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Detroit Musicians’ Negotiating Committee Says "Vote No"

As Drew McManus points out, both Detroit papers are reporting that the Detroit Symphony musicians’ negotiating committee is recommending rejection of management’s deal to end the strike.


The Detroit Free Press quotes spokesman Haden McKay, who says that the offer “did not meet our minimum requirements.” The Detroit News is saying that the committee felt management pulled a bait-and-switch, agreeing to things on Wednesday night in negotiations, only to leave them out in the agreement they delivered the next morning.

Orchestra Death Watch: Detroit Musicians Get A "Final Offer"

The Detroit Symphony management presented its “final offer” last night to striking musicians. They’d like the musicians to vote on the offer by Thursday night; the union’s response pretty much typifies their tone and approach up until now:

… according [to] musicians’ spokesman Greg Bowens, the union’s bylaws require a 72-hour waiting period after any proposal is submitted before a vote can be taken. He said if the contract offer was e-mailed to the union at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday as the DSO said, then 72 hours would mean a Friday evening vote. “Management,” said Bowens, “should have taken this into account.”

NEA Chairman to the Arts: Talk to the Invisible Hand

There’s just too much artsy stuff out there and not enough time. It’s a problem we face here in New York City. NEA chairman Rocco Landesman wants to solve it for us.

“You can either increase demand or decrease supply,” says Landesman, as reported in the Washington Post
this past weekend. “Demand is not going to increase. So it is time to think about decreasing supply.”

Michael Kaiser, who recently criticized arts organizations for timidity in programming, stood up for the little guy in his response: “My biggest problem with thinning out the field is that what people typically mean is: Thin out the smallest, weakest, least developed.”

Landesman’s comments came before Obama on Monday proposed cutting NEA funding, but the Washington Post article does note that Landesman may have been preparing people for the tough times ahead.

Maybe Michael Kaiser Just Isn’t Looking in the Right Places

On Sequenza21, Armondo Bayalo claims that Michael Kaiser is “just plain wrong about the state of the art”–and then proceeds to tell us all the reasons why he’s right.

Bayalo’s real point isn’t that Kaiser is wrong, but that he is only right within his own big-arts frame of reference. He doesn’t see all the great stuff that’s going in “smaller, leaner operations” than the Kennedy Center:

Fair enough, but part of the problem is that the funders and fundraisers who hold the purse strings aren’t willing to invest in those grass-roots groups so that they can grow.

I Want to Know What Rock Music Michael Kaiser’s Been Listening To

Kennedy Center president and one-note high-culture pundit Michael Kaiser called out arts presenters for a lack of imagination yesterday on his Huffington Post blog.

“The embracing of new technologies and the willingness to try new things seem to have become more the province of rock music and movies,” says Kaiser. “The classical arts have simply not kept up.”

Who’s to blame? Administrators, says the guy who founded a school for arts managers.

… groups of people are now more responsible for arts making than the individual. Boards, managers and producing consortia are overly-involved. 

And these groups are misbehaving. They are overly-conservative, subject to “group think” and so worried about budgets that they forget that bad art hurts budgets far more than risk-taking does.

Kaiser tends to repeat the same argument whenever he writes–and it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. At least for music.

When I read Kaiser’s post, I think of the time I noticed that three different orchestras were playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the same month, in the same hall (guess which one?). I also think of all the music I’ll never hear live because those orchestras continue to program the same music over and over, season after season.

I’d like to think that our programmers and music directors are doing this because the boards and management they answer to are closed minded. But I also know that it’s not that simple. And I know that Kaiser has his own blind spots, as Armondo Bayolo points out on Sequenza21.

Better Know a Composer: Wallingford Riegger

Maybe it was because he was a communist, but you don’t hear much about Wallingford Riegger anymore. Two years before Riegger went in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957, Gilbert Chase made a point in his book America’s Music of singling out the composer as “the leading native-born American composer who composes with twelve tones.”

Granted, that’s a pretty small group to be out in front of, but you get the point: Riegger was generally well respected, a composer who had emerged from the hotbed of avant-garde musical activity in 1920s New York City with a style at once daring and grounded in traditional technique. He was flaky, but not too flaky.

Dichotomy (1931-2) is one of his earliest works that typify what Riegger was all about, the first piece of his that showed the maturity he would later exhibit in his third and fourth symphonies.

His earliest success here in the US (he studied in Germany for a few years) was his Study in Sonority.

Go See My In-Laws’ Art

If you’re in Charlotte in March, take some time to check out my father-in-law’s and sister-in-law’s show at the Max L. Jackson Gallery at Queens University.

Sabrina (the sister-in-law) is up at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She sculpts metal, using blacksmithing tools to create some beautiful, surprisingly delicate work. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Murray (the father-in-law) studied art at Florida State University–and took piano lessons with Dohnanyi while he was there. Between then and now, he joined the Air Force, “worked for the government,” went to medical school and became a doctor, got married, raised his children, and started painting again.

The show runs all March, but there’s a reception on March 10, 5-7 PM.

Better Know a Composer: Roy Harris

As Beth Levy points out, you’ll see the words log cabin, Oklahoma, and Lincoln in the opening sentence of almost every biography ever written about Roy Harris.

Although he was a Sooner for only five years, almost everyone in music circles identified him as being quintessentially Western. Arts patron Mary Churchill had this to say about her meeting with Harris in Paris, where he was studying in the late 1920s: “[he was] wild and worn; but gave off a wonderful western farmer air in the middle of the Place de la Concorde.”

Serge Koussevitzky said that “nobody has captured in music the essence of American life–its vitality, its greatness, its strength–so well as Roy Harris.” That Harris shared a birthday with Lincoln–both were born on February 12–only added to the mystique.

Harris (1898-1979) certainly didn’t dispel any of the myth making, and even helped cultivate it. He was a lot like Bob Dylan that way: both built personas to promote themselves that have ended up enveloping–and even overshadowing–their music.

Orchestra Death Watch: Detroit Symphony Negotiations Grind On

Two million dollars is what the Detroit Symphony and the union are fighting over. Management wants to keep that money for community outreach; the musicians want it for their salaries.

Once again, the musicians whine for the short gain instead of going for long-term engagement with the city and the people that, ostensibly, will help sustain their organization.

The orchestra says that they’ll need to cancel the rest of the season in “two days” if they don’t reach a settlement. I thought that ship had already sailed. It seems as if the strike has been going on forever.