The SLSO has been in the news a lot lately, even beyond its
connection with the Catsup Bottle Festival. The new contract garnered attention
from media outlets large and small, and was the top story on artsjournal.com
this morning (Thursday), with the headline "St. Louis Symphony Players Get New
(And Healthy) Contract." Click here for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch coverage (the same article to which artsjournal linked).
This morning my colleague and Mensch of the Century Adam Crane (named as such at Nathaniel Ayers most
recent birthday party) accepted the SLSO's ASCAP award for Adventurous
Programming at the League of American Orchestras conference in Chicago: first place under the category "Awards
for Programming of Contemporary Music." Adam picked up a plaque and three
grand. For the Post-Dispatch report
click here.The plaque will go somewhere in the hall. I don't know where the money goes. A
trip to Ted Drewes for everybody?
Also in artsjournal.com today, Amanda Ameer, in her always
engaging blog Life's a Pitch, discusses
the phenomenon of Tweeting and texting during concerts. You can read the
complete post here, but I was most taken with
Hilary Hahn's perspective of Twitter consciousness in the concert hall (Hahn is one of the artists Ameer
promotes). Again, you can read her full response by clicking above, but here is
Hahn's finale, with its strong rhetorical flourish:
"Finally, it seems to me that listeners make things
difficult for themselves by observing themselves in the third person and
putting their thoughts into a narrative before those thoughts can fully form. I
feel that concerts can be a break from outside pressures and influences. For
audience members, a concert should be like a vacation on a distant beach with a
stack of good books. Comfortable seats. No one trying to call you. No one
breaking into your trains of thought. No way to reach the outside world. Just a
time to shut off and calm down and treat yourself to something truly wonderful.
If we can't sit through a classical concert we pay decent money for, and we
can't take two hours out of an evening to shut out everyone else's demands and
opinions and thoughts, where does that leave us?"
