{"id":1394,"date":"2010-02-19T07:30:10","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T15:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2010\/02\/blending_professional_and_amat\/"},"modified":"2010-02-19T07:30:10","modified_gmt":"2010-02-19T15:30:10","slug":"blending_professional_and_amat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/blending_professional_and_amat.php","title":{"rendered":"Blending professional and amateur"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2010\/02\/03\/AR2010020303579.html?hpid=artslot\">this Baltimore Symphony story<\/a> simmering on the back burner for a few weeks, and continue to come back to it. The symphony hosted a special concert\/performance event to allow amateur musicians to sit in with their professional counterparts. Called &#8221;Rusty Musicians With the BSO,&#8221; the event was a pet project of conductor Marin Alsop. Said the article:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Rusty Musicians event is conceived as an exercise in<br \/>\ncommunity-building. &#8220;Our vision for the orchestra is that it&#8217;s a<br \/>\ndestination point for the community,&#8221; Alsop said. She also observed that<br \/>\n&#8220;our society is changing dramatically to become more participatory.&#8221;<br \/>\nPeople are no longer content to sit by and watch.<br \/>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Through the program, the orchestra discovered a rather large audience of rather well-skilled musicians. And it unlocked a sense of excitement and opportunity among the most passionate among that group. <\/p>\n<p>As a follow-on &#8212; both for fun and profit &#8212; the BSO is hosting an orchestral academy for adult amateurs, offering a week of master classes, lectures and public performances with<br \/>\nBSO members (and Alsop), for $1650.<\/p>\n<p>The wall we&#8217;ve constructed in the professional arts between &#8221;professional&#8221; and &#8221;non&#8221; has become increasingly inconsistent with the larger ethos of the universe &#8212; in which almost anyone has access to the means of production. The fear in bridging that wall is that we cheapen professional standards, or invade the &#8221;pure&#8221; aesthetic space of the arts initiative. It&#8217;s good to see the BSO challenging those assumptions, at least a little bit.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had this Baltimore Symphony story simmering on the back burner for a few weeks, and continue to come back to it. The symphony hosted a special concert\/performance event to allow amateur musicians to sit in with their professional counterparts. Called &#8221;Rusty Musicians With the BSO,&#8221; the event was a pet project of conductor Marin [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1394","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}