The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been facing choking deficits and cash-flow problems for much of the last two years, has opened negotiations for a new contract with its players by proposing that the musicians’ pay be slashed by $10,000 and that benefits be severely cut back. The PSO has cut costs already this year by reducing its cello section to ten players (twelve is standard,) and some musicians are already taking other auditions in anticipation of what many consider an inevitable downgrade in artistic quality. But the orchestra’s cash crunch is real: last year, then-executive director Gideon Toeplitz raised eyebrows across the industry when he threatened that the PSO would file for bankruptcy if community support did not increase.
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Musicians Not Panicking
You won’t see the Pittsburgh Symphony musicians screaming over management’s proposal to slash their salaries and cut benefits – at least, not yet. The musicians’ negotiating committee yesterday turned down the PSO’s proposal, but made a point of saying that they understand that the orchestra was only making a first proposal in what is expected to be a long negotiating process. Both sides will likely continue to tread carefully, at least in the near future.
Auctioning Off A Masterpiece
“In an era when the publishers of such ephemera as comic books and trading cards routinely set aside a few thousand copies as prefabricated ‘collectors items,’ a spectacular rarity is set for auction at Sotheby’s in London tomorrow. It is nothing less than a near-complete manuscript of what may be the most celebrated work of music in the repertory — the Symphony No. 9 in D Minor by Ludwig van Beethoven.”
Politics In Art? We’re Shocked, SHOCKED!
“After grilling Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small yesterday about the changes to a photography exhibit on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a Senate panel asked the Smithsonian to clarify its policy on exhibition captions. The controversy… started last month when the National Museum of Natural History acknowledged that it had moved a show of photographs by Subhankar Banerjee and also had changed the captions because they contained language that advocated no oil drilling in the refuge.”
Swing Back To The Future
Take a big band sound, add banks of electronics, blend in sampled sound and a little rave culture, and you get an experiment in the old time. “By taking a dated musical style – big-band jazz – and marrying it with the kind of electronic processes usually reserved for cutting-edge dance music, Matthew Herbert has made the world’s first experimental yet traditional album. If the Institute of Contemporary Arts held a pensioners’ tea-and-modems morning, this would be its soundtrack.”
Death March – Getting To Know You
Why the fascination with the final moments of great composers? Do these accounts illuminate the music in some way? Not really. “The root, I suspect, is social rather than art-critical. It has something to do with the function that classical music fulfils for many listeners in a secular age, its surrogacy for a forsaken Christian faith. The mortal agonies of a great composer have come to represent the sufferings of a saviour figure, a ritual of veneration. We observe in awe, anticipating redemption.”
There’s That Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy Again!
Conservatives may be fond of compaining about the ‘liberal media,’ but increasingly, right-wingers are becoming the most audible media voices. Books written by right-wing pundits to repudiate the liberal worldview are flying off shelves, and the Book-of-the-Month Club recently announced plans to launch a conservative-themed series. Pundits like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage are nothing new to American politics, of course, but their embrace by a traditionally wary New York publishing industry is a very recent development.
Making Art And Finance Get Along
The biggest complaint of artists about the society around them is usually that the people holding the pursestrings just don’t “get it.” Arts administrators, for their part, are continually frustrated by what they see as an unwillingness on the part of creative types to accept basic fiscal realities. But at a small liberal arts school in New England, Katy Davy is trying to change the paradigm, with an approach to education that stresses critical thinking across multiple disciplines, and promotes fiscal responsibility as the friend of the arts and academia, rather than as an unpleasant complicating factor to be stepped around.
Disposable DVDs: Instant Waste, or Cynical Cash-Grab?
Disney is preparing to release a new disposable technology: DVDs, available for sale for around the cost of a rental, which self-destruct after 48 hours. So far, the idea isn’t garnering much positive response. Viewers don’t see the point; environmentalists are furious about the unnecessary waste material; and at some point, you’ve got to figure that consumers are going to wonder why a DVD with a chemical erasing agent embedded in it is less than half as expensive as the exact same DVD without a self-destruct mechanism.
Might Regulators Approve Giant Recording Company Merger?
Recording execs are convinced that courts might approve a merger between recording giants AOL Time Warner and Bertelsman, even though the idea was rejected two years ago. “A combination of the labels would shrink the number of global record distributors from the current five, providing new muscle and cost-saving opportunity for some players in an ailing music industry — while potentially threatening others. But the executives believe that recent legal rulings and the industry’s weak condition would bolster their cause in persuading regulators, particularly in Europe, to greenlight a deal.”