Phoenix Symphony Plays Again, Ten Days After Laying Off All Musicians

By Daniel Okafor

The Phoenix Symphony laid off all 66 of its musicians on November 2, saying it could no longer cover its costs. Ten days later, the orchestra plays again. Local donors have pledged enough to lift the suspension, and concerts resume November 12, the Arizona Republic reports. An 11-member commission will rework the orchestra's finances in the meantime.

That is a fast reversal by any measure. An institution that fires its entire orchestra one week and books it the next is not cured; it's stabilized. The commission's real work starts when the applause fades.

Who else made news this week?

Russell Brand's books are disappearing from one publisher. Pan Macmillan, his British publisher, is pulling his titles after his rape and sexual assault conviction, according to The New York Times. Skyhorse, which published his How to Become a Christian in 7 Days under Tucker Carlson's new imprint, says it has no plans to withdraw it. One publisher acts; the other holds the line. The market will judge which read the room.

NewJeans signed away more than music. The K-pop group joined Ador, a label owned by BTS's company Hybe, at ages 14 to 17, The Guardian reports. Their contracts dropped child-protection language, including the right to education, and gave Ador their likeness in perpetuity — including as AI chatbots or clones. Read that clause twice. A teenager's face, owned forever, in formats that do not yet exist.

Queens Public Library is working by hand. A ransomware attack on November 4 took down its network, Lit Hub reports. All 66 branches remain open, with books checked out manually, the old-fashioned way. Whether patron data was taken remains unknown. It is, depending on your mood, a cyber-crisis or an unplanned analog revival.

What happens when schools cut a day?

Oregon offers one answer. About 100 school districts in the state have cut to four-day weeks, and arts groups are filling the Fridays, Oregon ArtsWatch reports. Arts in Education of the Gorge drew 60 of Mosier Community School's 205 students to its first Friday session — nearly 30 percent of the school in one go.

That number deserves attention. When budgets shrink, the arts are usually first out the door; here they are first through it. A budget crisis created a vacuum, and artists walked in with programming.

The week's through-line

Three of these stories share a shape: institutions under pressure, from a symphony's payroll to a library's servers to a school district's calendar, finding improvised lifelines. Donors, hand-stamped due dates and Friday art classes are not permanent fixes. But the Phoenix commission, the Skyshore standoff and the NewJeans contract fight will all tell us what the arts owe their workers — and what their workers, especially the underage ones, never should have signed away.