The San Antonio Symphony has named local beverage industry executive David Green as its next president and CEO, continuing a long-demonstrated preference for executives plucked from the corporate world with little to no experience in the orchestral sphere. “Green has held several executive positions, including chief financial officer and vice president for operations, at San Antonio’s Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of the Southwest. [He also] founded Logicor LLC, a company that makes productivity-enhancing equipment for soft-drink dispensers… Green becomes the symphony’s seventh interim or permanent top administrator in less than seven years, and the fourth to have no prior experience in orchestra management.”
Tag: 01.13.06
KC PAC A Long Way From Fundraising Goal
Backers of Kansas City’s proposed $346 million performing arts center have managed to raise only $11 million of the $45 million they’d hoped to raise by February 1 in order to keep the controversial project on track. Without a successful campaign, it is unlikely that construction could begin on the center this year. As an incentive to potential donors, PAC backers are offering to sell the naming rights for one of the venues within the center for $5 million.
The Fabric That Sings To You
“Sound and visual artist Alyce Santoro has created Sonic Fabric, a cloth made from pre-recorded, recycled cassette tape combined with other fibers. Using a minimally hacked Walkman, the fabric becomes an audible reminder of its musical past. Sonic Fabric feels a bit like flexible plastic tarp, and is durable and hand-washable.” Of course, that’s no why it’s getting attention: if you run a specially mounted head from a cassette player over the fabric, it will literally play the music embedded in the tape. “[Santoro’s] latest creations play 20 tracks at once. She creates sound collages on a four-track, and the reader picks up five strands at a time.”
Alsop In Baltimore: You Can’t Hear The Controversy Over The Music
For the first time since her appointment as music director designate of the Baltimore Symphony and the subsequent controversy that erupted when the BSO’s musicians complained that they had been shut out of the appointment process, Marin Alsop has taken the stage to conduct what will become her orchestra in 2007. Since those difficult days, Alsop and the musicians have been taking pains to demonstrate that there are no hard feelings, and “last night, the orchestra continued signaling its intention to work with Alsop, this time in the best possible way – giving her a strong, attentive performance of a program that very much reflected the kind of tastes she is going to bring to the organization.”
Zukerman: NACO’s “Rotten Apples” Must Be Eradicated
Following a week of bad publicity and press revelations about his behavior as music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Pinchas Zukerman has as much as admitted that it wasn’t physical exhaustion that caused him to take a last-minute leave of absence from the ensemble for the remainder of the current season. Zukerman has been quoted saying that the NACO has some “rotten apples” who have created a divisive atmosphere within the organization that “has to be eradicated.” Representatives of the NACO’s musicians have shot back that Zukerman’s single-mindedness and unwillingness to hear dissent is the real problem, and the orchestra’s manager is backpedaling in an attempt to ratchet the rhetoric down a few notches.
Is It A Hijacking If No One Notices They’re Being Hijacked?
A group of Danish artists last month attempted to “culturally hijack” the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been the subject of much controversy as a holding site for suspected terrorists who, under Bush administration policy, are frequently denied the right to a court hearing or access to legal representation. “The artists hoped a blast of Beethoven’s Eroica [Symphony] from a boat moored offshore would send the American forces fleeing in terror and that they and their crew could occupy the military base and ‘have a great party’.” Shockingly enough, soldiers armed with automatic weapons operating a prison camp behind fortified walls and rows of razor wire turn out not to be frightened of classical music.
Mozart And The Case Of The Boring Tenor
Tenor Ian Bostridge loves Mozart, yes he does. “But there is a problem with Mozart, one I readdress every time I sing in one of his operas. It has been said – often – that Mozart tenor roles are boring. This is an opinion that I am anxious, for obvious reasons, to rebut. However, the evidence to support it is easy to find.”
Do We Need All Those Galleries? Those Museums?
“Do galleries have to run or look the way they do? How inevitable is the repeating cycle of solo and group exhibitions and the steady movement of artworks from galleries to museums, auction houses and collectors’ homes? How can you slow, expose or disrupt the delivery mechanism – maybe even avoid it altogether occasionally – to reassert art as a process and a mind-set rather than a product?”