Category: music

The hall began its life as a vaudeville and movie theatre, but the remodel for the Symphony was a little different: “Unusually for an American hall in the 1960s, Powell Hall was done up in a traditionally European style, with its red, gold and cream decor modeled on the royal chapel at Versailles.”

Is the question why now, or is the question why did hip hop, which has dominated the music scene for decades, take this long to take over the small screen? “Hip-hop is the soundtrack of at least one, probably two generations now. … People used to be afraid of it or consider it the music of gangsters or thugs, or whatever. But now, it’s part of everything … and everyone under the age of 40.”

To be clear, it wasn’t Babymouse from the eponymous children’s graphic novels. It was a baby mouse running around the first 12 rows of the Kennedy Center’s concert hall. “A spokeswoman for the NSO said the Kennedy Center is an old building and that it is treated regularly for pests.”

Both the Opera and the Symphony are on the hunt for new music directors. “There are some telling differences between the two searches, which can be traced back to the different roles filled by a music director in a symphony orchestra or an opera company. But the collective upshot remains the same — sometime around three years from now, the musical profile on either side of Grove Street is going to look and sound very different.”

Even negotiations with the musicians went well – with a new board chair. And the musicians got something they’ve been asking for for (get this) a decade — “that they be allowed to live-stream their performances and post archival recordings on social media to spread the symphony’s message to new listeners, in and outside of S.A.”

The sound defined an entire generation of media-makers and audiences. “Previously, traditional orchestral film scores were used simply to provide background music for onscreen action. So The Graduate’s heavy reliance on the folk-rock songs of the popular duo Simon and Garfunkel was unprecedented: By the time the film was released, many of the major tunes were already well known.”

Britain has been underfunding and defunding music education for years, but suddenly it’s all very surprising that not a single violinist from the country has made it to the shortlist of the Menuhin Competition. Will this change things? (Like, funding things?) “The failure has sparked renewed calls for the government to invest more in musical education to let the next generation compete on the world stage.”

We associate the ’60s with the counterculture and protests against government. But that was also when the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, so often under attack in recent years, were established.

In an article previewing the coming centennial year of the composer-conductor, Los Angeles Times classical critic Mark Swed devotes a few paragraphs to Tom Cothran, who was a high school friend: “I don’t know how Bernstein ultimately felt about Tom. He was a verboten subject. Nor could I ever get Tom to talk much about the personal side of Bernstein. He felt it was his job to keep Bernstein from being too neurotic, but he may well have made him more so in the process. Still, as Bernstein’s inner monster grew, so, too, did his giving side. Shamans can be like that.”

“The new accusers said they were angered by Dutoit’s initial denial and wanted to show the scope of his sexual misconduct during his globe-trotting career. They said the Swiss-born conductor attacked them in Paris, Montreal and the United States over a four-decade period, starting in the late 1970s.”