“It now costs about $1 million a week to send an orchestra on an international tour – maybe more. A million dollars might do if you’re talking about a standard 100-player orchestra. But some orchestras need more.” And the presenter of an orchestra is guaranteed to lose money too. “If we sell every seat in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, we are guaranteed to lose up to $50,000 per concert. However, if it’s a really special orchestra, our losses will go up dramatically. It’s quite a business.”
Blog
Vanity Books Set To Music
So you have a song you’ve written. So you hire pros to finish it up and record it. “The American Song-Poem Anthology: Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush” collects 28 mind-bendingly strange and very funny songs paid for by amateur lyricists and recorded by hard-up professional singers and musicians. ‘It’s the only scam I know of where each transaction is a unique work of art. Of course the work of art isn’t always great. These are vanity books set to music. But that’s what makes it so interesting. You have these very talented musicians working very rapidly to fulfill a quota of so many songs per hour, and sometimes the results transcend the limitations of the form’.”
CDs With A Different Commercial Purpose
Tour-only CDs are catching on with indie-label musicians and their fans. They’re ‘low-concept, short-production-run discs typically sold only at concerts and usually recorded live or in the artist’s home-studio. Tour discs might contain early versions of songs that will make it onto future label releases, unedited recordings of live shows, or a selection of what will ultimately turn out to be rareties. For musicians it’s a “chance to raise a little bit of extra cash while they’re out on the road, the opportunity to experiment musically in the presence of a friendly audience, or simply a way to provide music without worrying about whether it’s the best artistic or career move.”
Meet Mr. Post-Brustein
Robert Woodruff has a tough job – succeeding the legendary Robert Brustein as director of American Reportory Theatre in Cambridge. Some thought the director and the new job might not be a good fit. But “offstage, stripped of the spotlight, the outlaw director comes across as surprisingly regular. For all his Johnny Cash cool, he is equal parts Woody Allen: a slightly neurotic New Yorker overworked and unwilling to rest until every detail is in place. Strip away a few sexy hobbies – riding his BMW motorcycle, hiking to 18,000 feet in Tibet – and Robert Woodruff’s life outside the theater begins to sound pretty bland. In fact, there is little in his life that doesn’t involve theater.”
Has Broadway Gone Serious?
Wendall Brock detects a shift in attitude in this year’s Broadway season. “The season’s most thrilling productions are asking serious questions about the troubled soul of our democracy. While the Great White Way has always been a showcase for the easy-to-digest, corn-fed Americana of Rodgers and Hammerstein and others, the current season signals an attitude shift that speaks to the jittery politics of the new century.”
Checking In With Frank Gehry
Architect Frank Gehry’s laid-back air “is a large part of the appeal of his architecture. His buildings, assertive and emphatic though they are, are generous and open to the unexpected. The laidback air is also partly fictional, as he has a fierce competitive and creative will that shows no sign of relenting.” He’s designing a new house for himself in Los Angeles. And he’s up for a couple new projects in London. In the meantime there’s the new Disney Hall getting set to open in LA…
Oxford Sells Off Shakespeare Folio To Raise Money
Oxford University has sold “one of English literature’s most valuable works – a First Folio of William Shakespeare’s plays” for an estimated £3.5 million to pay for building repairs and textbooks. “The book, which was printed in 1623 and has been kept in the college’s library for more than two centuries, was bought by Sir Paul Getty, the philanthropist, in a private deal concluded in New York.”
Is Stupidity A Medical Condition?
Is low intelligence a disease? Fifty years after the discovery of DNA, one of the co-discoverers says he believes that “low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.”
Prokofiev – Great Music, Lousy Timing
Prokofiev’s legacy has been marred by contradictions. “He produced some of the sprightliest, most ingenious and most enduringly popular music of the 20th century. Yet Prokofiev’s career was also, in the brisk summation of music historian Francis Maes, ‘a succession of misjudgments,’ marked by flawed calculations on the artistic, personal and political fronts.”
San Antonio – The Costs Of Losing A Symphony Orchestra
What will it mean if the San Antonio Symphony goes out of business for lack of money? “A symphony orchestra is like the canary in the mine. If the bird stops singing, it’s a good bet the air isn’t safe for anybody to breathe. To be blunt, if the San Antonio Symphony goes silent, you’d be well advised to update your résumé. Appropriately valuing the symphony means rejecting the big lie — that’s what it is — that San Antonio is too poor and lowbrow to afford a luxury like a symphony orchestra. The issue isn’t money. The issue is values.”