Category: music

“The new initiative – [called the National Alliance for Audition Support and] created by the Sphinx Organization, the New World Symphony and the League of American Orchestras – will train musicians for auditions, pair them with mentors, showcase their work in concerts and give them stipends to travel to auditions. It is the latest effort to diversify American classical music, which has lagged behind other fields.”

The 64-year-old conductor will step down from the music directorship of the Norfolk-based orchestra at the end of its centennial season, 2019-20. (She is evidently staying on with her other orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic, where her current contract expires in 2021.)

“Lamar’s historic win figures in the grander, affected consecration of blackness within élite spaces—exemplified, I think, by the “thousand flowers of expectation” blooming in Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama. It was Obama, with his caucuses of rappers in the White House, who accelerated the conclusion that hip-hop had earned a prestige as a great American art. In its long and perplexing lurch toward acclaim, did hip-hop sacrifice its edge? Lamar is a fascinating and brilliant non-answer.”

The music Pulitzer was an obscure bauble coveted only by the people who cared about it, of which there were not many. Forget the big reporting and magazine awards; even the poetry Pulitzer mattered more than music. Grammys are the awards that count most in music, and given that Kendrick is already loaded with golden gramophones — though the Album of the Year continues, unconscionably, to elude him — the Pulitzer is just a feather in his Dodgers fitted cap.

Dana Canedy: “In this case [the jurors] were considering a piece of music they felt had hip-hop influences and said, ‘Well if we’re considering a piece of music that has hip-hop influences, why aren’t we considering hip-hop?’ And someone said, ‘That’s exactly what we should do.’ And then someone said, ‘We should be considering Kendrick Lamar’ and the group said ‘absolutely.’ So then, right then, they decided to listen to the entire album and decided ‘This is it.'”

“Michelle Miller Burns, former chief operating officer for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, will lead the state’s largest performing arts organization starting Sept. 1.” She succeeds Kevin Smith, who stabilized the orchestra and repaired management-musician relations following the 2012-13 lockout.

The not-for-profit Brass for Africa “has delivered 800 brass instruments to both Uganda and Liberia and reaches over 1000 children weekly. … The children involved include those living in extreme poverty (living either as street children or in a slum), as well as children living in orphanages and rehabilitation centres, living with physical or mental disability, or coping with HIV/AIDS. These children each have two training sessions a week, which include music theory, and … the bands each have at least three performances a year,.”

The Margravial Opera House, built in 1478 by Frederick the Great’s sister and now one of the best-preserved 18th-century theaters in Europe, is reopening after a six-year, €30 million renovation with one of the operas performed when the house was new, Johann Adolf Hasse’s Artaserse.

The Pulitzer for music, which was first awarded in 1943, generally goes to contemporary classical music; a quick scan through the list of previous winners reveals a lot of operas and symphonies. Lamar, however, is a hip-hop artist, and DAMN. is a hip-hop album. Lamar is now not only the first person to win a Pulitzer for a hip-hop album but the first person to win a Pulitzer for any music that’s not classical or jazz.

Yes, the physical manifestations of music worship, structures so Romantic that they wouldn’t be foreign to Richard Wagner. Though some argue that the etiquette for concert halls is outdated, elitist, and partly responsible for classical music’s struggle to find new audiences, concert halls actually provide unique experiences that have become all too rare.