“Marilyn Martorano first laid eyes on the long, baguette-shaped rocks almost four decades ago, as a volunteer at what is now Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado. The clearly hand-shaped stones, which had been discovered in the area, were housed in the on-site museum when Martorano first saw them. They were a strange set of artifacts for which no one had yet determined a use.” Thirty years later, a video someone sent her made her realize that the rocks made up a percussion instrument now called a lithophone.
Category: music
What Taylor Swift’s New Recording Deal Might Mean For Other Artists
The rise of streaming via Spotify, Apple and Amazon has put a music industry once racked by plummeting CD sales back in rude health. That transformation has been seized on by Swift, who has led the fight for artists to get a better share of revenues in the age of the digital giants.
Alex Ross: The LA Phil’s Mission To Expand An Orchestra
The L.A. Phil’s offbeat ventures are well and good, you sometimes hear people in the classical world mutter, but how’s its Beethoven? Isn’t the programming better than the playing? That put-down is unconvincing: an organization that can bring “Sustain” into the world is more valuable than one that executes yet another hyper-polished Beethoven Seventh. Still, the L.A. Phil has sometimes come up short in mainstream repertory, lagging behind the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, or the best European groups.
The Met Celebrates Placido Domingo’s 50th Anniversary
“‘For us, the opera singers, it is just like Frank Sinatra said: New York, New York, if you made it, you made it everywhere,’ the 77-year-old singer from Spain said Friday night when he was honored on stage for the 50th anniversary of his Met debut.”
Congratulations! You’ve Won Eurovision. What’s Next? [VIDEO]
Israeli singer Netta Barzilai won the 2018 competition, and since then, she’s met Prince William, gotten hundreds of thousands more followers on Instagram – and tried to stay true to being a musician, not a hit pop song writer.
The World’s Greatest Song Partnership Is Three Decades In, With No Signs Of Stopping
Christian Gerhaher, a baritone, and pianist Gerald Huber, who have performed together for 30 years, “have become bywords for sensitivity, cerebral depth and seeming perfection in a lieder repertory that they have made their own.”
How Dvorak’s New World Symphony Helped America Listen To, And Hear, Itself
The Czech composer listened to the people of the United States. “Dvorak recognized a rich tradition sitting under his nose, one that most American composers seemed blind to. He wove American roots music into his vast symphonic canvas. And, inspired by black spirituals, he came up with a bittersweet melody that would become a spiritual of its own: the ‘Largo,’ the symphony’s second movement, a kind of song without words scored for the English horn.”
The Bach Pop-Up Shop That Even Sells Condoms
The condoms note that J.S. fathered 20 children, but more to the point, “Inside the shop, a Juilliard-trained pianist, Evan Shinners, is playing five hours of Bach each and every day — for more than 30 straight days, even on Thanksgiving — and presenting evening concerts with guests.”
Did Britpop Lead To Brexit?
What Britpop originally was – a way of reclaiming an identity for gaudy, magpieish British music from the grey blanket of grunge, then slapped on the cover of Select magazine in April 1993 – was not what it became. Of course it wasn’t: the essence of every pop movement is altered by exposure, when it becomes about its consumers’ interpretations rather than its creators’ intentions. Punk went from art school kids seeking to shock to blokes with mohicans drinking cider outside shopping centres. Britpop went from something arch and wry and awkward to beery singalongs with arms around shoulders. In that transformation, though, Britpop did give new vigour to a strand of conservatism that has long existed in pop music – the one that believes there is A Proper Way To Do Things.
Jamaica Proposes Reggae For World Heritage Status
Jamaica, where the sound first gave a voice to the oppressed and the hopeful, is now seeking a new honor for the genre. As early as Monday, Unesco will announce a decision on the country’s application to put reggae on the world body’s list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.