Good work, Grammys, on the male side of the spectrum, with diverse nominees across major categories. But … “let’s hold off on patting too many backs. Even a casual look at the nominations reveals a woeful shortage of women up for the most coveted Grammys, which include album, record and song of the year.”
Category: music
The Nominated Musicians We Won’t See At The Grammys
The New York Times‘ Jon Caramanica: “The seeming arbitrariness of the Grammy nominating process sometimes provides left-field gifts: unexpectedly excellent nominees in categories that almost certainly will not be televised in prime time. Here is a selection of 17 under-heralded artists as worthy, if not more so, than their better-known compatriots.”
Jane Birkin, Interpreter And Inspiration Of Serge Gainsbourg’s Songs, Talks About His Roots In Classical Music
Birkin, who recorded “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus” with Gainsbourg while they were partners and who kept on singing songs he wrote for her after they broke up, says that many of his songs were rooted in classical music. “He was a pianist at a bar in Le Touquet [a seaside town in northern France], and his father was a classical musician — it was from his upbringing that he knew so much about classical music. Brahms was ‘Baby Alone in Babylone.'”
The Israel Philharmonic’s Biggest Change In Decades
“Founded by Hitler refugees in the 1930s and patronised by the café-dwellers of Tel Aviv, the orchestra has seen its audience grow old and its output stagnate. An influx of Russian musicians and concertgoers in the 1990s gave a brief blip of renewal but the IPO was set on a road to irrelevance. Young Israelis go to clubs, not concerts. Part of the problem has been the IPO’s resistance to change.”
Some Scientific Thinking On Music As A Universal Language
A new study finds categorizing obscure songs by their intended function is surprisingly easy to do—even when they’re the product of a faraway foreign land. Universal patterns of human behavior steer songs “into recurrent, recognizable forms,” writes a research team led by Samuel Mehr of Harvard University. It adds that these commonalities can be detected even as music maintains “its profound and beautiful variability across cultures.”
Some Skepticism About “Music As A Universal Language”
“While music is universal, its meanings are not,” adds Anne Rasmussen, an ethnomusicologist at the College of William and Mary. And those meanings are created both by the people making and hearing the music, and by the entire cultural package that surrounds it. A Bach cantata that was composed to celebrate God, for example, means something very different when played in a 21st-century concert hall or in a New York deli. The meaning of music, in other words, “is not something you can perceive while listening through a pair of headphones,” says Rasmussen.
Pianist Angela Hewitt Injured In Fall Before Concert, Performs Nevertheless
“[The Canadian pianist] took a tumble down a flight of stairs before her concert in Oxford last night, twisting her ankle. But she still managed to carry on with the show. Giacomo Panico reached her in England for the rest of the story.” (podcast)
Inclusive Music (For The Performers Too)
As part of these projects, we formed the Acoustronic ensemble, a mix of disabled and non-disabled musicians. They meet weekly to improvise, compose and perform using digital and acoustic instruments. A team comprising undergraduate, masters and PhD researchers works with the ensemble to investigate digital instrument-building and compositional and improvisational approaches in inclusive music settings.
Opera About Tabasco Sauce (From 1894!) Revived In New Orleans
Tabasco: a Burlesque Opera, composed by George Whitefield Chadwick, was the most popular American opera of the late 19th century: it toured to almost 50 cities before Chadwick pulled it because he wasn’t getting royalties. Now New Orleans Opera is reviving this tale of the original Louisiana hot sauce for the city’s 300th anniversary and the company’s 75th.
Footage Re-Emerges Of One Of Leonard Bernstein’s Last Rehearsals
“Fittingly, it shows him teaching a Copland symphony to students at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, in 1990 – 50 years after he had studied there with Copland.” (includes video)