My love of quality food and animal rights is no secret. Neither is my love of awesome marketing for classical music. So when I came across the Dortmund Concert Hall’s commercial claiming that playing classical music for cows produced more milk and that milk helped ticket sales for classical music, I was instantly intrigued.

To continue where we left off in Part 1, I want to take a look at what it means to invest in an orchestra from the perspective of a donor, volunteer, and employee. Using my aunt’s guidelines for investing (she was a major co-owner in Kinko’s before it went public) you should adopt a simple criteria that is not dissimilar from deciding to buy stock in a company. She put this together with me to help me decide whether to uproot to a new orchestra job or keep the current one I ... Continue Reading

Several years ago, I won a position in an orchestra that was closer to my family. While the job was a slightly better paying job which had a longer concert season and many other pluses than the job I had at the time, I hesitated. My aunt, who lived in this city and was a very successful businesswoman, was trying to help me decide whether to uproot and move or keep my current position and continue auditioning for work elsewhere. Her advice came in the form of a question: “If you could, ... Continue Reading

A couple of months ago I wrote a bit about how so many professional musicians’ bios tend to be boring and predictable. Apparently, I’m not alone as a number of readers sent private emails summing up people’s opinions on the topic. So in a very informal fashion, I’d like to take a few of these observations and create a “list of sins”:

When I was a teenager I would occasionally wonder if my desire to play music professionally would ever come to fruition. Growing up in Denver, CO meant watching The Denver Symphony dissolve in 1989. In May, 1990 the Denver Symphony Association merged with the newly formed Colorado Symphony Association, a new and initially smaller orchestra employing many of the Denver Symphony musicians. The new orchestra continually endured cuts and budget adjustments. Watching it was unsettling, and as teenager, it was always fresh on my mind as conversations with fellow teen musicians would ... Continue Reading