Category: music

“Rider University on Thursday signed a controversial deal to sell Westminster Choir College, a renowned but struggling institution in downtown Princeton, N.J., for $40 million to a Chinese company with little experience in higher education.”

It was “a period in which he helped transform the Berlin Philharmonic, one of Europe’s most venerable ensembles, into one of the 21st century’s most forward-thinking orchestras. He mounted ambitious educational extravaganzas, broadened its repertoire, reached out to Berlin’s diverse communities, and asked its musicians to embrace a different vision of what it means to play in an orchestra. It was a partnership that wound up succeeding despite occasional tensions, creative and otherwise, with the players — who self-govern the orchestra and hold the power to hire their chief.”

The times – and the methods for counting a song’s popularity – are changing: “As the market rapidly evolves, so too must the chart if it wants to cling to any vestige of relevance: the latest changes will see video streams added for the first time and a new weighting system applied to ‘premium’ streams (those on paid subscription services) and ‘free’ streams (those on ad-supported services like YouTube and the free tier of Spotify).”

It’s a challenge, for so many reasons: “The received idea of ballet pianists is that they are at the bottom of the totem pole, working, as they do, out of the public eye with people who don’t really care about music. On the surface it seems easy enough—small bits of light classics in triple and duple meter with a maybe a show tune or two thrown in for fun. Plié. Sauté. Soutenu. And again on the other side. [But] Ballet pianists at a top company will have about ten seconds to choose the music for the exercise from the library of tunes in their heads.”

On the Summer Solstice, there’s free music all over the city. “The organizers and audiences got a gift this year on Thursday: clear, warm weather, the humidity manageable and the sounds, as ever, sweet.”

And yet: “The high cost of stadium concert tours is deterring some fans from buying tickets, along with the fact that restrictive British weather and the dates of major sports fixtures mean that these large shows take place in a relatively concentrated summer period.” (Not to mention the random text messages changing people’s seats either to better seats or to way, way worse seats … thanks to “production” issues?)

The two 11-year-olds debuted their works during the New York Phil’s Music in the Parks programs last week. And they clearly know what they’re doing: “Both girls speak with clarity and command; there was no kids-say-the-darndest-things cuteness as they navigated topics like inspiration, writer’s block and gender disparity in classical music.”

Well, not now, but soon. Italian musician Leonardo Barbadoro is “still in the Kickstarter stage of his album, entitled Musica Automata, and it’s ambitious: the full robot orchestra has 50 members, and he can control each of them from his laptop.”

First come the songs, usually on memory sticks. Then the number crunching, via iPad and a lot of data. Then the vague predictions – and voilà! A child of 9 or 10 years old gets her first “Now,” as they’re known in Britain, and an addiction is born. “Nows tend to land at a particular moment in your young listening life. Some time after the realisation that the pop playing on the radio and out of Chinese restaurant speakers isn’t all indistinguishable mulch, but some time before you learn what albums really are and turn obsessive about track arrangement and liner notes.”

Opera Philadelphia has steadily built its reputation over the last decade as one of the top-tier companies in the world for commissioning (and co-commissioning) new works. In 2017, the nonprofit company launched its new programming model, with an ambitious—and wildly successful—fall festival called O17.