Category: music

Even today, where all you need is a social media account to be able to reach a potentially large audience, music competitions offer way more than just visibility. It’s like opening a window to let fresh air circulate: you need talent to travel, to become aware of what’s out there and to meet fellow musicians to work with. Plus, many competitions offer inexperienced players the chance to attend masterclasses led by world-class artists, and this is something not even a million Instagram likes can give you.

What, then, to make of this enormous reissue package, The Beatles (White Album) Super Deluxe? Seven discs—demos, sessions, a remastering—and a great big book. Doesn’t it just magnify the sprawl, increase the luggage, barnacle with further add-ons and special features this already ungainly rattle bag of a record? Answer: Yes but no, or yes but who cares, because this is The Beatles, and we want it all.

A district judge handed down a peace order (as it’s called in Maryland) against Jonathan Carney after he allegedly verbally attacked and threatened an employee of the Eastern Shore-based Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra on Oct. 31. “The peace order came less than two months after BSO principal oboist Katherine Needleman filed a sexual harassment complaintwith the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the BSO related to Carney.

A beloved music teacher to generations of children in suburban Abington, Jane Kesson also spent decades as a volunteer for the orchestra. So when she passed away last year, it was anticipated that she had included the Philadelphians in her will. But no one anticipated a gift this big.

Under magnetic resonance imaging, they observed the mechanics of how the artists make the distinctive beats that sound like percussion instruments using only their mouths. In gritty black and white, their tongues leap and flip; a sound like a snare drum snaps out.

The Twitterverse worked itself into a bit of a lather a couple of weekends ago, when Sunday Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera decried the people who sit down and play the pianos that have been left in train stations, writing “Can we please get back to good old British reserve in general?” In response, reporter Amy Walker went to St. Pancras Station in London and talked to some of the people who took a turn at the keyboards there that day.

Many, maybe most, American orchestras would be very happy to program more contemporary work. But it’s not as simple as just deciding to do it, and there are more complications than simple fear of low ticket sales. Patrick Castillo, who is both a composer and a “recovering orchestra administrator” (he’s held senior artistic positions at the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Milwaukee Symphony), explains what the issues are and what the new music community can do to help.

“Kaitlyn Hova is many things: a violinist, a web developer, a designer, a composer and a neuroscientist. And it was the blurring of these interests that bore a clear and clever idea. … Hova and her husband, who cofounded Hova Labs, have developed the Hovalin, an open source, 3-D printable acoustic violin.” Here is an excerpt from her Q&A and demonstration at last year’s Long Conversation at the Smithsonian. (video)