There is an “arc the NSO has traversed over my 11 years in Washington, from the disaffected, sloppy ensemble that Leonard Slatkin left when he departed in 2008 to the group that’s starting to taste real international demand under Noseda. Those in-between years have seen ups and downs.” – Washington Post
Author: Douglas McLennan
Is Los Angeles’ Community Of Musicians A Vision Of Orchestra 2.0?
What we need are larger communities of musicians who take on a variety of musical tasks throughout their towns, playing early music, new music, movie music, chamber music, whatever is wanted. – Los Angeles Times
Does Pay-What-You-Can Pricing Work?
Our analysis is revealing. It shows that typically, where PWYC tickets and performances are publicly available, they are taken up disproportionately by existing customers. One producing theatre found that while 48% of its regular tickets were purchased by new customers, only 26% of PWYC tickets were purchased by new customers. – Arts Professional
Would A Wealth Tax Would Hurt Non-Profits?
Tyler Cowen: “The effects of pushing wealth out of the for-profit sector would be far-ranging. Wealthy donors might be more likely to pressure nonprofits for luxury consumption experiences, for example.” – Bloomberg
LA MoCA Employees Give Notice They’re Unionizing
The workers come from nearly every department at MOCA, including visitor engagement, education, exhibitions, communications, retail and audio-visual, but not curatorial. Among their motivations to unionize: pay, working conditions, and quality of internal communications or “lack of transparency” between management and employees. – Los Angeles Times
Is Talent Starting To Shift Away From Superstar Big Cities?
The big knowledge and tech hubs which once had such a stranglehold on attracting talent seem to be losing their allure. Many places around the country now have bundles of amenities—renovated old buildings, coffee shops and good restaurants, music venues, and not least of all, more affordable homes—that can compete with the biggest cities. In other words, the amenity gap between superstar cities and other places has closed, while the housing-price gap has widened. – CityLab
A History Of Philosophical Thought
What is real? How should one live? What government is best? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Any answers can only be propositional or tentative, inviting further amplification or rebuttal. – Washington Post
Should We Rethink Plagiarism?
Academia is an honor-culture, in which recognition—in the form of citations—serves as a kind of ersatz currency. In ancient Greek, there is a word “pleonexia,” which means “grasping after more than your share.” Plagiarism norms encourage pleonectic overreach. One can see such overreach in the fact that those with perfect job-security—famous, tenured faculty—do not seem less given to touchiness about having “their” ideas surface in the work of another, unattributed. Quite the contrary. The higher one rises, the louder the call for obeisance: kiss my ring! Stigmatizing plagiarism serves those at the top. – The Point
Do Trigger Warnings Work? Research Says…
As you might have noticed, the use of trigger warnings has since spread beyond US universities to educational institutions around the world, and further: into theatres, festivals and even news stories. The warnings have become another battlefield in the culture wars, with many seeing them as threatening free speech and the latest sign of ‘political correctness’ gone mad. – Aeon
Arguments For Returning The Parthenon Marbles To Greece Are Compelling
Maybe it’s true that if Lord Elgin had not taken the sculptures they would have been destroyed, by the Turks or the Venetians or the pollution in Athens. And it is true that, as stated in the Times article, the Parthenon sculptures are accessible, and free to six million visitors a year. But Athens gets visitors, too, and Greece is no longer under the Ottoman Empire—in 2021, it will celebrate two hundred years since the beginning of its war of independence—and it can take care of its heritage. – The New Yorker