National Symphony Orchestra

An Updated Look At Top-Tier Musician Compensation 2016

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Currently, two of the top eight orchestras with the highest base musician annual salary are negotiating new collective bargaining agreements: National Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra. Interestingly enough, both of these ensembles are in positions where the outcome of those negotiations will likely have a larger impact on their future competitiveness than some of the upcoming negotiations for their peers. In order to visualize these distinctions, here’s a chart illustrating the current …

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Let’s Take A Look At Big Eight Musician Compensation

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Big 8 Base Musician Salary

Now that Cleveland has settled, we can begin to get a sense for how base musician compensation compares across the highest tier of big budget orchestras, which we’ll call The Big Eight (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, LA, National, New York, Philly, and San Francisco). Granted, we’ll be updating this chart with Cleveland’s figures once that data is available and when it is, it will be interesting to see how they compare with Philly, …

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Big Changes In Store For Chicago

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ADAPTISTRATION-GUY-066

The rumors were confirmed yesterday by way of official news that Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) president Deborah Rutter will become the new president of the Kennedy Center in September, 2014. This is probably some of the best news the Kennedy Center could hope for following the departure of former president Michael Kaiser but that gain comes as a loss for the CSO, which is now in the unenviable position of needing …

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What A Great Way To Bring In New Subscribers

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There’s nothing quite like experiencing three shows of Bugs Bunny At The Symphony in the space of two days, which is precisely how I spent the past weekend here in Chicago. It was particularly fun to sit in the audience and take in all of the ambient chatter. There were no shortage of families with parents pointing out instruments and introducing kids to the concert hall and there were more than …

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Chaos Is Good For Business

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Grinding The Gears

The month of September, 2012 was Adaptistration’s highest traffic month. I posted a tweet indicating the news over the weekend and it generated a wonderfully wry reply from Detroit Free Press music critic Mark Stryker: “Chaos Is Good For Business.” And the reality is that yes, by and large conflict draws more attention than good news but as I took a closer look at the metrics, I uncovered this fascinating gem:

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