PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
Click on the tabs below to advance your career by searching Contests & Awards, Schools, Festivals, Camps, Service Organizations, and our list of Services and Products, Scholarships and Grants and Events and Conferences.
And be sure to browse the excellent career advice offered by legendary Artist Manager Edna Landau in her Ask Edna blog and the entertainment law experts in their Law and Disorder blog.
US/Canada Arts Administration Degree Programs
Music Schools & Departments
Summer Music Camps & Special Programs
Services & Professional Music Orgs (non-profit)
Performing Arts Industry Events and Conferences
AskEdna: Career Advice blog
Scholarships and Grants
Send your questions to Edna Landau at AskEdna@MusicalAmerica.com and she’ll answer through Ask Edna. Click the links below to read Edna’s recent columns on the critical aspects of launching and managing and professional music career.
Communicating with Your Audience
During Edna’s 23 years as managing director of IMG Artists, she personally looked after the career of violinist, Itzhak Perlman and launched the careers of musicians such as pianists Evgeny Kissin and Lang Lang, violinist Hilary Hahn, and conductors Franz Welser-Mõst and Alan Gilbert.
Edna believes young musicians can grow their own careers, with “hard work, blind faith, passion for the cause, incessant networking and a vision that refuse[s] to be tarnished by naysayers.”
Special Reports
MA Top 30 Professional of the Year: Eric Einhorn
General and Artistic Director
On Site Opera
Eric Einhorn is stretching the boundaries of opera—literally. As cofounding general and artistic director of New York’s On Site Opera, he is taking opera out of conventional venues and into site-specific locales, such as Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera (The Secret Gardener) performed in a community garden or Gershwin’s Blue Monday at the Cotton Club in Harlem. For its 2012 debut, the company put on Shostakovich’s cartoon opera, The Tale of the Silly Baby Mouse, at the Bronx Zoo. In March, Einhorn staged Ricky Ian Gordon’s Morning Star, about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue.
Choosing the right opera for the right space is key. “It is a long process, finding the piece and venue that match,” Einhorn says. “There have been pieces we wanted to do and we had to put them aside because we couldn’t find the right space. But once the work and venue are matched up, everything else falls into place.”
On Site is part of a burgeoning indie opera scene in New York. “Audiences are craving more intimate experiences,” Einhorn says. “Entertainment in general now is more intimate—it’s a video on your phone, music in your ear; it’s up close, it’s personal. Indie opera and especially site-specific opera allows the performer to connect with the audience in a way that isn’t possible in a large proscenium theater. Sometimes, in site-specific opera, singers are a foot away from audience members, and there’s a connection made that is exhilarating to everyone—the singers, the audience, and me as the director.”
Einhorn, who studied vocal performance and directing at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, has been on the directing staff of the Metropolitan Opera since 2005. As a freelance director, his engagements this season include a new staged concert version of Madama Butterfly with the Pacific Symphony in February. This month, On Site is giving free performances of Einhorn’s production of the Menotti Christmas classic, Amahl and the Night Visitors, at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, with a community choir of formerly homeless singers along with the cast of opera singers and orchestra.