The diva posted a photo of herself in her dressing room at the Mariinsky, all done up as Verdi’s enslaved Ethiopian princess, and one commenter wrote, “Beautiful singing! But is the blackface really necessary?” Netrebko replied, “Black Face and Black Body for Ethiopien [sic] princess, for Verdi[‘s] greatest opera! YES!” And, of course, all hell broke loose. (It didn’t help when Netrebko called her critics “low class jerks.”) Olivia Giovetti considers why, in the opera world, there still has to be an argument over blackface. – Van
Category: music
A Choir For The Homeless Changes Lives In Rio De Janeiro
Streetwise Opera, the British company for people struggling with homelessness, founded the choir Uma Só Voz/With One Voice for the 2016 Olympics, and the city has kept it going. Two AFP reporters talk with members of the choir about what singing with the group has done for their lives. – Yahoo! (AFP)
Rise Of The Fake Festivals
Over the past five years, ticket sales for Glastonbudget, Tribfest and The Big Fake Festival have seen a healthy increase, according to The Entertainment Agents’ Association, and there are now more than 30 outdoor music festivals in the UK showcasing tribute acts, such as Coldplace, Antarctic Monkeys, Guns2Roses, Stereotonics and Blondied. – BBC
Should Orchestras Play The “Best” Music? So Who Decides?
“A common argument is that art should be a strict meritocracy, i.e., that the best music should be programmed regardless of who the composer is. But then, who determines what is of artistic quality, really? So goes one of the more philosophically heated debates in the classical music world at the moment.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Big Mood Machine: How Spotify Gathers And Sells Its Customers’ Emotional Profiles
“Spotify is currently running a campaign centered on moods [and its mood playlists] — the company’s Twitter tagline is currently ‘Music for every mood’ — complete with its own influencer campaign. But a more careful look into Spotify’s history shows that the decision to define audiences by their moods was part of a strategic push to grow Spotify’s advertising business in the years leading up to its IPO — and today, Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers.” – The Baffler
Study Suggests That Human Brains Are Wired For Musical Pitch
“We found that a certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch than macaque monkey brains. The results raise the possibility that these sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic organization of the human brain.” – EurekArt
MacArthur ‘Genius’ Rhiannon Giddens To Compose Opera Based On Slave Narrative
Giddens, a conservatory-trained operatic singer as well as a banjo player (she co-founded the string band Carolina Chocolate Drops) and composer, will prepare the libretto and compose the music for a new work about Omar Ibn Said, the only African-American slave known to have written an account of his captivity in Arabic. The as-yet-untitled opera was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA, where it will premiere in 2020, in honor of Charleston’s 350th anniversary that year. – The Post and Courier (Charleston)
Bernard Haitink Announces His Retirement
The 90-year-old conductor gives his farewell to his birthplace, Amsterdam, this weekend; following one August concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Lucerne, he will close out his 65-year career late this summer with the Vienna Philharmonic at the BBC Proms and the Salzburg and Lucerne Festivals. And what will he do after? “Just live.” (in Dutch; Google Translate version here) – De Volkskrant (Netherlands)
A Disaster For Music: How A 2008 Fire Destroyed One Of The World’s Most Important Troves Of Music
UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost. – The New York Times
Hackers Stole And Demanded Ransom From Radiohead. So The Band Is Releasing The Music Tracks With Proceeds To Charity
The group announced on its social media platforms today that the archive—consisting mostly of unfinished music and clips from the mid-90s—had been stolen last week. The hacker, or hackers, demanded $150,000 to keep it from being released to the public, Radiohead said. In response, the band decided not only to ignore the ransom demand but release the entire trove of music to Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion, the new climate change movement. – Newsweek