Each year, the National Conducting Institute selects a small group of promising young conductors to attend a three week session which includes rehearsals with the National Symphony Orchestra. Founded by music director Leonard Slatkin, the program gives unseasoned, but professional level conductors the chance to work with a professional orchestra of high caliber. They attend workshops, receive feedback from the musicians, and a lucky few conduct the NSO in the culminating concert.

Corporate Anthems was the subject of a segment on NPR’s “On the Media” this past weekend; I believe it was a rebroadcast of this segment from 2001. I linked to the IBM Songbook a while back. Now “On the Media” has revealed to me the wonder of Industrial Musicals. Way back when, Broadway veterans were hired to create glamorous theatrical events for sales meetings and executive gatherings. Often a recorded album was presented to attendees so they could relive the songs over again in the comfort of their homes, or perhaps play them at office morale events. Through these recordings, we can relive such garish wonders as the songs from the American Standard musical entitled “The Bathrooms Are Coming” which included the lyrics “My bathroom, my bathroom is a private kind of place.”

The classical music equivalent of opera supertitles and museum audioguides, the Concert Companion navigates audience members through a symphony performance. Created by Roland Valliere with software developed by Kinoma and Tribeworks, the PDA-based system receives information via wireless during the performance. Text that is typically contained in program notes, such as background information about the piece, composer biographies, and motifs to listen for appears on command from a technician using a laptop at the back of the hall. One could imagine that the light from the displays would be distracting to others in the audience. Response from test groups has been positive, though there are likely to be discouraging sniffs from the purists. As with supertitles, if this device can attract bigger audiences, it may be a necessary evolution in symphony performance.

National Public Radio’s most popular hour, Car Talk, is broadcast at different times throughout the country, seemingly impossible for a live call-in show. And yet, every week, Click and Clack are urging their audience to “call us at 1-888-CARTALK.” But when is the show actually taped? How do people from all over the country manage to call in at the right time? What about that guy that called in from an undisclosed armed services location? Well, sorry to shatter any illusions, but the show is not, strictly speaking, a live call-in show. It’s a taped call-out show. Callers to the toll-free number are instructed to leave their information and someone from the staff calls back prospects with promising personalities. The callers are auditioned by producers and ones that make the cut are called during the Friday taping to be put through to Tom and Ray Magliozzi. However, the brothers aren’t given information about their callers beforehand, so it isn’t a canned or scripted interaction. About 20-30 percent of the calls don’t make it into the final show.

The Bees Knees is a nostalgic resource for restaurant and diner china collectibles. If you’ve been yearning to outfit your kitchen with chunky thick diner plates, this is the place to start. They even have a list of mystery items that they’d like to match to the restaurants of origin. For china from steamships, railroads, and airlines, take a look through the offerings at Cabin Class Collectibles. They even have a couple nice pieces of Royal Doulton from British Airways.

Despite hectic schedules, we managed to catch the documentary film Winged Migration. This remarkable movie gets dreadfully close to countless numbers of birds as they proceed through their yearly cycle of north and south migration. When I watched Sesame Street as a child, I would always get bored when they had the wild animal segments. If they had been as compelling as this, perhaps I would have become more involved with the beauty of the nature surrounding us.

Kraft Foods Inc. has announced “global initiatives to help address rise in obesity.” But there are no concrete changes they can point to yet, except for plans to reduce the portion sizes of single-serve packs (and, I have to wonder, keep the same prices?) and halt in-school marketing (again, cost savings). The NY Times reports that Kraft is developing Oreos without trans-fats, so perhaps there will be significant changes to come in the actual content of the foods.

Children’s author Robert McCloskey died on Sunday. He was 88. Earlier this year students from Dean S. Luce Elementary School in Canton, MA succeeded in a four year quest to pass legislation naming McCloskey’s ”Make Way For Ducklings” the official state children’s book and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) the official children’s author and illustrator of the Commonwealth. Sally McCloskey, daughter of the author, thanked the children in a celebration at the State House on June 23rd. The addition of Geisel to the bill resulted from a compromise with the representative from Springfield, Geisel’s hometown.

David Bowie is embarking on a large-scale (17 countries, 7 months) tour this year with dates already announced for Europe. He is expected to perform in the U.S. before the end of the year and a new album is forthcoming as well.

A used bookstore owner found a signed Ralph Waldo Emerson book and a kitten at a yard sale. She purchased both. The Emerson signature has a doodle of a cat next to it. The kitten has been named Emerson.