Category: music

Laurent Jeanneau is an amateur ethnomusicologist who has traveled across the Zomia collecting sounds. In an update to the old colonial ramblers, under the name Kink Gong, Jeanneau is also a composer who incorporates his sound recordings into live performances. Between 1996 and 2014, he amassed a huge collection of field recordings, totally nearly 160 CDs of raw sound.

More than 255,000 people attended SLSO concerts at Powell Hall. Also, more than 8,000 attended performances in California and Nebraska this year. SLSO sold out 20 of the more than 300 total concerts during the season.

The 27-year-old pianist Daniil Trifonov was named Artist of the Year, while Julia Wolfe took Composer of the Year honors. Carlos Miguel Prieto, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, and the DC-based Orchestra of the Americas, is Conductor of the Year. Vocalist of the Year is countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and the JACK Quartet is Ensemble of the Year.

A costly experiment? Surely, since box office revenue in these spaces is small relative to cost of production. Without philanthropic support, the project would be untenable. What Opera Philadelphia is discovering is that there are donors particularly anxious to invest in the future

Hm. Not that well. “While there have been conversations behind closed doors about certain gatekeepers … there hasn’t been a tipping point like what’s happened in Hollywood with Weinstein. As one singer told Rolling Stone during an investigation that looked at harassment in country radio, ‘Nashville is a town of subtleties. Everything is covered by a friendly gauze.'”

Some candor, some mistakes, some crossover. “As he’s helped to wash away artificial divides between jazz and other contemporary black music, Mr. Glasper has spoken with a casual candor not typical of jazz musicians. ‘If you ever heard Miles Davis talk, I’m no different than Miles,’ Mr. Glasper said, sipping a cocktail in his Blue Note dressing room earlier this month. ‘His freedom in talking about where he is in the music and what he’s trying to do.'”

Saskatoon is cold, and the office was near a bus stop, before a man entered the office and stabbed the executive director in the eye with the blunt end of a fork. “As an arts organization, we’re really open to the public and we want people to be able to interact with us in all ways. … We want people to come in and warm up if they’re standing out in the cold when it’s -40 C and -50, and with our windows, you can see the bus coming so it is kind of the perfect warm-up spot.” Not anymore.

Kubrick never paid Gerald Fried (or apparently many others) for their first film. “He thought the very fact that my doing the music to his early movies got me into the profession was enough payment. We had an agreement – not in writing – [that] we would work for nothing but, as soon as the movie got sold, he would pay us. Well, he didn’t.”