Category: music

Iván Fischer, who founded the ensemble and led it to become one of the most admired in the world today, has been a vocal critic of the increasingly autocratic rule of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Nevertheless, Orbán’s government and the city of Budapest have announced an arrangement to increase the subsidies that the long-strapped BFO needs to survive. – OperaWire

“Payroll reductions of 35% in the aggregate will include the layoffs of 94 part-time employees and pay cuts of more than 35% for the leadership team, the orchestra said. Orchestra members will receive 65% of their weekly minimum scale beginning April 20.” Music director Gustavo Dudamel will forgo his salary. The Philharmonic will maintain health insurance for all full-time employees. – Los Angeles Times

Lara Downes: “Two weeks of dates cancelled, and then before we knew it, two months. Every single concert, opera, festival, club date–our calendars were wiped clean. When it happened, some of us were out on the road, and we made our way home in confusion and panic. Some of us were getting ready to head out on tour, and we cancelled flights, unpacked suitcases. We were all stunned. It was surreal and impossible.” – I Care if you Listen

“Physical distancing is the antithesis of what a community chorus is all about. We rehearse for four months before our performances twice a year. The community we form as we breathe, learn the music, and sing together is a vital component of who we are. Who are we in times of physical isolation?” – San Francisco Classical Voice

Normally, Josh Kantor is in a perch at Boston’s venerable baseball park, churning out tunes as the home team’s official organist. In late March, with the season put on pause due to coronavirus concerns, he decided he would try a single video stream from behind his Yamaha Electone and leave it at that. But the online response convinced him to come back the next day. And the next. Kantor is now pledging to continue the “7th-Inning Stretch,” as he calls his 30-minute show, until baseball returns or people get sick of it. – Washington Post

“The deal [with the musicians’ union] includes immediate pay cuts until early September, a wage freeze and a delayed pay increase and extends the current contract for a year, to 2024, according to the arts center. It avoids the open-ended furlough that was supposed to have started Monday.” – The Washington Post

“The Philharmonic dismissed the players — its principal oboist, Liang Wang, and associate principal trumpet, Matthew Muckey — in September 2018. Both men denied wrongdoing, and the players’ union filed a grievance challenging their dismissals. The case was heard by an independent arbitrator, who found that the players had been terminated without just cause and should be reinstated.” – The New York Times

Musicians have lost the battle to monetize recordings. With the internet awash in cheap streaming and free videos, our income now comes from live performance alone. Even if livestreams end up being only a short stopgap, offering them up for free on a large scale sets a dangerous precedent. Forced to be pioneers in this nuanced, digital field, we need to set the standard now—past performance footage is different than creating totally new content, for example. How do we assign value in an array of contexts? – Middle Class Artist

The two leading platforms are Spotify with 35 percent and Apple Music, with 19 percent. Amazon Music is third with 15 percent of market share. Paid subscriptions represented 80 percent of total revenue, with advertising and brand partnerships rounding out the remaining 20 percent. – Ludwig Van

Jennifer Koh got to work on Alone Together, an online performance series for which she hyper-compressed her usual process of discovering composers by asking 21 of them with some level of financial security (be it from salary or grants) to donate a new work between 30 seconds and one minute long, as well as to nominate 21 freelance composers for new commissions funded by Arco. – Washington Post