Category: music

“Most of the reviews found a significant effect of music on pain,” writes a team led by Colombian researcher Juan Sebastian Martin-Saavedra. It concludes music should be considered “a clinically significant complementary therapy to be used for the management of pain.”

“In 1918, six months before the end of the first world war, Marie Stopes published Married Love. … There’s nothing about sexual problems, nor contraception (apart from one chapter), but instead, she writes about the ecstasy of fulfillment.” (The book played a key role in an episode of Downton Abbey.) She then received tens of thousands of letters asking for advice – about sexual problems, venereal diseases, and above all, contraception. Composer Alex Mills and librettist Jennifer Thorp have turned a collection of those letters into a chamber opera.

“Steinway Musical Instruments Inc., the legendary piano maker controlled by U.S. hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, has attracted takeover interest from China Poly Group Corp. … The state-owned conglomerate is holding preliminary talks about a purchase of Steinway, … [which] could fetch about $1 billion in a sale.”

Since its 2008 launch, Spotify has realigned the global music industry toward streaming, popularizing the idea of music as a service rather than goods that consumers own. As the company has grown—it now has 170 million users in more than 60 countries and 75 million of them are paying subscribers—it’s turned around the fortunes of what had been a declining industry.

“Do we really want a white-breaded, Brexited flatland? A country that is losing the will to welcome the world? The ‘hostile environment’ took its toll at Womad … a number of events were seriously affected by visa refusals. By definition, a festival of world music requires visas for many bands. What on Earth is the Home Office doing refusing them? Is music the new enemy?”

Pianist Jonathan Biss, who began attending Marlboro as a 16-year-old student, joins Mitsuko Uchida at the helm of the summer conclave in the hills of southern Vermont.

The Light and Hope Orchestra has performed in public hundreds of times. Its success has taken it on foreign tours all around the world, and earned it countless awards. Al Nour Wal Amal is Arabic for ‘Light and Hope’  and the orchestra is part of a non-profit association that gives blind women educational opportunities and professional training.

Each year, 12 composers spend a month in Los Angeles in a compressed, specialized program to help them understand the world of scoring movies – and how to deal with the details. A successful alum: “You’re basically putting on the suit of a composer and pretending you’ve had decades of experience, and you are getting to know these people who you’re going to be interacting with for the rest of your career, hopefully.”

There are so many concerns for classical music groups, opera companies, and British music schools that it’s impossible to list them all in one article. Still, basically: “The U.K. has a thriving cultural scene; it might not disappear overnight. But over a 50-year period, who knows?”

The Lincoln Center Festival is gone, though a few of its programs got added elsewhere. But the whole Mostly Mozart brand has lost some of its allure. “Mostly Mozart has some thinking to do,” says NYT critic Anthony Tommasini.