What is meant by ‘reimagined’?
mainOrchestras are no longer cancelling half of the next season.
They are not even ‘postponing’ it to the following year.
The latest buzzword from the legal department is ‘reimagined’. As in:’Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Announces Reimagined Fall Programming’.
It means the same. No live public concerts. Some online content on a ‘virtual stage’.
Today, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Music Director Robert Spano announced the first phase of the reimagining of its fall 2020 season, responding to the advice of medical professionals and public health officials in order to minimize exposure to COVID-19 for performers, staff and audiences. Under these conditions, all first-phase reimagined concerts in the Delta Classical Series through December 31, 2020 will be performed without a live audience and will be available to view and enjoy on the ASO’s Virtual Stage. The programs will be comprised of smaller orchestral ensembles and will feature Music Director Robert Spano, Principal Guest Conductor Donald Runnicles, selected guest conductors and artists, and ASO members as soloists.
“Our patrons, donors and subscribers have shared with us how much they need the music of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, now more than ever, just as our musicians have expressed how important it is to bring comfort and connection to people during these uncertain times,” said Jennifer Barlament, Executive Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “At this time, the safest way to perform and engage with our community is through virtual performances. These programs are just the first phase of reimagining the fall season; stay tuned for announcements of smaller outdoor performances with live socially distanced audiences.”
Plain English has fallen sick with Covid.
Musicians need to read Tolstoy`s “What is art”. If they do, they will stop whining about having finally to get a meaningful job. Trying to monetize your precious inner and oh, such unique world is spiritual prostitution and a Ponzi scheme. If anything good comes out of this fake plague, it`ll be the end of this hebephrenic insanity.
Fake Plague??? today causing 1500 “fake” deaths and 50,000 “fake” infections in the US alone?
There is NOT one person on this planet who knows the exact statistics, neither of the infected, nor even of the dead!!! This Virus is and equation with multiple XXX – unknowns!
I can tell you:
Five people I know were infected.
Three of them are dead.
One of the living almost died.
If you talk to liberals (shudder at the thought ) they all know multiple people who died of this covidiocy, but conservatives don’t seem to know even one. Either liberals are lying or this is a plague that kills exclusively liberals in which case… I don’t want to say too much.
My registered-Republican police officer neighbor would beg to differ with you–if he were still alive to do so.
Yup, he’s dead from COVID-19.
I agree with you–the less you say, the better. I recommend that you follow your sage advice.
Seven people I know personally — six musicians and one actor (Union Bob from Mozart in the Jungle) are dead from Covid. Let’s ask them how fake the plague is…oh wait, they’re dead.
Blair, I’m a few years younger than you and I also finished Manhattan school. Quite a few people suggested that I write my memoirs but I will never do that, even though I could write a fat book about just the parties at La Salle street where I spent my youth. I enjoyed your book and even bought a few copies to give away as gifts. I’m sure your social network is larger than mine. My guess about the 6 people that you think died of covidiocy is that they had a regular seasonal flu, high fever etc, being naive and far from brave as most musicians are, went to a hospital, were promptly put on ventilators and died within 2-3 days from drowning in their own mucus. The hospital got 39000$ for the use of a ventilator. I come from a medical family and I know that most doctors in capitalist countries have morals not much more elevated than those of dr. Mengele. I had a very weird sickness in the second half of March which I cured by drinking a quart of cognac a day for 3 days and smoking a Dominican cigar which cost 15$. The total cost of my therapy was about 90$. 2 months ago I had to go to an emergency room for a bad cut ( nothing really serious but I needed a doctors note to get a day off at work) and the place was almost empty, the doctors and nurses were chatting and telling jokes. I was seen within 10 minutes. Trying to sound as stupid as possible, I asked: uhmm, how is the Coronavirus situation here? They said, trying to suppress a laugh at another moron: well, it’s almost over.
Thank you.
From wikipedia: Occam’s razor is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct.
Here is the simple fact: you’re a dunce. Stick that in your hebephrenic pipe and smoke it. And I sincerely hope this fake plague doesn’t make you fake ill and then fake die. That would be fake tragedy. (Except for all the REAL medical personnel who would do everything possible to keep your Ponzi scheme of a life viable.)
Napoleon shook hands with lepers. Liberals suffer from endocrine disorders which makes them very timid when faced even with the remotest possibility of death. Healthy, red meat diet, regular strength exercise can overcome mild cases but in the most cases one cannot have hope without hormone replacement.
Let me tell you who the cowards are: Trumpers and Q-Anon conspiracy reprobates such as yourself. Your ilk contribute nothing of any substance to any issue, ever. You haven’t given a scintilla of thought to what you are saying which leads me to believe you are one stupid f**k. You’re selfish to the core and don’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t offer you the least amount of masturbatory gratification. (Most likely even your fellow onanists find you repulsive.) Here’s some advice and an urgent request: crawl back into your cave, you troglodyte.
K, thanks for such an informative hissy liberal fit. No, I don’t jerk off anymore for lack of time. I work, travel to and from work, eat, sleep 3-5 hrs work out and go back to work. Occasionally I amuse myself by eliciting hissy liberal fits while on my 20minute coffee breaks. But I miss the years when I had time and energy to jerk off. Watching mouth-frothing libs is way better than any porn.
K, liberals have a comical delusion that they own arts. Classical music was created by White Christian conservatives for other White Christian conservatives. The only kind of art liberals own is sneakers glued to a wall and abstract paintings done in menstrual blood. You do control the Ponzi scheme of 1000s of competitions and countless conservatories ( they’re not called liberatories for a reason), where brainless, infantile mediocrities waste their lives. When faced with facts all you can do is vomit ad hominem. You own very little and soon even that will be taken away from you by your fellow liberals, the helicopter that is dropping money on you will run out of gas and the few morons who pay for Skype music lessons will suddenly realize that doing push-ups and chin-ups is way better and it’s free.
Thanks – you just made my point about your character and your intellectual acuity, which is basically, zero.
The only reasonable words there were “fake plague.”
Spoken like someone who doesn’t deserve to have any kind of art in their life, especially no classical music. Stay away, as long as you have that kind of attitude (of course you’re entitled to your opinion, as are we all.) And heaven forbid if a loved one of yours contracts the virus or even dies from it. Death isn’t fake; it’s final.
You need a dictionary to read this!
Might denouncing current events as a “fake plague” actually be a sign of “hebephrenic insanity”? Just wondering.
One would hope that music might ameliorate some quotient of the beast within. It seems to have failed, for you are a uniquely unhappy putz. May your condition be constant and unrelenting.
There are few things more satisfying than watching these hebephrenics offer their unique inner worlds online. Like prostitutes who were forbidden to offer their services under a bridge for having infected too many clients, they ask the judge: could I at least undress on Skype? As for calling me putz, I couldn’t care less. Sei Gezunt!
In psychic mode I’m getting a strong impression of a teenaged male, dressed entirely in black, with unnaturally dyed, straggly black hair.
Spends most of spare time in bedroom on computer either being a nuisance like this or watching porn.
It’s an amazing skill but I only use it occasionally.
Well, Nostradamus, you’re wrong. I’m a 50yr old beefy undercover narc officer in the East Tremont section of da Bronx. Capisce, papi?
I’m a uniquely happy dude. I’m gainfully employed while half the country lives on helicopter money. And no, I don’t try to exchange my oh, such unique inner world for bread on Skype. What could be more pathetic than that and this is the best that musicians can hope for on this musical Titanic that has been sinking for 50 years already.
You see, my neighborhood has some of the highest crime rates in the county. If the public here gets a whiff that my beast quotient has even slightly been ameliorated, I’ll probably be another unfortunate statistic of the hostile urban environment. Don’t worry, they are already coming to your neighborhood too. Soon you’ll discuss benefits of classical music with people who just smoked meth mixed with angel dust and watched some CNN. You know the saying: conservative is a liberal who’s been robbed…
Teachers in conservatory rough on you? Never quite have the stuff to ‘make it big’? Parents make you practice, perhaps? God forbid.
No Kenneth, it was me being too rough on my teachers.
What is your problem? Try to get a grip! Jesus!!
In 1339, the franciscan friar William of Ockham cut himself seriously with his razor when he tried to shave himself and think about a philosophical problem in the same time. The abt, then serving in William’s monastery, found him in theological confusion and with blood on his hands, admonishing him with the famous “Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate” (entities are not to be multiplied without necessity).
Since then, abductive heuristics are considered dangerous if in untrained hands.
I bet you wouldn’t think it was fake if you caught it. Let’s hope you don’t – it’s bad.
@occamsrazor the thing that’s hebephrenic is your screed. Did you lose out on a big audition or something?
Some of us are grateful that others are willing to invest the time, toil, and, sometimes, tears in developing their “precious inner and oh [so] unique world” into something from which we all can benefit. I just stumbled across a magical performance by Lara St. John of the Kreutzer Sonata. It made my evening. All I can say is, God bless her for willingness to, as you would say, “spiritually prostitute” herself for my benefit.
Yeah, Lara St. John in “Kreutzer” is absolutely stupendous!!
Skippy, what is the longest number of days have you gone without food in your life? One cannot benefit from art. One benefits from food, medicine, money etc, tangible things. Benefiting from art is a delusion easily curable by famine which is soon coming along with a civil war if liberals get their way.
Norman, you really need to flush the trolls at this point. If musician is a ‘meaningless job” to this twit, why are they even on the site? Proud to show that trolling is a meaningful job?
Time to stop being a smart arse Occamsrazor and stop searching every page of your dictionary like a nerdy teenager.
If you neither appreciate nor enjoy music then clear off and and leave the rest of us to sort things out as best we can.
Hey Dragon! It’s you who had to search the word hebephrenic, not me. What a shame not knowing your own diagnosis. Seriously, how many musicians just feverishly googled the word hebephrenic? You thought that knowing the words adagio and pianissimo was enough to pass for an educated person?
Interesting! How many more words does “Occamsrazor” knows
How many words do I know? How about human chorionic gonadotropin? You see, most classical musicians suffer from multiple endocrine disorders, not to mention hebephrenic schizophrenia and mandatory bipolar.
You somehow remind me of Rodion Raskolnikov; another one who was sooo convinced of his own superiority. Worked out really well for him… But the truly puzzling question is: what do you do on this site if you have nothing but contempt for the artists who bring the dots and lines on paper to life and make actual music out of it? It seems to be a strange use of your certainly immensely valuable time.
To Occamsrazor:
Whatever your education has consisted of I doubt it was the reason you express yourself in such an inhuman and insulting manner. If that’s what floats your boat then please find other, less inappropriate, forums for your misanthropy and negativity. If you wish to post comments on Slippedisc then please keep the gratuitous insults out of it, be constructive, and try and find some human decency within yourself, perhaps for your own sake as much as anyone else’s.
Symphony, please read Tolstoy’s What is art? I’m pretty mild compared to him.
But he is Tolstoy and you are you.
Symphony musician, I’m very constructive, working people are constructing the helicopter money that buys the contents of your fridge right now while you are contemplating how to peddle your unique inner world on Skype.
In America “plain English” is long dead.
Under the present circumstances, something is better than nothing.
Larry, dogs when hungry resort to eating other dogs’ feces, cats when starving simply go to the cat heaven. Dignity is inborn, to those who lack it one cannot even explain the concept. If tomorrow CNN announces we must walk around with pink dildos up our asses and drop our pants at checkpoints, 99% in nyc where I’m at will be happy to comply. Humanity utterly deserves the current situation. Gates and the rest of them never get cancer but they are afraid of only one thing, busting an aneurysm while laughing at us.
Orchestral performances are being re-purposed in accordance with best practices to scale up world-class high-quality musical experiences in these challenging times.
Of course the biggest benefit to this is having your brand stay in front of your audience and bringing in A LITTLE revenue while also keeping the musicians active. If USA goes all-out with a horrible second wave and lockdown it will be interesting at best to see what happens if things shut down anew. Let us hope we can forge ahead more normally in early ’21, otherwise…….
#innovation
George Carlin had a great skit about this illness. He called it “soft language”. So much of his timeless comedy has turned into a prophecy. Would be interesting to hear his commentary in these uncertain times.
They should all aspire to the be the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall.
I don’t know why this is getting thumbs-downed. The BPO is the one organization that has managed to control and monetize its product online. No doubt they are they envy of many an orchestra; the first mover into this limited space, with little room for a second one.
Language changes all the time for euphemistic purposes. What would we do today without words such as , “cognitively challenged” for mentally retarded, “trafficked” for prostitute. etc. I see nothing wrong in trying to soften a difficult topic.
In my opinion the test of whether a person has true fluency in a second language is his/her ability to use (or devise) euphemisms in it.
I actually don’t have a problem with this. They are reimagining what they can do under the circumstances, and are implementing it.
I am far more bothered by the following quote from that press release:
“The programs will be comprised of….”
No.
The programs will *comprise*.
Or, the programs will *be composed of.*
Not “comprised of.”
Feh.
Thank you, William Safford! Though I fear this one is also close to lost, along with the correct uses of hopefully, disinterested, enormity, and the correct spelling of “memento,” based on longtime mispronunciation of it.
Not only in music. Yesterday the new “star” Kamala Harris also declared that she wants to “reimagine” police in the US. The meaning being: defund and demolish! It has been done before (Germany 1933!!)
It must be awful to be so afraid all the time. I’m sorry.
Funny you should mention that, because euphemism indeed has a very dark history. It’s all about the skillful use of prefixes, as in de-fund or re-imagine. The German language echoes this quite well, with prefixes such as ent– or ver–, which succeed in making even the most sinister of ideas somehow more acceptable, almost giving them a positive spin, as in the expressions “unfriending” and “disinviting,” which still suggest the concepts of friendship and invitation, though they actually mean the exact opposite. Double negatives also achieve similar aims, and in some cases one would actually need to track statements on a truth table in order to figure out what they actually mean. For those interested, I highly recommend “The Language of the Third Reich” by Victor Klemperer — an important and illuminating book. For those looking for a little bit of humor, “The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook” by Beard and Cerf — I believe out of print, but still available second-hand on Amazon and Abebooks. Oddly, the two books have much in common. Finally, for those interested in the sheer perversity of double negatives, “The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations,” or L.I.A.R, by Robert Thornton — very entertaining read.
So anyway, like most orchestras that haven’t just given up, they are trying to figure out how they can present some kind of season, both to help themselves stay alive and to provide music for people who want to hear it.
If you “imagine” a symphony season as consisting mostly of big symphonic repertoire requiring 80-100 people onstage (or more, for one of the big Mahler symphonies), then you might have to “re-imagine” a symphony season as consisting of music for a smaller orchestra, or chamber performances, or… I really liked Leonard Slatkin’s idea of rehearsing and performing the same small-orchestra program twice, for smaller/safer audiences, with half the orchestra playing alternate rehearsals and concerts. Of course none of it is terribly sustainable, but that’s not the point — the point is to get through this coming season without having to shut down forever.
I’m having trouble figuring out Norman’s problem with this. Is it pathetic what they’re trying, or is it pathetic to even try anything? Or is he just annoyed by the writing?
No I understand Norman’s basic point. It’s both highly euphemistic and gets in the way of comprehension of what you’re supposed to do if you’re the target audience. I had to read the full press release twice to make sure I understood that 1) no there are no concerts at all to “go to,” and 2) there are indeed performances by such-and-such people at certain times that I can access.
But I find this only the second most annoying language trend in America at the current time. I can’t tell you how many announcements I’ve seen from not only concert presenters but also theaters and other types of cultural organizations that declare themselves “thrilled!” and “extremely excited” to share the “Great News!!” that some virtual and/or educational or entirely supplemental thing is happening that is in fact not a live event or anything close to it. It’s fine that they’re doing it and the problems with doing anything more are not their fault, but come on already with the super-duper- smiley-face approach. It’s kind of a set-up for a let-down.
I have a recommendation for everyone (myself included):
Don’t feed the trolls.
The trolls here are sleek and glossy.