Dear Editor,
Before coming to the USA I lived under Fascism, Nazism and Communism. I was confident I would never see again the methods of those totalitarian regimes in imposing their will against the wishes and desires of the population.
I was mistaken.
In the description of the NHMF annual meeting of November 18, Michael Kitch of the Laconia Daily Sun, wrote: “In a bloodless coup worthy of any tropical junta, the Board of the NHMF, yesterday stripped the incorporators of their role in the governance of the non-profit corporation and gathered all authority into its own hands”.
Robert Levine head of musician’s union local of Milwaukee colorfully comments on the situation: “The only adequate word in the English language to describe the current situation is the one that begins with “clusterf” and ends with “ck.”
In view of the self-proclaimed ignorance in music by Mr. McLear, his attempt at humor during the meeting, wishing to be somewhere else, was quite out of place. He should have been somewhere else; having been on the board for eleven consecutive years, contrary to the February 2004 bylaws and the non-ratified amendments of November 2008 and November 2009. The length of his tenure on the board can only be explained by self-serving reasons, connected more with Real Estate than music. It is obvious that respecting the bylaws is not one of his priorities.
Terry Thomason of Meredith stated that: “The more I heard from the board, the less I believed what I was hearing. The enemy is your constituency. You have shut off all parliamentary process and rewritten the rules, shutting down all input from those who pay the bills and fill the seats”.
The NHMF has been stolen from its faithful supporters by its mendacious and lugubrious president (see the piece on music education and the Three R programs on the Laconia Citizen of November 17), the festival director, a self-contradicting opportunistic charlatan (“From time to time ……I encounter a problem that seems to be growing and expanding like a bad weed. A board member, usually one person, trying to take over the programming of a professional symphony orchestra. ……..and it often results in a mess”) and “The Bald Soprano”.
Ionesco had several possible endings in mind, for his theatre of the absurd play, one, in which the performance was closed down by “the Superintendent of Police and his men, who open fire at the rebellious audience”.
In this year theatre of the absurd version of the NHMF annual meeting, the management came very close to implementing the version that Ionesco had discarded as too problematic.
Maybe it is already too late; is the paying public accepting this outrage in silence?
Giovanni Lanza
Thornton, NH