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:

Back in September 2012, the board of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra plucked Mark Niehaus from the ranks of its trumpet section and appointed him president and CEO. On Wednesday, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra replaced disgraced executive director Richard Dare with acting principal oboist James Roe.

Hopefully, hiring from within will help both of these orchestras avoid the distrust between musicians, management, and board has exacerbated so many of the recent crises in American orchestras. It’s heartening, I hope it works, and it will be exciting to see if it becomes a trend.

Thanks to Eric Snowdon and the NSC, Orwell’s back! 

When Wegmans was building its new store on East Avenue in Rochester, the word on the street was that there would be an underground parking garage for customers. There is indeed a parking lot under the new store, but it’s for employees. Here’s how everyone found out: 

In a recent post, I lifted some data from the Detroit Free Press that showed just how little the Motor City should care whether the city’s emergency manager sells a few pieces of art to cover its bills.

That data was part of the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey, and today The Atlantic highlighted a group of maps that use the survey’s data to paint a revealing picture of America’s income inequality.

You can view the maps here.

Through Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, I came across a blog post by 22-year-old Mary Sydnor, who bemoans the dearth of fellow classical-music travelers her age:

Sadly, at age 22, it is not an exaggeration for me to admit that I have no one my own age willing to discuss my greatest passion with me: classical music. I’m sure there must be other millennials out there who scrimp and save for yearly orchestra subscriptions or who’d prefer to party with Poulenc instead of P. Diddy (is that who the kids are listening to these days?), but I have yet to meet them.

Granted, the classical-music audience is predominantly 50 and over, but it’s hard to believe that in a city like Philadelphia there aren’t other 20-somethings out there going to concerts. The Philadelphia Orchestra is certainly trying to draw them out: it has a $25 subscription package for university students and a young professionals membership program.

I am so glad I didn’t have to learn this lesson the way that John Tortorella did: no one likes a bully.

Last week, the New York Rangers unexpectedly fired Tortorella as their coach. He is infamous for showing utter contempt to the media, but reports have surfaced that his abuse of players led to his ouster. Certainly, speaking hard truths to players is part of a coach’s job, but criticizing them in public? Not so much.

If you act like a mean jerk, eventually people will assume you’re a mean jerk and tune you out. It’s the fast track to alienation–from your job, but also from family and friends. Reading about Tortorella reminded me of how important it is to keep my own abrasiveness in check, both at home and at work (because I love my family, like my job, and want to keep both).

Tortorella’s now-former boss said after the firing, “Every coach has a shelf life.” Because of his behavior, Tortorella greatly shortened his. The next time you want to have at someone, think about whether it’s worth it. It probably isn’t. Don’t be like John Tortorella.

Back in October 2011, the National Institute for Responsible Philanthropy found that 55 percent of foundation money goes to the top two percent of organizations by budget size.

To some degree, this makes sense, as large arts institutions have the staff time to spend on writing grant proposals, and smaller organizations may not require the same amount of cash to achieve more focused missions. But in the same study, the National Institute for Responsible Philanthropy also revealed that only 10 percent of arts funding supports underserved communities, and concluded that in the arts, as the report’s author Holly Sidford put it, “philanthropy is using its tax-exempt status primarily to benefit wealthier, more privileged institutions and populations.”

Here’s a link to the full report.

These findings underscore Matthew Yglesias’s point about class and tax-exempt giving, and shows just how small the worlds of arts managers like Thomas P. Campbell really are.

Matthew Yglesias weighed in last week on tax-exempt giving to nonprofit organizations:

…it’d really be worth scaling this all back a great deal. A rich guy giving a gift to an elite university that mostly serves the educational needs of rich kids is not particularly worthy of a tax subsidy. That’s doubly true when we all know that the “gift” is in some respects a bribe to boost the admissions prospects of his own family members. We don’t have a shortage of political advocacy in the United States. God is not going to become angry at us and punish us if our churches become less splendid. Due to the progressive rate structure of the income tax, these tax deductions are very much a way of increasing the social and political clout of the rich and don’t seem to inspire a ton of charity in the sense of helping poor people.

In addition to tolerating a tax code that exempts from taxation multi-million dollar gifts that uphold an elite status quo, we live in a world where the NFL–whose franchises bring in hundreds of millions in revenue each season–is considered a nonprofit. Maybe its time we tighten things up.

Last week, Tom Jacobs of the Pacific Standard reported on a recent paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing that examined what compels people to buy tickets to an orchestra concert. Jacobs felt that Wagner Kamatura and Carl Schimmel’s research–“Mahler meets Moneyball“–upset assumptions about new music by showing that “less-popular works written before 1900 have a stronger negative impact on occupancy than less-popular works from after the turn of the 20th century.”

There were plenty of other things that, according to Kamatura and Schimmel, actively enticed concertgoers (a big-name star like Josh Bell and familiar works by Beethoven and Mozart) so saying that contemporary music doesn’t drive people away as much as second-tier Romanticism is hardly an endorsement, and certainly not a revolutionary upending of conventional wisdom.

So many people in concert-music circles want to convince themselves that it’s only weak-kneed artistic directors who are keeping new music from a willing-and-ready-audience. As a result, they’ll overemphasize the importance of points made by researches like Kamatura and Schimmel to keep their own hopes and prejudices alive.

The truth is, programming unfamiliar music is hard. There’s a lot of inertia to overcome and there isn’t much of an audience out there screaming for new stuff. I think it’s essential to the art form, and essential to keeping adventurous listeners engaged, to push musical boundaries but we can’t kid ourselves: it will rarely be a short-term, single-ticket moneymaker.