Category: music

The drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey has a lovely phrase to describe the practice of improvisation: “the adornment of time.” – New York Review of Books

It’s not just a matter of slangy terms like “happy dust” (German and Spanish have their own words for cocaine). Finding equivalents for the contractions and non-standard grammar in the libretto’s “Negro dialect” (as the Gershwins and Heyward called it) is challenging in itself, let alone when you only have 72 characters per screen. Here’s how the translators did it. – The New York Times

The page turner disturbs our illusion of musical command, threatening to shatter the audience’s suspension of artistic disbelief, where we disaggregate the magic of the sounds we experience from their more mundane physical and material realities: works that exist in published scores with broken spines and tweaked pages. – Van

Indeed, it has about one year to make itself sustainable: the musicians’ new contract expires next September, and the $1.6 million donated to cover the players’ pay while the orchestra is dark next summer was a one-time gift. But there may be some ways the orchestra can increase earned income as well as donations. – The Baltimore Sun

As social beings, we are hard-wired to interpret breaks in the flow of human communication. We recognize the pregnant pause, the stunned silence, the expectant hush. A one-beat delay on an answer can reveal hesitation or hurt, or play us for laughs. A closer listen shows musical silence to be just as eloquent. – The New York Times

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim looks at the uses of well-placed pauses for the purposes of acoustical clarity, rhetoric, drama, surprise, and even humor, traveling from chanting monks and Monteverdi through Haydn and Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler and Berg, to (of course) John Cage. – The New York Times

Mark Swed: “He’s been an unstoppable powerhouse, and, in the end, we may very well have to conclude that he’s human, and that maybe he couldn’t have done all the great things he did without also having done what he shouldn’t have, and hurting people along the way. In Domingo’s case, being an unstoppable powerhouse may not allow much time or room for self-reflection.” – Los Angeles Times

“Recent accusations that have been made against me in the press have created an atmosphere in which my ability to serve this company that I so love has been compromised,” he wrote in a statement provided to The Times. “While I will continue to work to clear my name, I have decided that it is in the best interests of L.A. Opera for me to resign as its general director and withdraw from my future scheduled performances at this time.” – Los Angeles Times

In case you are unaware, video games and video game music have come a long way from the 8-bit MIDI sound effects of Donkey Kong.  It’s a musical realm that has produced its own roster of superstar composers beginning in the 1980s with synthesizer “techno” scores created for games like The Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage by Yuzo Koshiro; Koji Kondo’s accompaniment for Super Mario Brothers; and Nobuo Uematsu’s influential scores for the highly successful Final Fantasy series. To the point that Uematsu has gained the title of “the Beethoven of video games music.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

Anne Midgette: “No figure in classical music is more iconic than the conductor, or more misunderstood. … No job in music is harder to quantify, and no job is, when it’s done well, more important. So here’s a brief look at the function of the conductor.” – The Washington Post