148: $400,000 for a Single Night with your Orchestra

IU massacred; MTT lives on; New Money Maestro

Jul 03, 2025

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: This composer was among the most influential of his age; now he’s fallen into near total obscurity.

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As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 147
Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust, Minuet of the Will-o’-the-Wisps

As ever, I’m really impressed with you all. Joey called it with “pre-Debussy French” ( Gounod, Massenet, and Sir Arthur Sullivan) and Listener Eric said it sounded like Berlioz, but wasn’t Berlioz, but still had the sense to put Berlioz in his bucket, along with Offenbach and Weber.

Listener Kevin knew it outright. And for those wondering, here’s the Miles Davis track that has (sort of) the same name.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to submit a YouTube link OR upload your own 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Slash and Burn

Six state-funded universities in Indiana have announced sweeping cuts to their institutions, including the outright termination of 400 academic degree programs throughout the state. From Forbes:

The programs on the list to be phased out include those at the undergraduate and graduate level and span multiple disciplines, such as education, the arts and humanities, foreign languages and some sciences.
One of the budget bill’s provisions — inserted by the Republican majority as the legislative session reached its final hours — established a minimum average number of graduates that degree programs at Indiana’s public colleges and universities must produce over a three-year period.
Those programs represented about 19% of all degree programs statewide. According to the Commission, “students currently enrolled in any eliminated or suspended degree program will have the opportunity to complete their studies through an orderly teach-out.”
The university and colleges eliminated 75 programs at both main and regional campuses, 68 of which had zero enrollments. Another 101 programs were suspended, and 232 programs will eventually be merged or consolidated.

Now I’m mainly bringing this up because I did my master’s degree at Indiana University in Bloomington (and Joey went to college there) and that school alone is terminating 100 degree programs. It looks like the Jacobs School of Music is safe, which comes as no surprise since it’s like a little government unto itself within the larger university system, and from what I understand, has always done impressive fundraising.

But it seems that there is one program under the Music banner that is getting the axe — Ballet. When I was there, the ballet was thriving, so I don’t know what’s happened to make mighty fall so cataclysmically. Perhaps there were never many ballet *majors* as such, and there will continue to be a dance program, but students won’t be able to get their degree in it.

MTT Takes a Bow

For those who missed it, CBS Sunday morning did a very nice piece on / with Michael Tilson Thomas, who continues to live with glioblastoma, a highly aggressive and malignant brain tumor that usually spells a death sentence 10-13 months after diagnosis (and that’s with treatment.) MTT was first diagnosed four years ago, and has continued conducting for much of that time.

The Two

From the New York Times:

The musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took their seats at Roy Thomson Hall on Wednesday for a performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. Then a stage door swung open, and out walked the conductor.
He was not a world-renowned maestro or even a trained musician. The man who walked out, wearing a crisp white shirt and taking the podium, was Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old technology executive who had paid the Toronto Symphony nearly $400,000 to lead it for one night.
Cheung, a lifelong fan of classical music who played in a harmonica band in high school and has dabbled in conducting, persuaded the orchestra to allow him to act out his long-held dream of leading a top ensemble.

Those of you in the know (and certainly any Tár fans) will know that Cheung follows in the footsteps of his fellow multi-billionaire Gilbert Kaplan in having been transfixed by Mahler’s second unto the point of shelling out beaucoup bucks to conduct it himself. This was noted in the r/classicalmusic subreddit: