Category: music

Any new music or new message has problems with reception. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven all had problems with reception. Even Jesus had problems with reception in his own hometown. Women in particular, though, have problems with reception in music. Lucy Green, music education philosopher and author of Music, Gender, Education, posits that there is a spectrum for acceptance of women in music. A woman singer is accepted because using her body to make music is an extension of her femininity. Put an instrument in her hands or in front of her face, and it interrupts the impression of a woman as either “sexually available or maternally occupied.”

“I don’t want to fight any more. I’ve been fighting stupidity all my life. … The problem is that when you defend your dignity people say you have a bad character. If that’s true, though, everybody with any sort of character has a bad character.”

The 35-year-old conductor’s existing contract was set to expire with the end of this past season, but last fall the orchestra’s board added two years to Urbański’s tenure, which now runs through the 2019-2020 season. ISO management made no public announcement of the extension at the time and only revealed it in response to this reporter’s inquiry.

The hub cities and venues are Copley Symphony Hall in San Diego; Nourse Theater in San Francisco; Community Center Theater in Sacramento; Paul Shaghoian Concert Hall at Clovis Unified Performing Arts Center in Fresno; and Coil School for the Arts at Riverside City College in Riverside. The combined capacity of the six venues is 9,800.

“Aged 36, Jing [Huan] is part of a new breed of foreign-trained conductors, as China hopes to gain recognition in the field after winning global fame for its soloists, including piano and string virtuosos. After long relying on Western conductors, a growing number of symphony orchestras around the country are now entrusting the baton to a fresh generation of Chinese musical directors.”

Jon Kimura Parker, Jamie Parker, Ian Parker, and Liz Parker are siblings and cousins. All three Parker pianists have garnered praise for their recordings as well as their performances across North America and beyond. How did the Parkers of Vancouver manage to produce a generation of musicians that has left such a discernible mark on the world of classical piano? On a practical level, it boiled down to a family discipline.

Apple Music’s growth accelerated past Spotify’s, and now, for the first time, Apple has pulled ahead. According to a report from Digital Music News last week, Apple Music has become the top on-demand streaming music service in the U.S. in terms of users. (The exact user numbers weren’t released.) Both apps have roughly 20 million U.S.-based subscribers, but Apple Music now has the upper hand.

XO Music Festival was slated to take place this weekend, July 12th to 15th, in Antioch, California. It promised seven stages, performances by 100 artists including Ludacris, Vanilla Ice and T.I., and a litany of Instagram-minded perks such as a foam pit, a color arena, an indoor skating rink and something billed only as an “interactive bounce arena.” Days before the start of the show, however, several artists dropped out of the lineup citing incomplete or missing payment, and Bay Area news outlets reported that other musicians were increasingly worried about whether the show was still taking place. On Wednesday, Contra Costa Event Park, the festival’s venue, suddenly released a statement canceling the festival entirely, “due to the promoters’ lack of fulfilling contractual obligations.”

African-Americans make up 1.8 percent of orchestras nationwide while Hispanics make up 2.5 percent, according to an industry-wide study. Those statistics inspired several performing arts organizations to form the National Alliance for Audition Support, which prepares talented musicians of color for auditions. Making it past that first hurdle is crucial as one opening in a top-tier orchestra can easily attract as much as a thousand candidates.

The casino, a multimillion-dollar project by Tesuque Pueblo, is being built on land that housed a flea market for many years. Construction has been moving rapidly since it started in earnest earlier this year, and the casino is expected to open this fall. Exactly what the finished product will look like — or how it will affect people’s experience at the opera — is a big unknown because the project is still in the works.