Some observations and comments:
A steadily growing number of students graduate from music conservatories each year. How many and what jobs are there for them, and what percentage of them settle for becoming amateur musicians and highly informed audience members?

Since it was not mentioned, I guess it goes without saying that the decline in school-age music education has a depressing effect on potential audience size.

As pointed out, in Boston and many other major cities, there are a surprising number of music organizations, all supported in some measure by attendance and donations. Wouldn’t it make better business sense to reduce the number of organizations in order to focus funding and attendance on the ones that remain? This is supply and demand economics. Perhaps fewer, region-serving orchestras that employ enough top caliber musicians to perform the primary season, run-outs, family and pops concerts, chamber music, recitals, studio work, etc. would be a model worth considering.

Anyone who thinks orchestral musicians earn too much should consider how much the average physician or surgeon earns, and compare the amount and length of time and the level of diligence involved in each. True, musicians doesn’t hold physical life and death in their hands, but neither do a lot of other highly paid jobs.

Performing arts organizations must figure out how to disseminate their performances on a pay-on-demand or subscription basis to generate income from people who cannot afford a ticket or cannot physically attend a performance but will settle for enjoying a it via download or live webcast with high quality visuals and sound.

Government and school districts need to re-assume responsibility for total education of our children, not just the three Rs. Isn’t it obvious by now that children learn by total sensory immersion, including art, music, sports, math, science, practical economics, reading, writing, and so forth. By pretending that a single exposure to a museum or a classical music concert is a sufficient substitute for ongoing band or orchestra or choir, we are doing our children and ourselves a huge disservice. Not only are we diminishing our culture, which already seems to be in the spin cycle, we are decreasing our nation’s human learning potential by eliminating important hands-on arts experiences.

But whatever the true number of hours outside the job practicing are, it’s just an average. Each individual will have to practice a different amount depending on the difficulty of their part and according to their own strengths as a player. Just because there are some players who may not need to practice as much is no reason to lay siege to the general point that a significant amount of time outside the workplace that IS required to play to a high level.

Furthermore, managements will often make the equally spurious claim that musicians are being paid full-time wages for part-time work in order to turn public sentiment against the musicians and portray them as over-paid, greedy primadonnas. The fact is that musicians salaries are meant to reflect not just hours spent on the job, but also the many thousands of hours of experience and training that they bring to the job.

The problem is that it is very difficult to monetize this increased productivity unless perhaps we compare each orchestra side-by-side, such as a competition, as I have been proposing for several years.
Otherwise, I believe we have “world-classed” ourselves out of the larger market of music lovers and need to restore BALANCE to classical music by seeking curious music fans where they enjoy other music… in clubs, bars, coffeehouses… yes, in noise. Classical Revolution (.org) is one of many loose organizations doing this in 30 cities around the world. The response is mixed. My CutTime Productions is another.
By warming up the presentation and demystifying what we musicians assume everyone knows, we can turn on small but increasing numbers of new audiences.

Artistic production that cannot easily be monetized has never been self-sustaining. That’s why Bach had a church day job. Our question now is how to proceed without church, court and high society subsidy. Can the “long tail” of internet distribution, reaching and aggregating scattered classical music fans, muster support for organizations that have historically been rooted in geographic communities? And if we want it to, at what cost?

This must not die.

It would seem to me that the 370,000 Swedes who purchased TEL are guilty of little more than being conned into the purchase of a bad book doubtlessly hyped by its publisher. In an era when memes “go viral” with astonishing speed–and almost anything can easily be monetized with “one click” online purchases–it is hardly surprising that the book sold so well. Then, too, you read it: did you borrow a copy ? or do you have reason to be ashamed also?

The achievement of this brilliant film is to set Bausch’s unique ideas into natural, theatrical, architectural, and urban spaces employing new technology with a genius sense of camera motion and editing. The music goes from Rite of Spring to modern things I’ve never heard. Wenders personalizes the dancers, offering us the unique architecture of each face in close up while hearing them in voice over, which gives a nice creative and spiritual insight into the work. As for the set pieces, every motion, each dancers body, experience, as well as age seems affirmed in movement. It is a profound use of 3-D. I’m only half kidding when I say that this is why 3-D was invented.

I saw Bausch several times in NY through the decades. The last time was at the Cherry Lane Theater for her interpretation of the Garden of Earthly Delights. Bausch did Bosch. It was breathtaking. With such an untimely and premature loss, I give the highest kudos to Win Wenders for this stunning accomplishment.

If you get a few people who have read the same non-fiction book to discuss that book or one event within it…you don’t end up with just one interpretation but several interpretations even though only one event may have actually taken place. Interpretation of any real situation or event fictionalises the situation or the event to a certain extent…it is next to impossible not to lend human imagination even to non-fiction. So why say that certain historical tragedies, such as the Holocaust, should be off limits to writers of fiction.

With the conductor substitutions that have been necessary this current season, none have been more fortuitous for BSO concert-goers than the opportunity to experience this Mendelssohn rarity, as performed by Maestro Tovey, who seemed to effortlessly exact an organic whole and sonic splendor out of this score.

Having attended several Mendelssohn concerts (most recently a great
performance of Elijah, with Frubeck de Burgos), it has become evident that the Boston Symphony can lay claim to a rich legacy of performing the music of Felix Mendelssohn, much as they can show the same for performing the music of Hector Berlioz, dating back to the Munch era, in the 1950′s.

Listen to the orchestra’s 1960′s recording of the music to a complete Midsummers Night Dream, under Erich Leinsdorf on RCA,
for a confirmation of this.

This past week performances of the Lobgesang under Bramwell Tovey,
not only added to that rich legacy, but may help insure for BSO patrons — the welcome possibility that the orchestra may program this neglected Mendelssohn masterpiece for future concerts.

During our current Gilded Age, perhaps we’re well-positioned to see how difficult it is to take a cheery view of humanity.