Category: music

Deutsche Bahn — Germany’s national train operator — has come up with a confrontational approach. This autumn, it will try piping “atonal music” into a Berlin railway station, a spokesman confirmed Wednesday in an emailed statement. It is an attempt to make the station less comfortable for drug users. In explaining the move, an official told the publication Deutsche Welle that few people find such music beautiful, and that many perceive it as something to run away from.

There are other orchestras in the UK for disabled musicians, notably conductor Charles Hazlewood’s British Paraorchestra, which was formed in 2011 to give disabled musicians the chance to perform. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra has gone a stage further, treating music-making by disabled musicians as one of its core activities. Resound’s six musicians perform as a self-contained group, but also play as members of the larger orchestra.

Ross looks at the zillion different directions new music has gone in since the eclipse of modernism. He also discusses what he calls the “Kandinsky Problem”: “In the art world, instinctive antagonism to the new, the weird, and the absurd is less common. People think nothing of queueing for hours in order to sit in a chair opposite Marina Abramović or to grope their way through a foggy tunnel designed by Olafur Eliasson. Indeed, composers can often find a more appreciative audience if they reclassify their music as an installation or as performance art.”

“Germany’s national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn (DB), is planning to pipe ‘atonal music’ into the Hermannstrasse station in Berlin’s Neukölln district in an attempt to drive away people who use the place to take drugs. … The music has not yet been chosen, though, according to a report in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, DB has opted for atonal music ‘because it completely undermines traditional listening habits.'”

The YOLA Center in Inglewood is a milestone project for the LA Phil’s Youth Orchestra LA project. Not only will it be a way to produce an unprecedented ethnically diverse new generation of musicians but it also promises to be a new model for ways a cultural institution can serve a community, with the added cachet of it being designed by the architect behind Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The German-born, 49-year-old Preu, who is about to begin his final season as music director of the Spokane Symphony, starts his initial three-year contract term with the 2019-2020 season. He is also music director of the Long Beach (Cal.) Symphony and the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra.

“A record held by Michael Jackson’s Thriller for more than 30 years is no more. The Eagles’ Greatest Hits 1971-1975, a perennial seller since its initial release in Feb. 1976, has surpassed 38 million copies sold, according to the latest certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).”

Artists sometimes can leverage their fame to command higher pay, but the artists who are famous enough to pull this off are a sub-one-percent rounding error of all working artists. Everyone else is left in an increasingly concentrated sector with less and less leverage. The best part? 12% is an improvement. Before the internet came along, it was seven percent.

Aryana Sayeed on the pushback when she performs despite Taliban death threats in Afghanistan: “I am very aware of the danger. Nobody can really protect me there. But if I give up hope to millions of people who feel lost because everyone else has left, then it is worth it.”

It’s been played more than 70 million times, and Franklin saw exactly none of the royalties because it was written by Otis Redding. “Every time the song is played on the radio, Mr. Redding’s estate — he died in a 1967 plane crash — has been paid.” That’s a rallying cry to make copyright law work both for writers and for artists.