Category: music

Check out the numbers for the now 90-minute-long A Quiet Place: “Back in came three arias that had been cut from the final act for the 1986 version. Snips were made throughout. An orchestra of at least 72 players was reduced to an ensemble of 18, creating leaner textures and encouraging a less, well, operatic singing and acting style.”

The new copresenting relationship may seem like inside baseball in that it does not directly affect what audiences hear and see. But, in fact, Opera Philadelphia sees the Kimmel contribution as a vote of confidence in the future of its new festival format, which it rolled out last season.

“The more I talk to other women of color hailing from nations across the globe, the more I understand how the subconscious presentation of diversity framed exclusively as a “middle-class white cisgender woman’s problem” has the ripple effect of silencing women of varied ethnic backgrounds and gender identities.”

According to Statistics Canada, using 2011 data (the last year for which detailed figures are available,) musicians and singers made an average of $10,402 a year from employment, and $16,061 from gross wages and salaries. StatsCan defines employment as including both salaried jobs and income from professional practice, and it should be noted the figures include everyone in the country who declared income as a musician or vocalist.

“Songwriting camps have convened since the early ’90s, when Police manager and I.R.S. Records chief Miles Copeland invited heavy hitters such as Cher and Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook to his French château.” They’ve become something of an industry since then, and they, “or at least the collaborative songwriting process, have fundamentally changed the way pop music sounds.”

The AZ Phil, whose creation has been spearheaded by Toni Tennille (of the 1970s pop duo The Captain and Tennille), will be based in Prescott, where it will give its first concert on August 26.

Steven Reed’s letter said he failed to blend with other players in the section and came in late to solos. He said he doesn’t need the hassle of the evaluation procedure. “My impression is that it is a form of discrimination,” Reed said. Once an orchestra member receives a warning letter, a meeting is held with the music director to discuss issues.

By recent research estimates, U.S. musicians only take home one-tenth of national industry revenues. One reason for such a meager percentage is that streaming services — while reinvigorating the music industry at large — aren’t lucrative for artists unless they’re chart-topping names like Drake or Cardi B. According to one Spotify company filing, average per-stream payouts from the company are between $0.006 and $0.0084; numbers from Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer and other streaming services are comparable.

Amanda Moniz of the National Museum of American History writes about the Hutchinson Family Singers (who campaigned for the abolition of slavery), the Fisk Jubilee Singers (who raised funds for Fisk University, which was founded to educate former slaves), and the concerts by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston to benefit Russian Jewish refugees.

“There was a postwar feeling that things should not be romantic, people moving away from a romantic aesthetic to something colder and more calculated, both in the music and in attitude to the audience as a whole. That attitude doesn’t relate to our contemporary culture. I see why it happened, but I don’t find it interesting as a way to move forward for myself. My mission is to connect with people. The purpose of creating music is to feel less alone, to create a community around the work to express something that can’t be expressed in words.”