Category: music

No one knows until – get this – until the broadcast starts. So if you’re a choirboy, you’d best be ready. – BBC

When Bach’s heavy reliance on parody technique came to light in the nineteenth century, scholars found it embarrassing. It ran counter to the Beethovenian principle that composers must write new, highly original pieces, and the realization that several of the St. Thomas Cantor’s most-revered sacred works—the Christmas Oratorio and the Mass in B-Minor, in particular—were derived largely from secular tributes to earthly kings and queens was difficult to accept. In more recent times, scholars have moved beyond those prejudices and embraced Bach’s use of parody, devoting much study to the brilliant ways in which he carried it out. – New York Review of Books

A company called ReDigi had developed a platform for people to offer their “pre-owned” MP3s and FLACs while making sure that the sellers didn’t keep a bootleg copy for themselves — or so they thought. Capitol Records sued, and now a federal district court and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that ReDidi’s business model is illegal. Cullen Seltzer explains. — Slate

Mark Cantrell “might be the most versatile hire in the organization’s history.” Currently chief of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra and a longtime freelance trombonist, he has also been a professional pilot and a competitive sled-dog racer. — Tampa Bay Times

“It’s an elegantly constructed, effortlessly listenable series that does exactly what you’d hope a general-interest opera podcast would do. It also avoids most of what you’d hope it would avoid—pandering, dumbing down, trying to make opera seem hip. (It gets away with its silly name, just barely, by claiming to “decode” what makes arias great.) The show seems to understand that there are plenty of people who know a little bit about opera and might like to know more; to do that, it makes use of the Met’s archive and extensive community of artists and thinkers.” – The New Yorker

Frankfurt financier Christian Reister and violin dealer Jost Thoene have founded Violin Assets GmbH as a fund that treats Strads, Guarneris, Amatis, and the like as an “alternative asset class” — one that, Reister observes, can appreciate at the rate of 8% a year or more. — Bloomberg

Scientists and engineers have been building and programming piano-playing robots for decades. But there’s something different about a new robotic hand that tickles the ivories with techniques usually reserved for humans. — The New York Times