Category: music

“Madeleine Careau, the orchestra’s chief executive, said the total number of concerts in 2009-2010, including those of a tour not yet announced, would be only two to four fewer than the tally this season. Musicians remain contracted for 46 weeks and no administration staffers have been laid off.”

“These legal challenges involve lawsuits, complaints to federal agencies, charges of wrongful termination, allegations of retaliation, and the charge that the symphony’s top, veteran players are being forced to take demotions or leave the symphony so they can be replaced with younger, more compliant players.”

“Working closely with educators, [Yo-Yo Ma’s] Silk Road Project plans to craft an interdisciplinary curriculum based on the study of the eponymous ancient East-West trade route where ideas, cultures and goods freely mingled. The American Museum of Natural History and the Manhattan School of Music will also participate in the program.”

“Music was the best medicine for four stroke victims whose cognitive impairments lessened while listening to songs they loved. The music stimulated neurological pleasure centers adjacent to damaged brain regions, apparently producing a therapeutic crossover effect.” (Kenny Rogers worked best, it seems.)

Choir directors everywhere bemoan the perennial shortage of higher male voices. This week, the Jubilate Chamber Choir, a 24-voice group that’s now down to its last two tenors, resorted to having four members stand at the foot of Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge at rush hour holding up signs in an attempt to locate new members of the elusive species.

“Following more than a year of negotiations and a strike that’s lasted nearly six months, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra has issued musicians a ‘last, best and final offer.'” The contract includes fewer guaranteed performances, and the union “argues that musicians should not have to agree to fewer services without full knowledge of the orchestra’s finances.”

“Desperate for cash, Orlando Opera may not be able to produce operas after the current season if a new $500,000 fundraising campaign fails. The 51-year-old group… is reeling from a huge deficit that has forced it to deplete the organization’s once-healthy endowment.”

“In one of its best box office results in recent years Opera Australia has posted an operating surplus of $848,000 [Aus] for 2008, a year also marked by the death in November of its music director, Richard Hickox.”

“Powerful grid computing has revived a stringed musical instrument that was last played in ancient Greece, Italian researchers announced at a recent conference in Catania, Sicily. Called an epigonion after the 6th century B.C. musician Epigonus of Ambracia, the instrument was somewhat similar to a modern harp.”

“If you’ve used an elevator in the Civic Opera Building in recent weeks, you may have noticed something different. The difference is operatic music. … The Financial District landmark, which opened in 1929, could in fact be the only building in the nation that pipes condensed versions of grand opera into its elevators, although I doubt anyone has made a systematic study of the matter.”