Archive - December 2013

1
2013 Recap: Top 10 Most Popular Posts!
2
A Polyphonic Holiday Playlist!
3
Marketing a “Difficult” Concert
4
Something you should read
5
Another missed opportunity
6
Kitschmastide (with examples)
7
‘Tis the season
8
Alias: A New Kind of Ensemble
9
Being in Tune

2013 Recap: Top 10 Most Popular Posts!

All of us at Polyphonic.org want to thank you, our readers, for making 2013 a great year!  This past year you joined over 63,000 people who visited Polyphonic.org a total of more than 92,000 times! Below are the top 10 most popular posts of the year from Polyphonic.org based on number of views! #1: Bringing[…]

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A Polyphonic Holiday Playlist!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Polyphonic.org!  Below are a few holiday favorites from our editors: Dr. Ramon Ricker, Editor-in-Chief The Piano Guys perform a creative arrangement of Angels We Have Heard on High! Robert Levine, Senior Editor We all have a few guilty holiday pleasures. Mine is candy cane ice cream. I have[…]

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Marketing a “Difficult” Concert

All orchestras want to “stretch” and offer repertoire that challenges both the players and the audience — that strengthens the symphonic art form and moves us into the future. But selling these concerts to our regular patrons can be very challenging. Orchestras with liberal return policies find subscribers giving in their tickets to the “stretch”[…]

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Something you should read

Once a year or so I read something online that stops me in my tracks; not because it tells me something I didn’t know (which happens every 2 minutes or so), but because it forces me to think uncomfortable thoughts. This year’s winner was a post by Emily Hogstad, who has consistently provided, on her[…]

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Another missed opportunity

The great Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously remarked, after the 1973 Geneva Peace Conference, that “the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The same could be said of the Board of the Minnesota Orchestra. At their annual meeting yesterday, the Board passed on the perfect moment to let the current board chair[…]

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Kitschmastide (with examples)

Polyphonic has Been Absolutely Inundated (OK; a few requests on Facebook, but this is a business where self-promotion seems to require the kind of spin that would make tennis balls spiral off into the next county) with requests for examples of what I was referring to in my previous post. So here goes. One of[…]

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‘Tis the season

…for lousy Christmas carol arrangements. What is it about Christmas music that leads arrangers into the ugly back alleys of kitsch? Is it simply that it takes a genius to make a good arrangement of a good tune? Copland’s handling of the great Shaker hymn tune in his Appalachian Spring would suggest that. (Speaking of[…]

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Alias: A New Kind of Ensemble

In 2007 we posted an article entitled, Alias: A New Kind of Ensemble.  Looking back with 20/20 hindsight it can easily seen that Alias was, and still is, part of a trend—a movement among musicians to form “alternative ensembles.” In an effort to understand more about this trend, the Eastman School of Music recently inaugurated[…]

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Being in Tune

Peter Renshaw calls for a new paradigm to address the key issues confronting learning and development in the arts.

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