“Attendance at Detroit Symphony Orchestra classical concerts inched forward last year by 2% and income from the orchestra’s classical series leapt 7.6% — victories in an environment in which many orchestras have seen attendance and income drop. Income from all DSO concerts combined in 2004-05 — classical, jazz, pops, children’s series and special events — rose 6%. A small increase in ticket prices was partially responsible for the uptick. The revenue increases are a critical step in the DSO’s drive to balance its budget for the second straight year after running up an accumulated deficit of $2 million. With three weeks left in its fiscal year, the DSO has met goals for earned income and expenses. But contributed income from individuals and businesses remains a question mark.”
Blog
Two Conductors Quit Everett Symphony
Washington State’s Everett Symphony Orchestra is losing its music director and another staff conductor as well, after both submitted letters of resignation to the board saying that they could not support “the direction that the current leadership is imposing on the organization.” If anyone at the ESO understands what direction Paul-Elliott Cobbs is referring to, they aren’t talking, but assistant conductor Ron Friesen’s letter said that the symphony leadership “no longer fosters trust, respect, and support.”
Where Do The Movies Make Most Of Their Money?
“The best-kept secret in Hollywood, especially from Wall Street, is that the movie studios’ biggest profit center is not theatrical movies, or even DVD sales; it is TV licensing. If the details of the profits remain clouded to outsiders, it is no accident.”
Theatre Without A Script (Are Playwrights Disappearing From UK Drama?
“Traditional plays are losing their dominance. And nowhere is this cultural shift more evident than at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Flick through the Fringe programme and it hits you. Along with the familiar plethora of one-person shows and revivals of Accidental Death of an Anarchist is a whole body of British-based work that owes more to performance art, the circus and devised, physical and visual traditions than to text-based theatre.”
The Mind-Reading Machine
Scientists say they have been able to monitor with scans what people are thinking. “Our study represents an important but very early stage step towards eventually building a machine that can track a person’s consciousness on a second-by-second basis. These findings could be used to help develop or improve devices that help paralyzed people communicate through measurements of their brain activity. But we are still a long way off from developing a universal mind-reading machine.”
The Summer Action Movies Ran Out Of Steam
Action movies – long a summer Hollywood summer staple – have been dying at the box office this summer. “In this year of the missing moviegoer, perhaps no genre has proven as perilous as the old stalwart of action, where the failures tend to be colossal, and the red ink runs in rivers.”
Why Bad Movies Are So Fun
“As far as I can tell, film is one of the few artistic mediums to rejoice in utter failure. No one revives hack 18th century opera or hangs paintings by Rembrandt’s butcher. But just try to rent a copy of “Battlefield Earth. The cult of bad movies doesn’t revolve around big-budget disasters so much as the penny dreadfuls of mid-century American cinema, the discreditable, low-budget horror movies peopled with attacking 50-foot women, killer shrews and aliens with zippers down their back. You’ve got to love any film in which Martians wear Timex watches. What makes these films so watchable?”
Rabbi: Boycott Klinghoffer
A Rabbi has urged a boycott of a production of John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Edinburgh Festival. “The work has evoked anger ever since it first appeared in 1991, and its subject has made it almost unperformable in the US and Israel, where charges of anti-semitism, naivety and of giving a voice to terrorism have been levelled at it.”
A Good Summer For Women Conductors
Of course there was Marin Alsop’s controversial appointment as msuci director of the Baltimore Symphony. In addition “this month Simone Young becomes music director of the Hamburg State Opera; Susanna Mälkki, a familiar conductor of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, is about to become the new music director of L’Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris; and Emmanuelle Haim’s reputation as a leading interpreter of the baroque repertoire blossoms by the week.”
How Schools Are Killing A Taste For Reading
High school reading scores haven’t improved since 1999. Why? “Faced with declining literacy and the ever-growing distractions of the electronic media, faced with the fact that —Harry Potter fans aside — so few kids curl up with a book and read for pleasure anymore, what do we teachers do? We saddle students with textbooks that would turn off even the most passionate reader.”