Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

The IRIS Chamber Orchestra will be performing a program of Brahms and Rachmoninov this Saturday (4/21/07) evening at the Germantown Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m. Click here for ticket and location information. The concert will feature the Fourth Symphony and Variations on a Theme of Haydn by Brahms and the Rhapsody [...]

Finding Rothko, The IRIS Chamber Orchestra’s latest commissioned work by composer Adam Schoenberg, just won one of the 2007 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. This is exciting news for Adam, and it is more evidence of the high level of musical activity associated with the IRIS Chamber Orchestra.
You can read more [...]

The cantankerous and controversial Norman Lebrecht’s new book titled Maestros, Masterpieces, and Madness depicts the classical music recording industry as being on its deathbed. This is definitely the case on the major labels, but the independent labels are in fact quite active in creating new and interesting work.
I have done many recordings for smaller [...]

Corin Long, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s principal double bassist, has died in a diving accident in Spain. Corin was renowned as an excellent performer and pedagogue, and he will be greatly missed in the double bass and classical music world.
Double bassist Kirsty Matheson, a former student of Corin’s, let me know about this [...]

Drew McManus is in the midst of running a series of essays on his blog Adaptistration for the Take a Friend to Orchestra initiative. He is putting up a new essay each day for the month of April, and I urge readers to check these out. Drew has been running these essays each [...]

Well, folks—jobs aren’t exactly falling off the trees these days, but what else is new? There are scant employment opportunities in this month’s International Musician outside of part-time work, but I’ll present you with what we’ve got anyway. Here goes:
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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra
Enrique Arturo Diemecke, Music Director
Announces auditions for the following:
[...]

Chicago Symphony bassist Michael Hovnanian recently put up a post on his CSO Bass Blog providing an interesting window into the rotation and time off policies of the Chicago Symphony. I also noticed that Patty from oboeinsight discovered this post. You can read her post about it here.
Check out Michael’s post here. [...]

Here is a shot of the Elgin Symphony bass section from our recent concert cycle at the beginning of April. One or another of us is often subbing out of a cycle for other work, so it is rare that the six of us are actually assembled as a section.
The players are (left to [...]

Double bassist and Contrabass Conversations guest John Grillo sent me a link to orchestrafacts.org, a compilation of salary information, structural deficits, and vacancy rates for orchestras in the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM).
While I would like to see some statistics for the last several seasons (the most recent statistics are for the [...]

Former New World Symphony pianist Josh Nemith left a comment on a recent post of mine about the New World Symphony;s Internet2 projects. I thought that it would be worth highlighting for folks out there interested in this technology:

I just thought I would share something about my Internet2 experience while I was at New [...]