Two of the protesters that entered the hall led music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to slam his baton on the podium and walk off the stage. Some musicians began to leave, too, before the protesters, who were loudly booed by the audience, were forcibly removed. After the 10-minute disruption, the orchestra’s interim co-president, Matthew Loden, told the audience: “We live in an age where dissent is important. It matters. It should be heard. But the sanctity of the concert hall should be respected.”
Category: music
When Classical Music Is A Weapon (Has It Really Come To This?)
Weaponized classical music is just the next step in the commodification of the genre. Today, most young people encounter classical music not as a popular art form but as a class signifier, a set of tropes in a larger system of encoded communication that commercial enterprises have exploited to remap our societal associations with orchestral sound. Decades of cultural conditioning have trained the public to identify the symphony as sonic shorthand for social status — and, by extension, exclusion from that status. The average American does not recognize the opening chords of The Four Seasons as the sound of spring but the sound of snobbery.
How Homeless Youth Built A Score With (And For) The Seattle Symphony
Composer in residence Alexandra Garner worked with the youth over a few months. “The participants, she said, never wanted to talk much about whatever traumatic back stories they’d brought into the room. Instead, they wanted to make music about love and hope. ‘In one way or another, they all said ‘just because we don’t fit into other people’s boxes doesn’t mean we’re not people — we have a lot of love to share.’’ Once the musicians got the score, she added, ‘some were surprised that it was very sweet and beautiful — not the angry, thorny experience they expected it to be.'”
The Met Now Says James Levine Has A Decades-Long History Of ‘Sexual Misconduct’
From the Met’s countersuit to Levine’s lawsuit against the Met, details from the investigation: “The company says it found credible evidence that Mr. Levine had ‘used his reputation and position of power to prey upon and abuse artists,’ citing examples of sexual misconduct that it says occurred from the 1970s through 1999.”
The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Lost Its Guest Star Cellist To The Royal Wedding
Nineteen-year-old British star cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason was scheduled to perform for LACO’s final concert of the season, but then a little thing called Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding got in the way. LACO’s executive director knows how to spin: “It’s such a great moment for the classical music world. This kind of visibility on a global stage for classical music is great for all of us.”
Small Study: Musicians’ Brains May Be More Efficient
That all-important ability is called “working memory,” and it takes considerable mental effort. That is, unless you play a musical instrument, or speak a second language. New research suggests that, over time, engaging in those challenging activities effectively rewires the brain, allowing it to complete complex assignments with greater ease. A 2017 meta-study found musicians have stronger working-memory skills; this research provides a likely reason why.
Music Is Slipping The Confines Of Genres
It’s dispiriting to see how ‘what’s on’ listings pigeon-hole music by genre – classical, jazz, pop, folk, world – and then realise that your music doesn’t fit comfortably into any of these categories. Our large-scale shows contain elements of opera, musical, lyric theatre, but none of these accurately characterises their form.
Roger Sessions On How To Learn To Listen To Difficult Music
Once, with a class of fifty students, all relatively unprepared and some quite innocent of contact with contemporary music, I tried the experiment of familiarizing them, at the beginning of the course, with Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, one of the composer’s most “difficult” works. My whole effort was to bring them into contact with the music, and I deferred speaking of the problem of tonality, or the twelve-tone system, until the students knew the music thoroughly. By that time—believe it or not—one could hear the opening theme of the quartet, or other passages, being whistled by students on the campus. At the end of several weeks I spoke only briefly about the technical questions involved and they fell, it seemed to me, in their proper place. My students had learned to know—some to love—the music; their ears had been conquered.
Why Do Orchestras Tune To A, And Why Is That A From The Oboe?
After all, concert bands (as some of us remember from high school) tune to a B-flat from the clarinet. Turns out that there are sound practical reasons for both choices, concerning the strings (for the choice of A as the pitch) and the oboe (a fussy and obstinate instrument).
Why We Review One Classical Concert And Not Another: Anne Midgette
Surprised (happily) by a reader outcry that The Washington Post didn’t cover Washington National Opera’s performances of The Barber of Seville last month, Anne Midgette explains the limits she and the paper have on how much can be covered, how she decides which events among those on offer will get reviewed, and the unusual run of bad luck that affected critics that particular weekend.