The field is called the Music Industry, a title that many people still bridle at, as being totally reductionist and crassly commercial. Pierre Bourdieu’s “disavowal of the economic” was invoked to describe the musical artist’s traditional disdain for success, large audiences and the hegemony of the super star, not to mention Pop as the other (darker!) side of the industry.... READ MORE HERE

In the UK alone women comprise 60% of all interns and 59% of entry-level positions but only 30% of senior executive positions, according to The Guardian.

Women in the Pop industry in the States earn 20% less than their white male colleagues with African Americans and Latino women much less than that.

PRS professional songwriters and composers in the UK comprise just 16% of their total membership... READ MORE HERE

By the end of the BBC Proms next week, there will have been 75 concerts this season. Just eight of them have been conducted by women, with one woman, Marin Alsop, in charge of three of them. Quite frankly it’s not enough.... READ MORE HERE

For me it’s a monument to the amazing courage and commitment of investigative journalists, photographers and cameramen the world over. And it’s really their story in chronicling our times that is told in gracious style, from Walter Cronkite announcing Kennedy’s death in 1963 to the unfolding catastrophe of 9/11. As newspaper columnist Rod Dreher wrote of the courageous responders that day: “There are three kinds of people who run toward disaster, not away: cops, firemen and reporters.”... READ MORE HERE

Many of us have seen Fareed Zakaria on CNN hosting his own program focused on international affairs. His style of journalism and reporting is penetrating, analytical and smacks of an intelligence that seems all too rare on TV these days…READ FULL ARTICLE.

The Guildhall School of Music & Drama, housed at the Barbican in London, is an extraordinary cauldron of invention. It teaches some of the finest young musicians and actors, has community partnerships across the whole of London, and promotes vigorous and highly creative collaborations with the Barbican Centre itself and its major resident company the London Symphony Orchestra...READ FULL ARTICLE.

So at a time when many people are suggesting a re-examination of the American orchestra model given its apparently intractable problems and dynamics, here is an opportunity to look at musical life differently. After all, it doesn't matter where resources come from -- U.S. tax credits, endowments, vs. European government subsidy -- what is important is how resources are used to develop an organization into something of contemporary vibrancy...READ FULL ARTICLE.