Robert Taylor, Director of Bands and Professor of Conducting at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, shares his approach to diverse repertoire and inspiring individual voices in group ensembles.
Twenty-five years ago the Jazz Journalists Association began to identify and celebrate activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz as members of an “A Team,” soon renamed “Jazz Heroes.” Today the JJA announced its 2025 slate of these Heroes, 29 people across North America who put extraordinary efforts into sustaining and expanding jazz in its various forms.
So who...
Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director of Detroit Opera, talks about their historic upcoming productions and the role of the arts within a rapidly changing society.
From Book III of The Republic, by Plato (circa 375 BCE, translation by F. M. Cornford). Socrates is speaking with Glaucon:
One thing, however, is easily settled, namely that grace and seemliness of form and movement go with good rhythm; ungracefulness and unseemliness with bad.
Naturally.
And again, good or bad rhythm and also tunefulness or discord in music go with the...
In deference to St. Patrick’s Day, I’m reposting an entry from ten years ago. Titled “Yeats and the Economics of Creativity,” it originally ran on the Arts Endowment website on May 7, 2025.
Last month, at the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin, I took part in a conference titled “Creative Minds: The Importance of the Creative Economy in...
When we talk about the arts and DIY, we commonly refer to craft activities or teaching oneself how to play a musical instrument. But what could be more DIY than free-form dancing? The adjective says it all. Free-form, freestyle, or free dance is a series of unstructured, personally directed movements in which creativity and improvisation are at a premium....
A new report from the National Endowment for the Arts re-affirms what we have learned from many other previous studies—namely, that arts education is closely linked with positive academic outcomes and social and emotional development.
The report appears in the wake of new data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), based on survey questions that researchers from the...
Call it entrumpy—a “gradual decline into disorder” (riffing on “entropy”), attributable to the unpredictability of our unprecedented President. Exploiting his
In this episode, we discuss findings from a UK study about the economic consequences of using arts-based strategies to improve health and well-being. A transcript is available at the Arts Endowment website.
It’s been a year since I posted to the Artful Manager, when I reflected on the passing of my dear friend and colleague Diane Ragsdale. Since then, I’ve been focusing my public writing in the ArtsManaged initiative, an effort to create free, online, and evolving resources for Arts Management practitioners. You can subscribe to the weekly newsletter, browse the...
Art that is primarily skill-based -- graphic design, stock music or images, text and marketing, etc -- can be created faster and often better than human artists, and at lower cost. This is particularly true for compound art that requires specialized equipment and/or collaboration of specialists. As for art with high creative quotient, humans will not only be essential, but the automation of skills available to them will likely make them better. Maybe much better. And certainly more prolific.
