Category: music

“That’s what I conclude from today’s New York Times story about declining audiences for late-night talk shows such as The Tonight Show and The Late Show.“

In 2007, Joseph Bertolozzi went to a bridge over the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie and “hammered on I-beams and guardrails, whacked thick cables, sent steel pellets down the inside of a bridge tower and recorded the sounds … [and] turned them into a composition, Bridge Music..” He has now asked the city of Paris for permission to do a similar project with the Eiffel Tower for the structure’s 125th anniversary in 2014 – and the city is seriously considering it.

Near the end of a review of a Verdi Macbeth in Brussels, Le Monde critic Renaud Machart “drops an unexpected and unrelated bomb” – that Pierre Boulez is composing an operatic adaptation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, to premiere at La Scala in 2015.

At the American Guild of Organists’ Washington convention, “they can peruse the latest offerings from music publishers” and “examine brochures from organ builders from Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Canada and the United States.” They can play local organs, too — though the Kennedy Center organ’s problems are “evidently so pronounced that the city’s organists have simply given up on it.”

“For the second time in a month, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra has canceled a concert due to slow ticket sales. But June’s cancellation was for a ‘community concert’ featuring Jubilant Sykes – an astounding singer, but not exactly a household name. And it came with two weeks’ warning. But today’s announcement comes but one day before a scheduled show at the Morton H. Meyerson. And Smokey Robinson’s a legend.”

“‘Because of the impossibility of maintaining a serene and constructive work relationship, Maestro Jean-Christophe Spinosi, in agreement with La Scala management, has decided to abandon the production,’ the opera house said in a statement.”

“The work took seven years to develop, runs three hours long, includes the collaboration of 21 writers and 11 composers, is performed by 21 actors and nine musicians,” and transports spectators “from scene to scene and set to set in a train of carts pulled by an electric golf cart. Those with the lower-priced tickets follow the trains on foot while dragging along their folding chairs.”

“After more than four decades serving in various production and administrative capacities at Lyric Opera of Chicago, [William] Mason has announced he will step down as the company’s general director at the end of the 2011-12 season.”

“Classical music pulls at the heartstrings of people in a vegetative state as well as those of healthy listeners. If you play music to vegetative patients, their heart rate changes in the same way as that of healthy controls, suggesting that music can affect the neural systems of emotion even when conscious thought is impossible.”

“The N.C. Symphony, regarded as among the top 50 orchestras in the country, remains in the red. But the amount it owes the bank has been reduced to $2.8 million as of June 30, the end of the fiscal year, [the symphony’s president and CEO] said. That compares to $3.8 million a year ago.”