Orchestras improve with more performances not more rehearsals! The act of being at your best happens at the point of contact with an audience. The challenge is:
How do we perform more with expenses rising and budgets stagnating?
Simple, if you have good musicians, TRUST THEM and don’t rehearse them to death! In fact by cutting rehearsals an orchestra can become better and fast!!…..
This past weekend in the middle of conducting “The Nutcracker” a thought occurred to me. Didn’t composers try to use new instruments as soon as they became available? Case in point the Celeste. We hear Sugar Plum now and the first thought from conductors and musicians is probably Great only 10 minutes till the end of the ballet! Seriously though, when it was first heard it would have been like hearing an Electric Guitar in the orchestra today the sound was so new…
Time for a rant! The obsession with attracting the younger audience, making music cool and hip with hip advertising, funky clothes and punky billboards is the same as trying to sell a Yugo by putting a great stereo in it. After a while they will realize what it is and buy a bicycle and an ipod because it will go faster! Worse, it might be discrimination….
This week I want to focus on the idea that challenges can become an opportunities if we don’t let ourselves be defeated. An orchestra or any arts group for that matter faces so many obstacles to becoming relevant to their community. One would think that when the local paper suddenly cuts the arts section, that it would be easy to cry “that’s it, we’re done”. Here, the paper did this recently, but instead of commiserating we are celebrating!
So, I just got back from my eldest’s Suzuki recital. The one thing that I’d recommend to the Suzuki folk is that if you want to make it more interesting you might want to consider an open bar. Other than that all the kids did really well. And then there was the 8 year-old daughter of Raef’s teacher, and my jaw hit the floor.
There has been much brouhaha concerning concert attire lately. Now, for the record, I love my Tails. They are made by my good and dear friend tailor John here in Minneapolis. John is a self-described stereotypical Italian Jewish tailor who knows much more music than I do and is one of the happiest people I know. He loves his job and I love working with him. When I put on the Tails he made for me it’s like I slip into another world of fancy dress and high society. Or in the … Continue Reading
The first in a series of Conductor Smack Downs! The topic what we wear, and what the audience wears has popped up yet again. We so often don’t have an answer to our audience woes, so why do we turn to fashion to solve our problems? If we are building a house and we are looking at a hole in the ground where it will eventually be, the window treatments should be the furthest thing from our minds…. Holly’s Partial Observer article mentions the audience expectations in regards to dress. I am … Continue Reading