Category: music

“We have a huge audience, built up over years. But, from this last season, we have begun to build a new audience, combining of course with the traditional one.”

Management told the Musicians’ Union that the company could make the orchestra part-time, change it to a freelance band, or eliminate it and hire Scotland’s existing orchestras as pit bands.

“The San Francisco Opera is far from the only opera company that has tried to build its audience with free outdoor simulcasts of performances. But it may be the only one that ekes out a small profit from them.”

“A £50,000 award given to the most innovative idea for a new musical work was tonight given to an arts practice that recycles everyday noise whether it is the repetitive drone of motorway traffic or the tumbling rapids of a weir.”

“Mostly the pieces on this album resulted not from ‘composition’ in the classical sense, but from improvisation. The improvisations are not attempts to end up with a song, but rather with a landscape, a feeling of a place and perhaps the suggestion of an event … there is no singer, no narrator, no guide as to what you ought to be feeling.”

As recently as March, symphony leaders were projecting a possible deficit as high as $1.5million for the year ended Aug. 31. “This is a remarkable turnaround in a short amount of time.”

“The internet giant is circulating a proposal among major labels for an a la carte download store and a subscription-model, cloud-based storage locker, with the company supplying a web-based music player and a mobile application for playback of tracks.”

Described by its patron as a “mini-MacArthur,” the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass “will give $50,000 annually to ‘an individual or group for outstanding accomplishment in the field of five-string banjo or bluegrass music’.” The jury, which included (along with others) banjo legends Earl Scruggs and Béla Fleck, gave the inaugural prize to Norm Pikelny of the Punch Brothers.”

Calvin College, a Protestant school in western Michigan, has cancelled a concert by Canadian indie-rockers The New Pornographers following weeks of complaints by some in the community about the band’s name. (Previous appearances by the Barenaked Ladies and the Crooked Saints seem not to have caused any controversy.)

“When Jacques Lacombe opened his first season as music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at a sold-out gala event tonight, President and CEO André Gremillet announced that the orchestra had raised $25 million toward a $32 million fundraising campaign begun quietly 20 months ago.”