Category: music

Classical Music Is Broken Online. What iTunes, Spotify, Apple Music And The Others Should Do About It

It’s difficult to find music, hard to catalog, and just an overall pain in the neck to manage. The problem? “We’re treating around 300 years of music from various countries, forms, philosophies, and so on as one genre. As far as modern commercial music, we don’t group the past 50 years together” – Mac Rumors

Heavy Metal Has A Nazi Problem. But What To Do About It?

“Should metal stay dangerous and controversial and offensive? Is it censorship to deny bands a platform for their genocidal views? Is it curtailing their free speech to make it harder for a band to get booked or get signed versus at what point does it become critical to keep these dangerous Fascist elements out of our scene? At what point is that record worth so much to you that you would buy it knowing that you were actively contributing to something that is harming other people?” – The New Yorker

The Way Musicians Understand Beethoven Is Different From The Ways Listeners Do. Here’s How

Anne Midgette: “There’s a big gap between the way classical music is introduced to lay listeners and the way musicians experience it. We tend to offer classical music to audiences like a history lesson, in explanations studded with names and dates that are useful enough as context but that don’t really get to the heart of what you hear. Musicians, however, experience it differently. So I went in search of a new view of the Emperor Concerto by talking to some of the artists who have played it recently, and although I’ve heard it dozens of times, I learned more than I ever dreamed I was missing.” – Washington Post

Ryan Adams Is The Tip Of An Indie Male Iceberg Of Terrible Behavior ‘Visible From Space’

And every indie music journalist knows it. “Publicists for male indie stars ask for guarantees that allegations and evidence of an artist’s bad behaviour aren’t referred to in interviews, and often receive those guarantees. Managers intimidate women at public events because they don’t like the way they have written about their male charges. Music magazine editors sideline female employees who raise red flags when plans are made to cover well-known creeps. Publications continue to write about men outed as beasts once the heat has died down.” – The Guardian (UK)

An Entire Italian Town Fell Silent In Order To Preserve The Sounds Of Stradivarius

In Cremona, where the mayor doubles as the president of the Antonio Stradivarius Violin Museum Foundation, sound engineers were trying to record every note a Strad could make, and every transition between every note. But a town of 70,000 people can be noisy, so the mayor “asked the people of Cremona to please keep it down, and blocked traffic around the concert hall during recordings.” – NPR

City Opera Sounds An Ominous Note As Board Chair Steps Down

The chairman of the board also happens to be New York City Opera’s biggest benefactor. And: “Its board is down to a mere three members. It has largely spent the more than $5 million in bequests it received after emerging from bankruptcy, and its modest endowment is shrinking. The company’s most recent financial report notes that its difficulties ‘raise substantial doubt about New York City Opera, Inc.’s ability to continue as a going concern.'” – The New York Times

What Was Up With The Crude Racial And Sexual Stereotype Jokes That Filled This Carnegie Hall Performance?

Everyone was in on the joke, or at least everyone on stage was. But the audience wasn’t sure what to do or how to react. “The concept, whatever its good intentions, tempts comparisons with the history of African-American performers in blackface, acting out stereotypes of themselves for predominantly white audiences. It also risks feeding the common perception of Asian-Americans as perpetual foreigners.” (Of course, not everyone agrees.) – The New York Times