This is Canada, so it’s mixed with hockey: “There are drinking breaks for both performers and audience, and this leads to loud appreciation – even some whooping. It feels like a pub during a hockey game (and indeed, the game was on in one corner).”
Category: music
The San Antonio Symphony Came Back Almost As Soon As It Left
The season will be abbreviated, and the new chair of the board won’t say where the money’s coming from, but it’s on, and “people are dancing in the streets.”
The Mysterious Practice-Room Pianist Who Could Mirror Anyone’s Repertoire
“It is kind of unusual when you have the opportunity to transform these moments when you’re in the cell of a practice room by yourself into a moment actually of communication or connection.”
Bel Canto Star Lawrence Brownlee Commissioned A New Song Cycle To Fit Modern Reality
The winner of 2017’s male singer of the year at the International Opera awards says, “You can’t blind-cast with opera. No one has ever turned me down for a part and said ‘Because he’s black’ or even ‘Because he’s small and black!’ but there’s a code I’ve come to understand – ‘We have a different idea for the role’ is a common one. Change is slow, across the classical world.”
Classical Music’s “Crossover” Problem
“As classical music searches for a wider audience, classical crossover poses an increasing conundrum — not least because it’s attracting exactly the audience that “straight” classical claims to be seeking. The mass audience is generally put off by classical music, which seems, to many outsiders, to present a facade of unwelcoming elitism. The crossover genre, however, offers the same kinds of mellow tonal sounds and rich buttery voices — music to relax to, if you will — without classical music’s perceived strictures or judgments.”
Showing Business Execs What They Can Learn From Orchestras And Conductors
PBS NewsHour goes to visit a session of the Music Paradigm, conductor Roger Nierenberg’s seminar where corporate folks, high-powered doctors and the like study the examples of preparation and teamwork that an orchestra can offer. (video and transcript)
Does Ireland Need A New State-Funded National Orchestra?
If RTÉ does what the world expects it to to, what we will actually need is a new, genuinely national orchestra, directly funded by the State, just as most of our essential national cultural institutions are. It will be interesting to see if any of our politicians will be brave enough to start that particular ball rolling.
We Need To Distinguish Between Creative “Human” Music And That Made By Machines
A distinction is necessary here between creative ‘composing’ and ‘compositing’. Artificial Intelligence generativity (so-called “creativity”) is based on a compositing process; it’s basically all just recombinations of pre-existing data. While it is clear that the human process of creativity lies on a continuum between compositing and composing, a salient aspect of human creativity involves the creation of new ‘data’ rather than the novel recombination of prior ideas.
The Saxophone Capital Of China (Oh Yes, There Is One)
“For more than a century, the region around Sidangkou has been a hub of musical instrument manufacturing, including traditional Chinese instruments like the sheng, a reed pipe, and the di, a bamboo flute. Factories in the region now produce thousands of oboes, trumpets and tubas each year. Yet nothing seems to have captured the imagination of people here like the saxophone.”
San Antonio Symphony Cancels Rest Of Season, ‘Suspends Operations’
“The Symphony Society board met late into Wednesday evening ‘to determine whether there was a path forward for the Symphony Society,’ said Board Chair Alice Viroslav in a statement issued following the meeting … ‘To be clear, this is not the end of the symphony.’ … An attempt on the part of major donors to take over the Symphony’s operations [recently] failed.”