Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

Note - I wrote this post before checking through my daily blog reads, at which point I found that Matt Wengerd had already blogged this story. Check out his post on this tale from Michael Hovnanian’s CSO Bass Blog.
Michael Hovnanian (this coming weekend’s Contrabass Conversations guest) just wrote a great post titled Showdown [...]

The Elgin Symphony Orchestra (of which I am a long-time member) was recently featured in a great extended article on the orchestral musician forum Polyphonic.org. The piece starts with some introductory information about the Elgin Symphony, and how, despite their (relatively) small budget, they are making big plans while being fiscally responsible:
The Elgin [...]

Alex Ross (New Yorker critic and blogger) has been making visits to some non-coastal orchestras recently. Dubbing it his ‘I 65 tour’, he has visited the Indianapolis, Nashville, and Alabama Symphony in quick succession.
He’s got some great photos of these three cities along with some commentary about all three of these orchestras (their venues, [...]

I have recently added Spot’s Doghouse to my list of music blogs, finding this great blog earlier this month through Matt Heller’s hellafrisch blog. This blog is written by a horn player currently playing in the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana. He was also in the New World Symphony and went to Northwestern [...]

Here is an interesting study from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation about how to involve young people in nonprofit arts organizations. This reading ties in well with my article Rethinking Music Performance Degrees:
View publication: Youth Report.pdf
About this publication

The future of nonprofit arts [...]

Drew McManus wrote a post recently about the benefits and drawbacks of brevity in concert programming. He has written on this subject in the past on his blog Adaptistration, and it is a very important and touchy subject. This particular post discusses the Chicago Opera Theater’s double feature of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle [...]

Robert Oppelt just wrote a story about Mstislav Rostropovich from his time with him in that National Symphony Orchestra:

Rostropovich StoryThe great cellist Mistislav Rostropovich just passed away. As he made himself available so freely, many musicians around the world have their own “Slava” stories. I thought I would tell at least one story from my [...]

This is a guest post by double bassist Jean-Yves Bénichou. Benjy is bi-national, being a citizen of both the United States and France. He has lived in France for the past 30 years and has been a member of the Strasbourg Philharmonic since 1985. He studied double bass at Temple University with Edward Arian and [...]

I’d like to thank readers for all of the great comments (both via e-mail and through the comments on the blog) about the most recent installment of Road Warrior Without an Expense Account. This information and perspective on the music performance degree curriculum at most music schools is in dire need of change, and I [...]

Chicago Symphony double bassist and CSO Bass Blog blogger Michael Hovnanian wrote a recent post about the dynamic between the Chicago Symphony and Bernard Haitink. It sounds like the working atmosphere has improved considerably in the Chicago Symphony since the departure of Daniel Barenboim:

For years around here ‘artistry’ has been so firmly linked to [...]