Drew McManus on the orchestra business.
Joe Patti keeps sucking me in with his headlines and yesterday’s post was no exception: Probably The Only Time Comic Sans Is Appropriate In A Planning Document. If I’m being honest, I didn’t even read the rest of the article because it made me wonder what actual orchestra mission statements look like in some of the worst fonts of all time. And that’s all I needed to go down that rabbit …
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 …
Anyone working in the labor side of things inside the orchestra and opera fields knows how much impact legacy costs have on an institution’s expense structure. Larger budgets typically mean larger legacy costs, especially pension obligations. And while that’s not going to be changing anytime soon, legacy costs in other departments have been creeping up over the years. A good example is the total cost of ownership for web-based platforms. These …
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 …