SAAM

I finally got to the newly renovated and remodeled Smithsonian American Art Museum (aka the National Collection of Fine Arts) and the National Portrait Gallery. The building looks great, with lots of the old Patent Office’s original features. Details like the visible conservation labs are a great touch. Having grown up in the DC area, it was nice to see things I remember as a kid like the marble statue of Dying Tecumseh (an American take on the Greco-Roman Dying Gaul), or James Hampton’s tin foil-covered garage-built altar.

One of the temporary exhibits is an exhaustive (but not too large) show on Joseph Cornell that includes plenty of the boxes (many from the Lehrman Art Trust), but also less familiar things like portfolios of collages and materials he put together around specific personalities, films he mostly collaborated with other artists on, and stuff collected from his apartment, labeled boxes and envelopes filled with his raw material like cork balls, clay bubble pipes, magazine clippings, and some of his books and the records he listened to. I always enjoyed the boxes in isolation, as small idealized spaces, but this show gives a way to see them with much more context and connected to an artistic milieu.

There’s also work by William Christenberry that shows everything he does – color photos, sculptures, paintings, drawings. In a lot of cases he will take one vernacular building form and show it in a photo, a sculpture and a painting. The photos still work best for me, but there’s value in seeing the form expressed each of the three ways.

My favorite aspect of the show was seeing photographs together that he took of the same buildings and scenes over time. There’s a barbeque joint in Greensboro that undergoes a name change, subtle architectural changes, then starts to decay and ends up an empty lot. Or the Klan bar in one photo that has been replaced by another business in another. And two shots of the same pear tree, one in winter, one in summer loaded with fruit. An abandoned palmist’s shop that gets overtaken by kudzu, then by other vegetation, some of which finally gets cleared away. There’s also a series of photos of a green warehouse that doesn’t change that much over time, obviously still in use.

The photos show all sorts of time and change. Social time, seasonal time, environmental time. There’s decay, cyclicality, and even progress (the Klan watering hole replaced by something more benign).

Tomorrow I may write about one or a couple of the pieces in a portraiture contest at the museum. We'll see.

More yearend recapping

I did a year-end piece for the Scene and found myself gravitating towards things that I didn’t actually review in the paper. The piece in this week’s paper ended up with a mix of stuff I did and did not review, but at one point I set myself up to see what I would come up with if I did 10 items that I hadn’t reviewed. Here’s the other five that didn’t make it into the article this week.

• Clear Box Project, Ruby Green. For a fundraising auction, the gallery got a really impressive group of local and out of town artists to contribute pieces, all of which somehow used a clear acrylic box. In some cases it was just a case for a work, but a lot of the pieces were pretty interesting. A bunch used it as the setting for a diorama, which worked great for say Emily Holt, who is going for something like that in many of her pieces all the time. Andrew Kaufman used the box in a completely integrated way for a quasi-electrical apparatus—it seems a natural material for him. Terry Glispin might have gone the furthest, embedding the box in a bunch of colored foam. showed what could be done in and with a clear acrylic box. For many, the format revealed new dimensions of their work. I hope they do this auction again next year. It’s the kind of thing that could catch on if they can give it some time to build.
• Valerie Lueth and Paul Roden, TAG. Two printmakers (husband and wife) new to town and to TAG—Lueth makes finely detailed, vaguely obsessive etchings and Roden does accomplished woodcuts with political themes.
• Hamlett Dobbins, Frist. I reviewed some of Hamlett’s work at Zeitgeist, although I don’t think I’m doing justice to his stuff. He also had an exhibit this Spring in the Frist project gallery (check the Early Morning series here). The best thing about that is that they were running their show of African art from Seattle at the same time, and the patterns and some of the colors in Dobbins’ paintings have a surprising resemblance to the geometric forms of African textiles like some of those in the exhibit. The coding of Ashanti cloth tells you something about Hamlett’s patterns, which usually have associations with people but the average viewer can’t really make it out – like a non-Ashanti viewer and those patterns in the Kente cloth.
• Wes Sherman, Arts Company. Sherman is an abstract painter, but his method involves letting famous paintings lead him into his compositions. This exhibit set his pieces next to reproductions of the masterworks that inspires them, showing how he picks up colors or general massing and turns them into abstract forms. It was a great reminder of the value of abstraction as a kind of painting essentialism, and of the way a life of viewing seeps into every artist’s vision.
• Cynthia Reynolds, Samantha Callahan, and Rusty Johnson, Dangenart. One of my favorite Dangenart shows included these three artists (although with the permutations of shows this year, they overlapped to different degrees. Reynolds made these exquisite sculptures of packing peanuts cast in metal or glass, set up on high small pedestals, and dramatically lit, taking the disposal stuff meant to protect precious contents and turning it into the precious stuff. Callahan took an old idea – flowers as symbols or tropes on female genitalia, and pushed it further by giving big colorful flowers genital piercings. That addition made the association undeniable and just a little more fleshy and sexual. Johnson’s paintings have crusty surfaces made of odd materials like baking soda that change and even self-destruct over time. Some of the paintings sluff off some of the surface, scattering particles on the ground below.

Susan Alcorn, LaDonna Smith and Misha Feigin tomorrow night

It's been so long since I've posted, who knows if anyone reads this, but I've got a few things I need to post over the next few days. The first is to plug this concert at Ruby Green tomorrow (Thursday) night. Susan is a friend of mine who does amazing things with the pedal steel guitar. I've posted on her previously at length (a long piece, shorter piece, and link to an article she wrote), and Jonathan Marx did a nice piece in the Tennessean about this show.

This show also features LaDonna Smith, who has created a nexus for improvisation in Birmingham and improvises on violin, viola, and voice. Some of her stuff has a strong theatrical element, others stays more in an area of musical abstraction. She's playing with Misha Feigin, a Russian guitar player now based in Louisville.

Last I heard the plan was I was going to play some with Susan. The show will start at 8:30 or 9, at Ruby Green on 5th Avenue.

One Night Drawing show tonight

Kristi Hargrove is doing a show at her studio of work by her drawing students. The work I've seen looks really good, especially a bunch of pieces by Iwonka Waskowski. It's just tonight, Friday night, at the studio on Hawkins, which is a street between 8th and 12th just after you cross I40 heading out of town. Mapquest it. It's not hard to find.

Here's a writeup on the show that didn't make it into the Scene this week:

“FLATLINE”/HARGROVE-YONTZ STUDIOS The meticulous drawing of Kristi Hargrove is one of the delights and wonders of the Nashville art scene, and she also teaches drawing at the Watkins College of Art and Design. This one-night show at her studio displays the work of seven people studying with her, 6 current Watkins students (Jonathan Abarquez, Adam Bennett, Kelly Bonadies, Janet Heilbronn, Myrna Talbot and John Whitten) and one recent graduate, Iwonka Waskowski. Waskowski in particular seems to have come up with very strong stuff—vivid, fleshy compositions that slip subtle bits of representational figures into abstract shapes. As a group, her drawings also show a confident logic in their formal progressions from image to image. The exhibit will be for one night only, 6-9 PM on Fri., Nov. 17, at 911 Hawkins Street. –DAVID MADDOX

Playing out this weekend

Brady Sharp and I (aka Bluff) are playing out two nights in a row this weekend, first at Buzz and Click on Saturday at the End with a bunch of other groups, lots of electronic stuff (hence buzzes and clicks, some beats), and then Sunday a Ruby Green show that features a group from Louisville, Ut Gret. I don’t know their music, but it looks to be an acoustic group that draws on a lot of world music. I do know that the reeds player in the group, Steve Good, is excellent. He played with Sapat at Dino’s a while back. So I trust that this will be good, and not too prissy world-musicy. Taiwan Deth is playing this show too.

Here’s the Buzz and Click lineup.

3kStatic (from St Petersburg, FL) (computers & electronics)
Circuit Breakers (Chattanooga) (computers & electronics)
Anemone (Murfreesboro) (computers & electronics)
aTHeNa BLue (electronic keyboards)
The Potato Battery Experiment (sax, potato battery & more). Deanna Varragona—very interesting stuff.
Taiwan Deth (guitar, sax and electronics)
Bluff Duo (winds & prepared guitar)
Let's Say Baltimore (drums, bass, guitars & electronics)
Matt Hamilton (guitar & effects)
Logickal (computers and electronics)

Buzz and Click is at the End, 8 on Saturday. Ruby Green show is Sunday at 9

Erin Anfinson Writ Large

Erin Anfinson is having her moment in the Nashville Airport sun, with a couple of big landscape paintings overlooking the Southwest Airlines checkin area. Erin is known for her camouflage paintings, where she takes a scene and reduces it to patches of tones within one color group, which has the effect of making the underlying image hard to pick out. Your eye switches between that kind of translating activity and taking the shapes in as abstractions. She has starting breaking away from this, with more color range in the camouflage paintings (which tends to make them read a little more directly) and another series that’s completely different (little scenes in encaustic, part of it masked by one or several big circles in single color of thick paint). The paintings at the airport are more along the lines of the camy stuff, scenes of birds flying up from what seem like late Fall or winter fields. The colors are reduced to blue, brown, white, and grey, and the shapes reduced to essences. It sure looks like Iowa (she grew up there).

Boiling the birds down to these irregular pointy shapes makes it possible to imagine them as a bunch of leaves blowing around – which gives the shapes, whether you think of them as birds or something else, the sense of being nearly weightless and vulnerable to the elements, or susceptible to recording the slightest disruptions in the invisible world. It reminds me of one of Paul Chan’s videos (I don’t have the name with me, but it was in the PS1 New York region show), where birds are displaced by trash in a desolate environment. Anfinson’s paintings don’t have the apocalyptic overtones of Chan’s piece, but I think she gets in a hint of the same chaotic forces.

This reductive technique of hers continues to make for subtle and tricky viewing effects. And it works well at large scale, seen from a distance and up close. I wouldn’t necessarily have assumed that would be the case.

Review #2: NSO and Anu Tali Play Sibelius, Tower, Mozart

I finally made it to the Schermerhorn Hall last Saturday, to hear Anu Tali conduct the orchestra in Sibelius' Symphony #2, Mozart's Violin Concerto #5, and a Joan Tower piece ("Chamber Dance"). To get one blinding insight out of the way right off—the hall sounds very nice. You have the sensation of being in a small room with the group. The soft sounds were very impressive. Soovin Kim was able to tease out the notes in his cadenzas with what seemed like the slightest pressure on the bow and you were right with him.

I was interested in this program because of the Estonian conductor doing a Sibelius Symphony. I’ve never paid much attention to Sibelius, so I figured I would learn something. I mainly learned that there’s probably a reason for not knowing his work too well. It struck me as sappy stuff given over to grand gestures. Borodin came to mind.

The best music was the second movement, which started with a pizzicato bass line that was handed over to the cellos and provided the basis for a bassoon duet. All these delicious low sounds. Several sections featured a trio oboe, flute and clarinet with the clarinet in the low range, and the oboe in the lead voice but still low enough to be very reedy. The low sounds throughout the symphony were the best thing about the Sibelius. The orchestra sounded great making these sounds—enhanced by the hall, no doubt.

The Mozart was fine, Kim played loosely and languidly. Tower’s music does not excite me very much, but it is admirable in its balance. This piece, a dance-inspired work written recently for the conductor-less Orpheus chamber orchestra, has a rondo form that shifts between solo and duet passages and the ensemble. In many cases one instrument started as a solo and then was joined by another instrument—flute and then clarinet, oboe and then viola, 1st violin then second. The combinations had a sense of logic without being overly predictable. And the simple counterpoint in these passages was the nicest writing.

Now that the NSO is in the new hall, you have to ask how good they are and in what ways would they would want to improve. It’s unreasonable to think that another Chicago or Philadelphia has been hiding all these years under the TPAC acoustics, and unreasonable to think the group can just wake up and by will play at the highest international level. I heard and saw two things that made me think about the future, especially once a music director comes on full time (not sure how much of this orchestra-building Slatkin has signed on to do). The winds were generally very strong, although there seemed to be uncertainty in the horns in a few places. Also, while the hall sounds great soft, it never felt like we were hearing it played loud, and there were certainly passages in the Sibelius intended to have a heavy majesty. One possible way the sound got blunted looked to be in the violins, where the bows did not move with preternatural uniformity. You would see two players on the same stand with their hands moving in opposite directions at points—I suppose it’s possible I was looking at divisi sections, and I don’t know enough about string playing to know if it would be typical to divide the parts on each stand. There was also a visible delay in bow action from the front of the section to the back in places like the end of notes.

Review #1: Purbayan Chatterjee and Subhankar Banerjee

I guess it served as Nashville’s consolation prize for having the Ravi Shankar concert cancelled, but Purbayan Chatterjee’s concert, with Subhankar Banerjee on tablas, could not have been better. A thoroughly satisfying and thorough performance.

Chatterjee seems very interested in contrasts. In the alap on his first piece, the evening raga Malgunji, there were many sections where he would strike a note followed by the same note with a different attack and whatever else was required to generate different combinations of harmonics to surround the pitch. These sections seemed much more concerned with the combination of timbral contrasts than in melody. In the faster sections, he and Banerjee took real delight in breaking off very vigorous, fast passages and joining together to parse out a delicate 3-note figure: the contrast between loud and soft, fast and slow, takes great technical mastery.

The ascendancy of sounds over notes came out also in the climaxes of sections, the most intense of which ended with a nearly dissonant, metallic crunch.

When Chatterjee came on stage, one noticed his very stylish glasses. He’s a young man, only 29, and although he plays this very traditional music, and seemed well-attuned to the religious dynamics of performance, one cannot believe that a young Indian engaged in a cultural field in this day and age would not be completely plugged into the breadth of global culture. You wondered what was on his iPod. And it was easy to see a linkage between his use of sounds and practices in organization of sound found in sophisticated popular music.

You Are Being Watched

The weekend before last I rushed over to the Arcade to catch the tail end of the openings on Saturday night. Just I was leaving Ali Bellos stopped me and in addition to catching up a little, she gave me a sheet for ARTGO. Ali is always coming up with ideas for game art/art games, most of which never quite seem to crystallize into a full-fledged game with rules, which is part of the charm of it, watching the pieces start to form but maybe never get there. When she was in the book show in the Library she had everyone write down questions on a piece of paper which she collected. I think that was it. Something was going to happen to them, she never said quite what, I think she explicitly said she didn’t know for sure and then I never heard about it. But that was fine.

Anyway, back to ARTGO. A combination of Bingo and a scavenger hunt. Each square contains a drawing of something you might see at an opening. You get five across, up and down or diagonal, you win. I don’t know what. Doesn’t matter. And pretty much everyone wins. The squares are great: plexiglass, “that 70s haircut,” tetanus risk (a nail) cheese tray, special glasses, DIY clothing, art show friend (with a broken heart locket saying “Best Friend”), inappropriate touching (hand with circle and diagonal crossing line), The Man, country club pinky drink (drawing of beer bottle, pinky extended). It had a trenchant quality you have to love. And it made me self-conscious. How many of the items applied to me? At any rate, it left me with the thought that people are watching – either self-awareness, paranoia, or self-importance. Not sure how you figure out which.

Elkins Lecture at Lipscomb

James Elkins, professor at the School of the Art Institute and author of a bunch of books, spoke at David Lipscomb this Monday. First of all that’s kind of a remarkable sentence. You just don’t expect to hear about someone like that speaking at Lipscomb. Vanderbilt maybe. This is part of a new lecture series in the visual arts at Lipscomb. Not sure if the rest of the people are as prominent as Elkins.

I thought Elkins might talk about religion and art, since that’s the topic of one of his books and a subject of obvious relevance to such a deeply church-affiliated institution. Maybe that would have been too obvious. Or people didn’t want to go there. Or that’s not the lecture he’s doing these days. What he did talk about was the status of visual practices within the entire range of intellectual disciplines in the university (you can find the basic ideas by going to Elkins’ website , scroll down to “Visual Practices Across the University” and check out the section “Table of content and introduction”). To grossly oversimplify, when you really look at how visual material is used as a tool for intellectual discovery and explanation of the world, and when you strip away spurious uses of visual information, visual practices have the most importance in disciplines outside the humanities, like medical research or the physical sciences. It’s in those disciplines that the details of visual information matter, such as the specific features of an image on a mammogram will that guide diagnosis of structures in the breast, or modeling of chemical processes. Much of the humanities doesn’t have any great use for visual information, and Elkins even argued that art history does not concern itself particularly with visual detail.

The prevalence of visual practices in realms outside the humanities is a valid observation, but comes as no surprise to the countless people who have those beautiful Edward Tufte volumes on visual information on their shelves. Like every budget analyst I work with. Which just confirms Elkins’ point.

One of his claims struck me as odd. He contrasted the poverty of visual practices he found with the belief that our society is one of the most visual cultures ever. We see lots of images, etc. But what about the traditional claim that the West is logocentric? Hasn’t pure sensory input always taken a back seat to information processed through words? Nowhere more so than the university. It’s no surprise that the visual is an afterthought in an academic culture where everything is oriented towards the production of words. And it is most true of the humanities, where all there is are articles and books.

The best thing about the talk was that he had the most beautiful presentation slides ever. The text was whitish grey on a dark, not-quite-black background that looked smoky, like the captions on a silent movie, or even more so like a Guy Maddin movie. He uses a clean and elegant, kinda elongated font, and there were never many words on the screen, everything perfectly boiled down to the essential cues.

Sad Day at Tower

So they’re liquidating liquidating Tower Records finally. Other than boutiques, used stores, and maybe mall stores, the record store is an outmoded economic form. Tower has seemed to be on its last legs for a long time. Whenever I went to the Opry location, there were far too few people on the floor for it to have any chance. I’ll buy a bunch of stuff over the next 9 weeks – I made my first trip today, but the discounts are only 10%. I’m betting a lot of the stuff I want no one else will want. Which is the whole problem, isn’t it.

It occurred to me that these next few weeks are going to be my last time shopping for classical music in Nashville. For rock and pop, and a bit for jazz, there’s Grimey’s, but they don’t really try to carry classical music. I wouldn’t if I were them. Sure I can get stuff on the internet, but there won’t be any bins of classical recordings worth running through. The classical section at Borders always seems crummy to me. I travel, so I can hit the classical music store in Berkeley, or Melody Records or Olsson's in DC (not sure how stable Olsson’s is). But it’s hard not to see the demise of Tower as a narrowing of classical music, with harder access when you leave major cities and university enclaves. Sure, the Nashville Symphony has opened a new hall, and it sounds like they are getting great houses. But they only need to sell 1,870 tickets to fill the hall. They don’t really need a broad audience, but a loyal audience that can afford it.

Tower is/was just a store, but its demise feels like a diminishment of cultural life.

New Herzog film this Sunday at Belcourt

The Belcourt is doing a one-night screening of Werner Herzog's new film, The Wild Blue Yonder, this Sunday at 7:00. It's in conjunction with the new video show opening at Cheekwood, a group of pieces dealing with the idea of utopia curated by Greg Pond. The Herzog is a sci-fi film! I'm guessing or hoping it will have that dreamy 70s quality of something like The Man Who Fell To Earth, which for some reason has been on my mind lately. Here's the details from the Belcourt website.

Jon Langford at TAG

Got a press release from TAG that Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers, etc.) is doing a one-night thing at the gallery from 6-8 this Thursday. A one-person media empire, apparently he's got some new paintings to show, a book of art work and "remarks on his life in music" for sale, and he's going to play some songs.

Banksy in Disneyland

Not that this dude needs any more publicity (NPR had a long piece on him this week), but this is priceless. Thanks to Scott Marshall for sending this link.

If you're in Nashville this weekend

Downtown Pres is doing another DIG art show, with an opening 7-9 Saturday night. That's this Saturday, the 16th. (DPC is at the corner of 5^th and Church, and you will enter on the 5^th Avenue side Saturday.) Based on the people involved, it should be very good. This includes current and former users of the church’s studio space like Richard Feaster, Todd Greene, and Beth Gilmore, and some friends. Heather Thompson has a piece, and the piece she did for DPC show last Spring was one of the most successful things I’ve ever encountered that integrates religious experience and contemporary aesthetics. Erika Johnson is also in the show, and I always look forward to seeing her new work—she progresses and grows before your eyes, and is engaged with important issues and experience. Rocky Horton from the Lipscomb art faculty also has a piece, and it’s good to see a connection developing between the art program there and DPC. He participated in forum at last Spring’s show.

The best thing about the show is the title, "Found Objects in Ordinary Time." Ordinary Time is the term that describes the time on the church calendar between Pentecost (the last event in the Easter season) and Adevent, when there are no major holidays in the Christian year. It's like the workplace between New Year's or MLK day and Memorial Day when most places don't have a lot of days off. You chug along, gettting work done until the summer season starts. In the church, this period between the major holidays is when you just go to church, work through the lectionary, sing hymns not associated with particular holidays. Just live. In honor of that kind of ordinariness, Beth, Tom, Geoff and the others asked for works that incorporate found objects, everyday stuff for ordinary days that are as rich as the days endowed with special pomp and ceremony.

I Wish I'd Written It

This post brings together two people I admire very much: Amy Pleasant, an artist from Birmingham, and Frederic Koeppel, who reviews art for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Amy has shown in Nashville several times and I’ve enjoyed looking at her work and writing about it. Currently she’s got a show at Rhodes College, and Frederic did a tremendous review of the show. You expect the arts writing in daily newspapers to be non-existent or severely limited in its critical dimension. That’s not true with him. This review is a good example, economical, descriptive, perceptive, and touching.

If you are in New York next weekend

Philip Gayle is playing a show at the Downtown Music Gallery on Sunday Sept 17 at 6:00. He hasn't played out much lately as far as I know. I guess you could say this performance is "in support" of his CD The Mommy Row, but that was done in the studio with layers of overdubbing. This will be him and some guitars and waterphone, or something like that. Although there's obvious differences between this sort of live deal and what he can assemble in the studio, it's definitely the same voice.

The thing about Phil, well there's many things about Phil, but about his music is that he has a remarkable ability to extrapolate a universe of music from any single sound. One noise, generated however (with him the sources are always acoustic as are most of the manipulations), immediately suggests more and more sounds to him, and quickly they explode into polyphony and counterpoint. It doesn't matter what he uses to make the sound, although the fact is he has great guitar technique, which means that some of the options open to him involve things like being able to pick notes on a stringed instrument. And his technique never, ever devolves into something hackneyed.

New Yorker cover

Check out the cover of the new issue of the New Yorker. All white, except for a little drawing of a man holding a long poll. Oh yeah. Philippe Petit. You fill in the rest of the scene that's not there.

This is on the magazine's outer cover. You turn the page and the tightrope walker is overlaid on a painting of the WTC site today, still suspended in mid-air. But the second picture is redundant. The one on the outside captures the loss -- people and buildings, but also the world that produced the WTC. The reference to Philippe Petit, who made his walk in 1974, reminds you that the WTC was a phenomenon of the 70s, and Sept 2001 maybe was the final chapter in a process through which that world was obliterated. Even though NY was falling apart in the 70s, the city still had its character as a place where everyone mixed it up. It's a point you get in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam too, nostalgia for what by all rights we should think of as good riddance. But it was a time when there seemed to be a lot more room in the culture for pleasure, for change, and for goofy stuff like Petit's stunt.

The other thing about the picture is that the figure could be falling through air.

It's a brilliant illustration, distills all this loss to one image.

You can see the cover in a flash box on the New Yorker main site, next to the box you click to subscribe.

A Wendell Berry poem

Been browsing around in some Wendell Berry poems, from A Timbered Choir, poems which arise from his practice of dedicating his Sunday mornings to walking meditation. Found this short one that struck me. I won’t grind on, but the idea of locating the loss of the great forests and grasslands inside our own bodies is powerful to me.

It is in the destruction of the world
in our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forest, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.

1988, II
A Timbered Choir, p. 98
(Counterpoint: NY, 1998)

It’s probably illegal to post this, but maybe these credits will satisfy. Oh yeah, here’s the Amazon page for the book. Maybe that will fulfill my obligation.

Leonard Slatkin in Nashville

So the Nashville Symphony is opening its new hall, which really should mark a new era for the orchestra. The group will sound better in this building. They’ll be able to hear themselves better, and presumably any weaknesses will be audible. And it may bring in larger audiences. The LA effect.
The next step is to fill the music director’s slot, a process that takes a long time in symphonies. Kenneth Schermerhorn died in April 2005, leaving the orchestra without a leader for the next season. The search continues this year, but the symphony just announced that they have signed up Leonard Slatkin as “musical adviser” for 3 years. According to Jonathan Marx’s article on it, he’s going to help with the director search and with some of the key music director duties: “programming future seasons, hiring musicians and selecting guest artists and conductors.”
Getting Slatkin involved with Nashville is a coup. They hired him for a recording, then the opening gala, and then got the idea for this extended relationship. Slatkin has a reputation for having built up St. Louis and continuing to improve the reputation of the National Symphony (that was my orchestra as a kid, and in the pre-Rostropovich days it was definitely in a tier below groups to the north).
My first thought is they are trying to pull a Gordon Gee here. Gee had only been at Brown a year or so when the people at Vanderbilt contacted him for advice. Apparently they got to talking and decided he was the man for the Vandy job, offered him a lot of money and he got here in 2000. Is the Symphony trying the same thing? Sidle up to Leonard Slatkin to ask for advice and then try to convince him Nashville is the place he needs to go next.
This seems like it would be a harder sale than getting Gee to leave Brown for Vanderbilt. Brown and Vanderbilt are much more comparable in reputation than the 2 NSOs. There are fewer orchestras and thus a more well-defined hierarchy. So I imagine it would take more work to convince Slatkin to come here permanently. Maybe after he has “assisted” in hiring some musicians and seen what the group sounds like in the new hall, he’ll see big enough possibilities here.
Or they’ll do what they say they’re doing and hire someone who's making what seems more like a parallel move or a clear step up.

Update, Sept. 4: The New York Times weighs in about Nashville's hall. The tone is a little more skeptical. The Times arts pages are funny. They'll tease kind of provocative in their titles and then turn much softer and accomodating in the body. The title on this articles makes it sound like the piece says these halls are wasteful boondoogles, but it doesn't quite go there.