If you’re an orchestra looking for a quick and easy way to incense your season ticketholders, the Pittsburgh Symphony has a surefire technique for you: make them switch seat locations. A new set of ticket packages are forcing the orchestra to relocate 772 of its 9,650 total subscribers, and some are objecting, loudly. “Complicating things further, the PSO asks its subscribers to give to its annual fund-raising campaigns shortly before asking for ticket renewals.”
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Spinning Controversy Into Broad Discussion
A new 100-foot sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky is prompting controversy at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, not for what it is, but for where it’s going. “Where and even if it should be installed has been widely debated on campus, ever since the university announced its intention to plant it at the intersection of the Hornbostel Mall and the Cut, the campus’s two rectangular green spaces, by building a concrete pad there.” The controversy has led CMU to create a new public art committee which includes student input and will create and monitor the school’s new public art policy.
Sopranos Ratings Way Down
To judge by the slobbering devotion displayed by most daily newspapers these days, you’d think that The Sopranos was more or less the only program left on television. (Okay, they also admit to the existence of Desperate Housewives.) And certainly, the New Jersey mob drama has built up quite the following over its five seasons. So it had to come as a shock to HBO (and all those adoring critics) when the premiere episode of the show’s final season lost fully 1/4 of its audience from last season.
Is It A Marketing Problem, Or A Quality Issue?
Hollywood is considering a major promotional campaign designed to get the public off the couch and into movie theaters on a far more regular basis. The campaign, which would be patterned after the highly successful “Got Milk?” and “Pork – The Other White Meat” campaigns, would be the film industry’s new hope for reversing the slide in box office receipts. However, at an annual conference, theater owners objected to the strategy, saying that the problem of slumping attendance stems from Hollywood’s insistence on making and marketing terrible movies.
Demigod Needed: Must Enjoy Chaos
“Wanted: an educational visionary with the political skills of a senator and the diplomatic polish of a secretary of state. The successful candidate will be a scholar of national prominence, a charismatic speaker, a successful fundraiser. Bold leadership required; affable personality preferred. The post is university president — a job where the spotlight is bright, stakes are enormous and, some say, expectations are impossible to meet.”
Proulx: A Sour Grapes Rant?
Annie Proulx hoped that “Brokeback Mountain” would scoop her up the Best Picture Oscar. But it didn’t, of course, and Proulx isn’t happy. “It was a safe pick of ‘controversial film’ for the heffalumps,” she writes in an essay for The Guardian. Is she bitter? You judge: “For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.”
Less Music, But At Least The Tickets Are Still Expensive
South Florida’s recent history with classical music is an unhappy one, bordering on the tragic – the (some would say unnecessary) shutdown of the Florida Philharmonic removed the anchor of the local scene, and several smaller groups that sprang up in the Phil’s wake have fared no better. So with the situation so precarious, why are some South Florida music organizations still charging $50 a ticket for a standard performance?
Sydney’s New “Ticket Hub”
A collection of Sydney-based performing arts organizations have spent AUS$2 million building a new “ticketing hub” which will allow groups using the Sydney Opera House to consolidate their sales departments, sell more tickets online and fix long-standing problems. “Previously, the various organisations were using different ticketing platforms and the ticket inventory was split, leaving the process prone to the double-selling of seats.”
When Downsizing Isn’t A Dirty Word
As the Cincinnati Symphony prepares to announce its 2006-07 season, music director Paavo Järvi is turning up the heat on one of the orchestra’s most pressing issues – its concert hall. “With 3,516 seats, it’s the largest concert hall in the U.S., and despite having an audience any orchestra in the country would be proud to own (the CSO has more long-term subscribers than any U.S. orchestra), the cavernous hall swallows them up… There has been considerable speculation about ‘downsizing’ Music Hall, which was never intended as a concert hall in the first place, the CSO having left its home in Emery Theatre in 1936 to give Music Hall an anchor tenant.”
SD Lawmakers Slash Public Broadcasting Budget
Earlier this month, the South Dakota legislature stripped $500,000 from South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s annual allocation as part of a last-minute round of cuts. Now, with the cut having been made public, lawmakers are passing the buck on whose fault it is. But what everyone seems to agree on is that there is little chance of the funding being restored this year.