Two of my fellow ArtsJournal bloggers have been exploring topics related to my previous posts. I thought a few pointers would be handy.
For one, Drew McManus picked up the trail of this entry on conductor salaries, and was gracious enough to ask and quote clarification of my point. Drew has been posting a lot about discrepencies in artistic & executive director salaries at orchestras as compared to their musicians. Take a look at his topic archive to find these strands.
In another topic, Greg Sandow has been discussing his own experiences writing for and working with the Concert Companion gadget (which I wrote about in this entry). His most recent entry came just last week, building on an earlier entry back in May.
Greg’s experience writing concert commentary for the wireless device exposes fascinating questions about the orchestral concert experience, about how to talk about complex music to a broader audience, and about why the device has received so much attention from orchestras and media alike. A particularly provoking passage:
Some people who don’t like the Concert Companion have in mind, I think, an idealized conception of what goes on at concerts — that the concert halls are full of people listening intently, following each unfolding nuance of the music. Or at least that this is an ideal, in principle attainable, which we should be working towards.But who knows what’s really happening? Studies of the audience, as I’ve said before, seem to show that people at orchestral concerts drift into what they feel is some kind of transfigured realm. That’s completely compatible with losing track of the music for minutes on end, which I’ll confess that I sometimes do.
So many intriguing thoughts and comments and strands of inquiry, so little time…
