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Bar-Hopping? Nahhh. Let’s Go Hear Some Beethoven!

ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus has declared May to be Take A Friend To the Orchestra Month, and in case that sounds like a dubious proposition in a culture where orchestral music sometimes calls to mind stuffy surroundings and elitist snobbery, Drew has enlisted the help of more than a dozen critics, bloggers, musicians, and administrators to explain how to sell your friends on the concept. Up first is former Chicago Symphony executive director Henry Fogel, who once personally convinced a sixty-year-old Texas pilot to come hear a performance of Mahler 5, while simultaneously rescuing the CSO’s instruments from an overturned truck on a remote highway.

La Scala Loses A Tour, But May Gain Labor Peace

La Scala has canceled a planned tour of the UK after being unable to secure the services of conductor Mstislav Rostropovich. The tour was originally to have been led by Riccardo Muti, who resigned as La Scala’s musical director last month, leaving Milan’s famed opera house scrambling to find replacements. However, there is evidence that the labor strife which has engulfed La Scala for much of the last year may be ebbing, as union leaders rescinded their call for an ongoing series of opening-night strikes.

Blue Man Brouhaha

There is slightly more than a month to go before the popular Blue Man Group is to open a major show in Toronto, and the media blitz to promote the production has begun. But the group remains locked in a bitter struggle with the unions representing actors, musicians, and stagehands, with no end in sight. Blue Man Group has never been a union show, but has usually paid its participants at rates comparable to those required by labor organizations. Organizers say they don’t understand why they can’t coexist with union shows, as they have in so many other cities, but the unions appear dug in, and are ready to call for a boycott of the Toronto production.

We Know What You Read Last Summer

“With the approaching introduction of a new, potentially revolutionary sales-tracking system, Canada’s publishers, retailers and the media will know for certain, and faster, which books Canadians are actually reading. BookNet Canada, a not-for-profit organization, hopes to launch its BNC Sales Data service in June, in time for the annual publishing industry fair, Book Expo Canada. The new system will collect sales information from retailers across the country and produce weekly reports — the ultimate bestseller list.” Canada is a bit behind the curve on such tracking devices, being the last major English-language market without a nationwide tracking system.

Canada, In Its Own Words

Canada is justly proud of its literary heritage, which, perhaps more than any other part of the country’s arts scene, has come to define its land and people internationally. A new CBC Radio series is devoted to examining how Canadians from the aboriginal population to Quebec’s Francophone majority have told their stories to the world. “The challenge of explaining Canada to itself is a daunting intellectual and logistical enterprise.”

Taking The Gloves Off

For the first several months of the dispute, Blue Man Group’s founders were determined to take the high road, sure that they could satisfy Toronto’s unions without actually becoming a union production. But with opening night approaching, the organizers’ anger is mounting over what they see as a ridiculous double standard (they compare their organization to the Canadian troupe Cirque du Soleil, which has never mounted a union show,) and over accusations that they are somehow “unprofessional.”

Sell, Sell, Sell!

As consumers become ever more impervious to traditional advertising, marketers are becoming ever more obsessive in their attempts to track consumer habits and target specific ad messages to individuals who will be most receptive to them. At the annual Ad-Tech conference in San Francisco, cutting-edge techniques to ensnare potential buyers comingle with such low-tech ideas as cutting back on the number of ads shown on television. Most intriguing, something called Project Apollo promises to provide greater consumer trackability than ever before, providing what advertisers hope will be a surefire method of discovering which ad campaigns actually work.

New Foundation Focuses On ‘Creativity’

There are plenty of grant-awarding foundations out there, but Louise Blouin didn’t see enough of them encouraging real creativity through their grants, so the 46-year-old Canadian native decided that the time was right to start her own foundation. In addition to handing out individual grants, “one of the foundation’s early projects will be to study the economic importance of the arts. It plans to hold forums at which artists, politicians, business leaders and educators propose cultural policies. The foundation also wants to endow a chair at a leading university to research the relevance of art to everyday life and the connections between the study of art and the study of perception and cognition.”

Incompetence, Politics Plague Ground Zero

“The master plan for ground zero is unraveling, which is not necessarily bad news. But what are the odds that planners will see this as an opportunity to save it? The discovery that the Freedom Tower will have to be redesigned to address concerns raised by security experts has once again sent architects scurrying to patch up one of the most muddled developments in the city’s recent memory… These are not simply errors in judgment. They are byproducts of the mix of secrecy, self-interest and paranoia that have enveloped the site from the outset – a climate that favors political expediency and empty symbolic gestures over thoughtful urban planning discussions.”