Friday (11/12) on his ArtsJournal blog The Artful Manager, Andrew Taylor writes, “Name the publication year of the following excerpt from Time magazine: ‘As a group, the symphony orchestras of the U.S. are unsurpassed in quality by those of any other nation in the world. Yet today they are in trouble—loud, unavoidable, cymbal-crashing financial trouble.’ That’s right, 1969. Or, did you guess a slightly more recent year? The article is unearthed and shared again by Jesse Rosen, President and CEO of the League of American Orchestras in the current issue of Symphony (you can read the article on-line). Drawing from a McKinsey & Co. report on the dire straits of American symphonies at the time, the article went on to suggest that up to a half of the nation’s major symphonies would be out of business by 1973. Rosen takes the opportunity to ask a panel of guest experts—William Foster, Russell Willis Taylor, and Peter Pastreich—why so much of the article sounds familiar today, and why those orchestras actually got bigger rather than dropping dead.”
Posted November 15, 2010
