Category: music

“Dr. [Ahmad] Sarmast founded ANIM in Kabul in 2010 in response to that country’s civil war destruction of centuries of rich musical tradition. In the 1980s the pop music and film industries were thriving in Afghanistan, with hundreds of ensembles and a national radio orchestra playing Western and Afghan musical instruments. Between 1996 and 2001, music was completely banned. Over the last eight years, ANIM has been providing a challenging and safe learning environment for all students regardless of gender, ethnicity, religious sect or socio-economic status. The institute has a special focus on the most disadvantaged children in Afghanistan, including orphans, street vendors and girls.” the other winner of this year’s $125,000 prize is the band Metallica.

“Empathy is, perhaps, the most plausible of music’s utopian promises. The universality of musical communication dissolves the barriers of isolated viewpoints. We can gain direct access to perspectives and emotions far from our own experience. Music expands our ability to empathize, to sympathize, to humanize. It’s a great story. It’s a story I’ve told enough times, certainly. And, at those times—now, for instance—when empathy seems to be a dwindlingly scarce societal resource, it’s a story we like to tell with greater insistence, and confidence, and hope. But what if it’s just that—a story?”

“The 37-year-old Venezuela native” – like his friend Gustavo Dudamel, a product of El Sistema – “will succeed Jahja Ling, who last year concluded his 13th and final season with the symphony. … Now music director-designate, [he] will formally assume his role as music director July 1, 2019. Payaré will [also] continue … as music director of Northern Ireland’s Ulster Orchestra.”

“Robertson, whose tenure [as music director] with the [St. Louis Symphony] ends at the close of this season, succeeds Alan Gilbert at Juilliard, perhaps the most important training ground for classical musicians in this country.”

“Spinning the globe for a spot where it can play for a knowledgeable crowd, conduct cultural diplomacy, and woo some important patrons, the Philadelphia Orchestra has put its finger on Israel. The ensemble will perform in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa the first week in June, after another leg of the tour takes them to Vienna, Paris, and smaller European cities. The Philadelphians have been to Israel only once before, in 1992 as Riccardo Muti was ending his tenure as the orchestra’s fifth music director.”

Robert Everett-Green points out that allegations of Dutoit’s bullying of musicians in rehearsal – allegations repeated in detail last week in two of Montreal’s francophone newspapers – were made very clear by the players in 2002. And when they were, Dutoit abruptly stormed away from his job, and the orchestra’s management was far more concerned with his feelings than those of the musicians. “It’s worth looking at the circumstances that may have led [the board] to brush off the players’ complaints for about 20 years.”

Though 49 of the site’s top 50 tracks are songs from official artist accounts, the site is plagued with secondary accounts posting primary content, all of it loaded with track info designed to game the system’s search algorithms in their favor. If other platforms have problems with “fake news,” SoundCloud has problems with fake music, and in both cases the issue is more feature than bug.

Systemic discrimination occurs when biases like racism and sexism cut across unique organizations. It’s closely tied to, but distinct from, actions we associate with overt bias—a conductor claiming that men are better on the podium or an orchestra defending its discrimination against women and musicians of Asian heritage. Rather, systemic discrimination relies on the abdication of individual responsibility for its consequences, thus rendering it passive and plausibly deniable. In the world of orchestral music, “the system” sustains discriminatory practices even when individuals within it claim to be progressive.