http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/music/lockout-for-the-minnesota-orche stra-grows-more-painful.html?ref=music
The cost of a professional classical musician's education (lifelong with private lessons and conservatories), is more than to train an American MD. The upkeep in unpaid rehearsal time is comparable to the costs of supplementary education after you're hired and unlike financial companies, is not paid for by the company. The question is whether Minneapolis is up to maintaining a world class product or whether they just want a Ford or a Dodge. Remember Warren Buffet is from Minnesota. Let's see Bankers negotiate a 30% pay cut amongst their most valued experts and then we can talk. The public is so "cowed" by economic jargon that the graduates I teach in Cantorial school side with the bankers believing that the banker's morality is contained in the Torah. It isn't, in fact their usury is a capital offense. In class I call their attitude "The New Torah." I'm walking on very thin ice for a Cherokee Priest but I'm sworn to tell it as I see it. Ed speaks of the church taking up the slack in the industries suffering from productivity lag and just plain on greed. Music has walked this path since the crash in 1929. Since the invention of "Productivity Lag" as an accepted tenet of neo-classical economics, it has been the churches and synagogues that have provided quality musical experiences for the regular people who can't afford to educate their children's brains with the teachings of the arts. School has been off and on but sacred music has been consistant and of every type including the classical heritage. Did I or maybe Keith mention the book by Iain McGilchrist, "The Master and the Emissary" on the recent left and right brain research? It seems the Arts are the brain food and developers of our ability to handle complex patterns in later life. Brain training and brain food. According to Lawrence Levine in his Harvard Massey Lectures: The early immigrants to America were far more sophisticated in the Arts than Americans today. Could that be the root of all of that industry and drive by those folks? McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and a popularizer of what has become common knowledge in the medical and research literature I've used for my class. It's nice to see but it runs against the economis'ts stereotypes of the meaning of the lower classes. Of course the only reviewer that I've found that really took issue with the book was the "Economist." REH
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