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Berkeley-raised conductor J. Karla Lemon, who conducted a host of local and national new music ensembles and orchestras between teaching gigs at Stanford University and other institutions, died peacefully at her Oakland home on October 15.

On Nov. 6, 2002, a conductor named Osmo Vänskä made his first appearance with the San Francisco Symphony. At that time, few Bay Area music lovers had heard of the Finnish maestro, who had just been named music director-designate of the Minnesota Orchestra. But his San Francisco debut made a big impression. Conducting Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No.

It was an accident.

I remember the day my daughter Sofia came home from the nursery school she attended and told me that her teacher played a guitar during song time.“I want to play guitar,” she said. She was 4. I didn’t listen.

All kinds of instrumental combinations occur in classical music, though chamber music is by far the most diverse, in terms of instrumentation and variety. If you’ve shunned this area, you’re missing out on much of the world’s greatest music, since many composers have poured their finest concepts into chamber music, especially the string quartet.

The USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program presented a first-of-its-kind virtual National Summit on Arts Journalism last Friday, October 2, 2009 at the Annenberg Auditorium on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles.

“We feel that a performance of an opera shown in movie theaters,” said Giovanni Cozzi, managing partner of Emerging Pictures, a distributor of opera movies from Europe, “is a new art form.” And it is.

Last November, as the economy came crashing down, San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley stepped onstage before a matinee performance of La bohème and told the audience how the company was coping with the money crunch.