue to escalate. While there are no shortage of commentary decrying the position, Kennicott does an excellent job providing broader historic context and trends inside the US military and …
Over the 2014/15 and 2015/16 seasons, the Los Angeles (LA) Opera implemented a program to promote opera to the general public by placing opera and opera-related stories and images in popular television, film, and other entertainment media. The program came about thanks to an Opera America’s Building Opera Audiences grant. Part 1 in this series examined the program’s scope and implementation and today’s installment will focus on what the LA Opera …
In 2014, I served as an adjudicator for an Opera America grant panel. One of the grant recipients was the Los Angeles (LA) Opera, which used the funding to initiate a pilot program to put opera into popular media culture. At the time, it was an ambitious and intriguing program. Here’s how the organization described the program in their grant proposal: LA Opera seeks to pilot a program to more heavily …
I had the pleasure of talking to WWFM’s Rachel Katz for her program, A Tempo via a retrospective of 2019. Granted, there was a lot of ground to cover but she did a good job at keeping me in-line and on track with topics that covered labor disputes, diversity, discrimination, and quite a bit more. The classical music world grappled with a variety of issues in 2019 – increasing diversity and inclusion, …