Category: music

The status of the cover song has shape-shifted throughout pop-music history. Well into the 1950s, it barely even needed a name: It was just the routine way of doing business. During the rock era, covers became suspect as inauthentic, the stuff of the hack bar band, unless an artist “made the song their own.” With the rise of hip-hop, covers were displaced by sampling and remixes, but then samples themselves became more concealed and layered, for reasons of both art and copyright. In the 2000s and earlier this decade, the practice migrated to YouTube, where concert clips or home videos of one-off covers, rearrangements, and parodies might show off the skills and wit of amateurs and pros alike but still seldom troubled the charts—unless they also made it to soundtracks or TV ads, where acoustic remakes of once-upon-a-time hits (either twee or glum or both) have become a staple.

Competitions, like the rest of the business, are redefining themselves. Rather than trying to produce the superstars of tomorrow, they’re increasingly focusing on the present: an end in themselves. Indeed, the line between the competition and other classical music organizations is increasingly blurred.

“The ceramic shell at first appeared to be one of a kind. One hypothesis was that it might have been a cheese strainer. Then, similarities were found with two other objects, found near Naples, that had been convincingly identified as sound boxes for musical instruments.” One doctoral student determined that it was either a bowed lute or a lyre, and she made speculative reconstructions of each, using a copy of the ceramic shell and materials that were available circa 3,000 B.C. (includes sound clips)

Polyrhythms run through Brahms’s music like an obsessive-compulsive streak. You don’t have to be musically literate to know the bumpy feel of a cross-rhythm. Two-against-three can be a parent strolling hand in hand with a skipping child. Triplets on top of eighth notes are like a slow canter next to a trot: The two horses might move at the same speed, but you wouldn’t want them pulling a carriage together.

“Separating the most durable tunes from the millions of other would-be classics is no easy task. So we asked critics, musicians, and industry professionals to predict which [ones will last].Some of these songs our children will belt in sports arenas. Others our grandchildren will dance to at their weddings.”

“Although the TSO has been in the black for many years, the surplus for 2017-18 is significant. After many years of small, slow declines in ticket revenue, the organization posted a 17 per cent rise in ticket sales over the 2016-17 season. Subscription revenue has been steady, but revenue from single-ticket sales last season was up 26 per cent. This is a remarkable accomplishment, largely due to interim CEO Gary Hanson, a veteran orchestra manager.”

“Organized by WDAV in Davidson, and held at a brewery in Charlotte, the quarterly Small Batch Concert Series has attracted standing-room-only crowds of more than 200 people for its four concerts to date” — a turnout “much bigger” than previous station events, says the general manager, who adds that at every concert he encounters people who didn’t know that metro Charlotte even had a full-time classical radio station.

“I was once told by the then chairman of a leading American opera company that the reason Wexford has rightly survived is because from the outset its rationale was plain wrong. He was right: the dream by a small group of local people, including a GP, a hotelier and a postman, in the early 1950s, of bringing international singers to a remote corner of Ireland to present rarely performed operas, wouldn’t even get past the first page of a modern-day feasibility study.”

“When I write a piece of orchestral music, I can be as controlling as I want, but with a piece this big, I try to be the opposite of precious. … Obviously, it’s anxiety-provoking, but it’s not going to be me onstage in a negligee singing a high B-flat.”

“For me, every project has three clearly defined phases: the scheming and planning; the writing of actual notes; the editing. The planning process almost entirely excludes, by design, notes and rhythms. … I don’t want to play [the audience] a movie with a clear exposition, obvious climax and poignant conclusion, nor do I want to drop them blind into a bat cave of aggressively perplexing musical jabs … [and] mapping the piece’s route helps me avoid the temptation of the romantic journey or the provocateur’s dungeon.”