Category: music

The figures, compiled by the Donne – Women in Music project and Drama Musica, show that a total of 3,524 musical works will be performed at those concerts, and, of those, 3,442 (97.6%) were written by men and only 82 (2.3%) were written by women.

“Adam Diegel has resigned as artistic director of Opera San Antonio after just five months, accusing the board of directors of interfering in his work and not allowing him to choose the operas the company would perform.”

George Gelles, the former executive director of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and a lifelong (though never pro) French horn player, writes about taking part in the Be Phil Orchestra, 101 non-professional musicians from the world over, chosen by online audition, who spent a week getting coached by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, rehearsing and performing Brahms’s First Symphony under Simon Rattle.

“Bowing to pressure from women who argued that the dress restrictions were not only unfair, but could also hinder their ability to play comfortably, other major orchestras have moved in recent years to let women wear pants if they choose. … The Philharmonic, alone among the nation’s 20 largest orchestras, does not allow women to wear pants for formal evening concerts. That could soon change. The orchestra — the oldest in the United States, with its 176th season wrapping up — has quietly been talking about modernizing its dress code.” (It’s also considering letting the men ditch the white tie and tails.)

Clea Simon: “Contemporary jazz … is full of journeymen female musicians. … An internationally touring ensemble, [Wynton] Marsalis’s band is the flagship jazz orchestra of the day, the one that he is using to establish the importance of jazz around the world. Taking the stage with 15 musicians, none of whom is female, presents the music as segregated and outdated.”

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

At the end of this month, the label Impulse! is releasing Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, “a full set of material recorded by [Coltrane’s] quartet on a single day in March 1963, then eventually stashed away and lost. The family of Coltrane’s first wife, Juanita Naima Coltrane, recently discovered his personal copy of the recordings, which she had saved, and brought it to the label’s attention.”

“One hundred and sixty million dollars over four years — it would be a shot in the arm for the Canadian music industry, to be sure. According to information obtained under the Access to Information Act, that’s what the industry is asking the federal government to pony up to compensate artists for what is known as private copying.”

“The first thing the dance company does when we arrive is to measure the stage. They have to reset the dance to fit that stage. So you also have to reset the time of the music: In a larger theater, you must play slower. In a smaller theater, you have to play faster. The relation of time and space in music is dynamic. I have a range of speed in mind. If the players don’t pay attention to that, it will look really funny. You can see the stage fill up with dancers because they are playing at the wrong speed.”

During intermission on opening night of the company’s production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, an audience member suffered a heart attack. “Paramedics were called, and worked with doctors who were in the audience for a half-hour before taking their patient to a waiting ambulance, where he later died.”