Category: music

“Perhaps the most interesting development is that all 18 winners were issued on independent labels, which tend to allow more artistic freedom than the majors, often because they are at least partly artist-funded.”

“This is the first time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize for Music that the prize was awarded to a recording. Sound Grammar, a collection of live performances recorded in Germany in late 2005 which was released commercially on September 12, 2006 on Coleman’s own label, also named Sound Grammar, is the first recording of new material by Coleman in nearly a decade and his first live recording in 20 years.”

” ‘El Sistema’ [‘The System’], as we call it, now encompasses 140 youth orchestras and 128 children’s orchestras in our country, as well as the semi-professional Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of which I have been music director since 1999, when I was 18. Some 260,000 children and young people are involved in The System — studying and playing orchestral music all the time. Every day. Absolutely. We are a family. My orchestra, and The System, is my family.”

The enormous Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival has been unable to resolve differences with its founder and artistic director, and will continue without him.

The live music scene in the UK is booming. “Many believe new technology – in the shape of MySpace and music forums – has boosted the scene. Computers, e-mail, texts and mobile phones mean people have much more access to information than they did five or six years ago.”

Composer Peter Maxwell Davies has railed against pop music and the way music education is conducted in England. But do such bomb-throwing screeds really help the caues of classical music?

“Volksmusik is a melodic form whose mysteries are beyond the reach of anyone not born in Germanic culture. To the unitiated, it is the pinnacle of kitsch, bucolic nonsense put to simplistic, sickly sweet music. It is the tonal equivalent of wooden cuckoo clocks. And yet there is something fascinating about the genre.”

Paris hasn’t yet had a great hall for orchestra concerts. But just before Jacques Chirac leaves office, “an eye-catching design for a $260 million concert hall by the French architect Jean Nouvel. The Philharmonie de Paris, as it will be called, is scheduled to open in the Parc de la Villette, in northeast Paris, in 2012.”

“One of the problems of concerts in the modern age is that people often have to come from the office … and they have all their quotidian concerns with them. They come, and they get a place — row number whatever, seat whatever — and they have to sit down. It’s a little like factory chickens. And we say, ‘Now it’s time for art, for the ultimate revelation.’ Length is also a problem, the idea that you have to have 90 minutes of music. It’s like going to the gym. It’s a stiff form — too stiff for me.”

In 50 years of Pulitzer prizes in music, “classical has reigned, despite a rich musical landscape featuring the likes of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, James Brown, John Coltrane, the Motown era and the birth of new genres from rock to rap. That may change on Monday, when this year’s Pulitzers are announced.”