Yesterday, the Minnesota Orchestra board offered its musicians a new agreement to end the year-long lockout: while the base pay for musicians would see base pay shrink by 25% after three years, the board did offer a one-time $20,000 payout to mitigate the shock.

This is an improvement over previous offers, but the musicians union didn’t take kindly to management circumventing mediator George Mitchell to make the offer directly to them, and certainly didn’t appreciate that it went public.

“We are further offended that they have again broken the confidentiality of the mediator’s process,” said spokesperson Blois Olson. “We encourage management to stop playing games and work through the mediator.”

At least that’s not a “no,”right?

Back in January, halfway through the 2012-13 season, the Cleveland Orchestra announced that its student-ticket sales were up 55% over the previous year, helping to account for a 24% increase in earned revenue. On May 30, the orchestra released its final numbers: a 65% season-over-season increase in student tickets sold, and a 27% increase overall increase in ticket sales.

These are great numbers, but it’s important to note that Cleveland has a $20-million fund to help cover the discount that students receive. Not all orchestras have that cushion to help them absorb the added cost of marketing to students, a notoriously fickle and transient group. 

Yesterday, Tim from Irondequoit inadvertently reported on a falcon abducting a pigeon when he called into John DiTullio on 1280 WHTK to talk about how bad the Bills will be this season; here’s the call.

DiTullio’s awesome for turning this into a great talk-radio moment. Mike Francesa: pay attention.

Another person who makes it worth living here is Ira Jevotovsky. I caught more of his handiwork on a bike ride Monday night:

Keep keeping Rochester weird, guys. 

If you’re a fan of Cold War history and find yourself in Nova Scotia, you should check out the Atlantic Canada Aviation Museum out by the Halifax airport.

Here’s their F-86 Sabre (with daughter), a plane that went into production right after World War II, and entered the Canadian Armed Forces in the 1950s as tensions with the Soviet Union were really heating up:

It also has in its collection a CF-101 Voodoo, the plane that Canada decided purchased from McDonnell in 1961, two years after Diefenbaker canceled the supersonic Avro Arrow (it was a controversial decision, as many believed that the Candadian-made Arrow would have made the country a major global military player in the fight against Communism):

Yesterday, my wife and I went to Rosie’s Hot Buns for dinner on Monroe Avenue (right next to the bong shop). It’s a high-end fast-food joint that sells fancy tasting $4 sandwiches. Get two of them, and you’ve got a good meal.

Rosie’s is just down the block from Dogtown, which makes this our new go-to area for cheap eats, on our own or with the kids. We also like Pizza Stop on State Street (good if you’re over at Hochstein for lessons or a concert) and Bill Gray’s in the ‘burbs (don’t judge me).

In the East End, the new local lunch spot Camarella’s closed after less than a year. Working down in that area is a dismal proposition, and losing this place doesn’t help.

It’s not like I’m going to be going out and getting $10 mimosas for lunch at Fraiche.

Seems as if everyone wants to know how all those music students are going to support themselves when they get out of school.

In next month’s Opera News, Allan Kozinn writes about how conservatories are incorporating career training into their curriculums, and News Hour ran its own report a few weeks ago on the travails of fine-arts students.

Jon Marcus of the Times Higher Education Supplement (UK) put the focus on the new Paul R. Judy Center at Eastman (disclaimer: my employer), which will be dedicated to helping students create their own ensembles, as did Rochester’s own Democrat and Chronicle and RBJ. 

There’s a lot of optimism surrounding new groups like Alarm Will Sound and the International Contemporary Ensemble, but so far the work they create doesn’t pay nearly as well as a even a third-tier orchestra job (granted, there are few of those). More and more, musicians are surviving by piecing together a living from playing a little, teaching a lot, and taking on a part-time job outside of music. 

There’s also a danger with career courses that students might interpret the message as this: if we  write a good resume and find the right photographer for headshots, we can get those few high-paying gigs–or shine brightly enough to be a rich and famous star.

That said, when people ask me what you can do with a music degree, I respond, What can’t you do? Never underestimate the power of intelligent people who love what they do to survive and thrive.

I thought it was a joke when I heard about it a couple of years ago, but Finnish tango is a real thing.

So is German-language-loving dirty ol’ Finnish men, apparently. Sheesh.

Tango came to Helsinki as early as the 1910s, and was at the height of its popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s, when songs like “Satumaa” by Reijo Taipale’s “Satumaa” caught on as indigenous popular music:

Want to learn more? Go here and here. The New York Times recently ran a story about Finnish tango as a dying art; read it here. 

On Deceptive Cadence, Anastasia Tsioulcas praises Vi Hart for “demystifying” serialism. Perhaps the best way to understand twelve-tone composition, though, is to listen to great music written using the technique, which is why I picked these as two of my favorite American symphonies. 

Real-estate agents really love their jobs here in Rochester. Especially Ira Jevotovsky:

And there’s this:

The house is really clean, or it actually comes with sequins. Either way: awesome.

My favorite, though, is the sign posted after the sale mocking tardy customers. “Too late!” it said. Hilarious.

In the UK, Andy Doe on Proper Discord criticized both the Times Higher Education Supplement and The Independent for reporting that the Royal Academy of Music has a 100% employment rate among its graduates. According to Doe, the survey upon which both sources base their articles omits over half the RAM’s graduating class and defines employment very loosely as basically doing more than simply sitting around all day on the couch.

The Times Higher Education Supplement‘s American correspondent, Jon Marcus, cites some numbers in the US, and frames them optimistically. Citing a study from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, Marcus says that the unemployment rate for music students is only one per cent higher than the unemployment rate for university grads in general (8.6 per cent versus 7.9 per cent), and lower than other arts majors (almost 10 per cent of them can’t find jobs after graduation).

(Disclosure: Marcus discusses the Eastman School of Music at length in his article, and as director of communications I provided him with information on the school and set up an interview with the school’s dean.)

Doe was right to look at the Royal Academy of Music stats with a jaundiced eye; clearly there is some wishful thinking going on there, and the uncritical reception by UK news outlets reflects a possible bias towards fine-arts education. On the other hand, we in the US assume that music graduates are unemployable, which might explain why Marcus responds to the Georgetown study as if they are a cause for optimism.

On NPR’s Deceptive Cadence blog, Tom Huizenga is looking for the great American symphony, and he provides a comprehensive Spotify playlist of candidates. Here are a couple more to consider.

The first is Rochberg’s Symphony No. 2, which George Szell premiered in 1959 with the Cleveland Orchestra. It’s got all the things that makes Rochberg great–it’s aggressive, ironic, and filled with breathtaking musical contrasts–without the (at times) hammy reliance on stylistic allusion that marked his mid-’60s and ’70s music. I think it’s his best piece.

The second is Wallingford Riegger‘s Symphony No. 3 from 1948. It’s alive with rhythmic energy; it’d be a great piece to choreograph: