Rock, who was born Robert Ritchie and grew up in Macomb County, Mich., is volunteering his services. So are Detroit Symphony Music Director Leonard Slatkin and orchestra members. Proceeds will help pay symphony musicians for community outreach and education efforts.

“As a musician, and of course a Detroiter, I am proud to be supporting this longstanding cultural institution,” Rock has said of his show with the orchestra.

One night — even one that rocks and rolls in big money — doesn’t erase bigger, long-term woes for the internationally recognized orchestra. Musicians agreed to major concessions during the six-month strike that ended in April of last year, but that’s only slowed the orchestra’s $2.5 million-to-$3 million annual drain of a roughly $14 million endowment that it draws from to survive. And officials have been mired in a so-far unsuccessful effort to restructure a $54 million bank loan on a real estate deal for the Max M. Fisher Music Center.

The lingering debt came before the labor strife but it’s “certainly become more acute after the strike and we returned to concerts,” said Paul Hogle, the orchestra’s executive vice president. Hogle said as long as the money is owed, the orchestra cannot increase its endowment.

Still, in the short-term, “we’re performing, broadcasting, we’re being an orchestra,” he said.

“We still have an enormous amount of work to do,” Hogle said. “But the business of performing and attracting talent here is in fact returning and vibrant.”

He cited the hiring of seven musicians, including incoming concertmaster Yoonshin Song. The orchestra announced this week that the 30-year-old member of the Saint Paul Chamber Ensemble would permanently replace Emmanuelle Boisvert, who left after the strike to become associate concertmaster with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

Several of the recent departures can be traced to the contentious walkout or settlement that left musicians with a roughly 25 percent cut to their salaries. Hogle said the hiring process is restoring the faith across the organization.

“As a result of the auditions we’ve already had this year, it certainly suggests that Detroit and the music-making legacy here continues to be attractive for candidates,” he said. “That bodes very well for our future.”

Hogle said he’s also excited that more than 100,000 people have tuned in to the orchestra’s webcasts this past season. Much closer to home, the orchestra has inaugurated concerts in a half-dozen Detroit-area neighborhoods — drawing a suburban audience largely composed of audience members who haven’t attended a performance in Detroit.

Drew McManus, a Chicago-based orchestra management consultant, said he’s glad to see some good signs after so much strife, but he lacks enough information to conclude the Detroit orchestra is succeeding in its turnaround plan.

“Is the organization going to be able to stabilize and look at a new growth pattern? All that hasn’t transpired in the year since the (strike) ended,” McManus said.

He said the upcoming concert featuring Rock backed by the orchestra is “a good thing” and could be a successful one-time event. McManus would like to see it inspire a series of rock-flavored shows, using the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra’s successful Rockin’ Orchestra Series as a model.

“It’s far more beneficial for an organization if they can develop that into a series,” he said. “It’s a really smart financial move: It shores up their bottom line and supports the core mission activity.”

Hogle sees the collaboration with Rock as recognition of how far the orchestra has come, and a fitting example of where it can go.

“It’s the perfect culmination of what we will look back on as a very successful year,” he said “A year ago, our stage was silent. And today our hall is regularly full. We have an increase in donations. And, we’re performing with Kid Rock.”

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Detroit now has about 10,800 employees and an overall budget of about $2.5 billion, according to Bing’s office.

Bing’s executive budget proposal also calls for privatizing the city’s bus system and transferring its lighting department and airport to an independent authority. The plan also calls for eliminating departments — including workforce development and health and human services — and creating an authority to run them.

Proposed job cuts are wide-ranging and include the staffs of the mayor and city council, as well as buildings and safety engineering, finance, human resources and recreation.

Detroit has an accumulated budget deficit of $265 million and has $13.2 billion in long-term structural debt. A state-appointed review team determined last month that Detroit was under severe financial stress and recommended the city operate under an agreement with Gov. Rick Snyder’s office.

In doing so, the city avoided a state-appointed emergency manager, who, under state law, could have dismissed Bing and the council members. But the deal requires the city to meet specific financial reporting deadlines and make realistic revenue projects.

Monday’s proposals, which extend across all departments, expand on the legal budget proposal Bing submitted to council members on April 12. The initial $2.5 billion proposal came with a 10 percent pay cut for police and firefighters, a reduction in some city services, consolidations of other departments and concessions from city vendors.

The executive budget proposal includes job cuts to the staffs of the mayor and city council, as well as the following departments: police and fire, buildings and safety, finance, human resources, recreation, district court, water and sewer, transportation and others.

Even with lower revenue projections, the Bing administration has said it expects close to a $100 million surplus in the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Snyder, who spoke Monday morning at a business forum, said state and city officials are “asking for sacrifices,” but at the same time “creating a much better environment where job creation can happen.”

“We need a sense of urgency,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s still enough urgency there. I’m not seeing it across the board yet.”

Richard Mack, a lawyer who represents a coalition of Detroit’s civilian labor unions that hammered out an agreement with the city before the consent agreement, said he’s disappointed to see more proposals focused on privatization.

He has been involved in studies that show workers at private companies are paid as much as three times per hour than city employees make for the same work.

“It doesn’t make any sense why private contracts are seen as the solution — long-term or short-term,” Mack said. “What the city will say is we want to get rid of some of the long-term bids. You don’t do that by putting yourself in a position of dependency on companies that don’t have the city’s best interests at heart.”

What else do the syntactical Scrooges want to cast out with the good cheer in the new year? The list also includes “occupy,” ”ginormous,” ”man cave” and “the new normal.”

In all, a dozen words or phrases made the 37th end-of-the year list. The list started as a publicity ploy by the school’s public relations department on New Year’s Day 1976, and has since generated tens of thousands of nominations.

“Amazing” received more than 1,500 nominations, the most of any on this year’s list. Disdain for the superlative was apparently universal among English speakers, garnering disparaging dispatches from across the United States and even the United Kingdom and Israel.

While it lacked a single pop-culture culprit, such as the proliferating protest movement that occupied the word “occupy” or the collective ooh-ing and aah-ing that accompanied Beyonce’s “baby bump,” nominations to banish “amazing” cite its overuse on reality television and by daytime talk show hosts. Social media also spurred the call to surrender the word’s conversational credentials, notably through a Facebook page called “Overuse of the Word Amazing.”

“The word has been overused to describe things only slightly better than mundane,” Alyce-Mae Alexander of Maitland, Fla., wrote in her nomination. “I blame Martha Stewart because to her, EVERYTHING is amazing!”

University spokesman John Shibley said he and his colleagues were surprised that “amazing” hadn’t already graced the archive of about 900 banished words.

“The simple ones are always the ones that get through the cracks — until this year,” he said.

Other terms circulating for years that have finally raised enough ire to earn a spot on the list include “blowback,” ”man cave,” ”the new normal” and “thank you in advance.” The last one particularly annoys Mike Cloran of Cincinnati, Ohio.

“This is a condescending and challenging way to say, ‘Since I already thanked you, you have to do this,’” Cloran wrote in his submission.

Lake Superior State University, located in Sault St. Marie — the last stop before Michigan’s northernmost border-crossing with Canada — has seen its list survive despite many banished words stubbornly clinging to the language. For evidence, look no further than last year’s “fail,” ”viral” and “a-ha moment.” And then there is, well, blowback from critics who can’t take a little tongue-in-cheek critique.

Shibley said some people have missed the point over the years and complained that the list is an effort to control the language. But most seem to receive it in good cheer, rather than with jeers.

“A lot of people can take this wrong. We don’t mean any malice when we publish it,” Shibley said. “If it makes you angry, it gets you thinking about language. If it gets you laughing, it gets you thinking about language. It’s done its job — to get you to think about how you express yourself.”

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Online:

Lake Superior State University’s banished words:

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Jeff Karoub can be reached at