Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
As a Gen-Xer I grew up at the height of the cold war and recall the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember the inability for musicians to travel in and out of USSR and Soviet Bloc countries. I also remember the flood of musicians into the US after the fall of the Soviet union. Entire generations of musicians were lost to the Iron Curtain and I’m growing increasingly concerned that …
Just when this week was settling into a really nice topic groove, life decided to throw a curve ball. As such, I’m taking the rest of the week off from blogging but I will be back in action on Monday, March 14.
There’s a thought-provoking article by Peter Whoriskey in the 3/7/2022 edition of the Washington Post that examines the extent Russian oligarchs have contributed to US nonprofits, including those in the arts and culture sector. According to the article, the Anti-Corruption Data Collective has been uncovering the depth oligarch money has been funding arts and culture. “To produce the analysis, the collective scoured public sources for records of charitable contributions given personally …
One of the more intriguing parts of designing the reserved seating process for UpStage was the user testing. It’s rare for nonprofit performing arts organizations to spend much time designing their online ticket experience around the new ticket buyer and that only leaves money on the table and untapped potential. When designing UpStage’s process, we made sure to rectify that oversight by creating one of the three primary user test groups …
While it should come as no surprise to see the global response to arts and culture organization breaking ties with conductor Valery Gergiev and soprano Anna Netrebko, the announcement from The Metropolitan Opera that they “can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him” invites the question of how they will go about making that determination. When it comes to artists like Gergiev, quantifying …