Reporter Joshua Barone meets Rithy Panh and Kim Sophy, the director and composer of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, which uses both Western and Cambodian instruments as well as traditional smot singing in a memorial for the two million people – and the huge parts of Cambodian culture – wiped out by Pol Pot’s dictatorship in the late 1970s.
Category: music
Why Classical Music Audience-Building Strategies Don’t Work
“Working toward greater diversity in new music is necessary and right. The problem is that we’re putting the cart before the horse. Greater inclusivity isn’t an audience-building strategy—it’s an audience-building outcome. Making inclusivity the focus of strategy actually hurts our efforts. All we do is muddle classical music exceptionalism with easily disproven assumptions about musical taste, in the process blinkering ourselves to certain truths about how people use music in pretty much any other context.”
Want To Be Jealous Of Alex Ross? Here’s What He Got To Hear This Year
The list of remarkable performances and recordings will give you some idea of the musical creativity out there.
How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming The Music Business
Youtube, fueled by their parent company’s artificial intelligence division, Google Brain, has successfully accelerated their recommendation capabilities through a series of micro-improvements. For example, roughly four years ago, YouTube made its first significant improvement to its recommendation algorithm when it decided to value the number of times users spent watching a video more than the number of video clicks per person. With this one move, creator’s saw their view counts decline, who had originally profited from misleading headlines and thumbnails. All of a sudden, higher quality videos which were directly correlated with long watch times came to the forefront. As a result, watch time on YouTube grew 50% year over year over the next three years.
When A Pack Of Opera Stars Goes Out For Karaoke
“It was a bit like going ice skating at Rockefeller Center, only to discover that Michelle Kwan was also there, breezing through axels and lutzes.” A reporter follows Susan Graham, Paul Groves, Jamie Barton, Barry Banks, and other singers currently at the Met as they let loose at a karaoke bar. “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Piece of cake.
America’s First Gospel Music Museum To Open In Chicago
The National Museum of Gospel Music, with a planned opening in 2020, “[will be] on the site once occupied by Pilgrim Baptist Church, known as the birthplace of gospel.”
How Scammers Are Laundering Bitcoin Through iTunes
Some schemers are essentially laundering their bitcoins through song purchases on Apple-owned media store iTunes. Although it’s unlikely to be widespread, the approach results in a legitimate payment from Apple—meaning fraudsters are then largely free to use their ill-gotten gains however they see fit.
Why Are The Met’s Biggest Stars Dropping Out Of The New “Tosca” Production?
Since the Met first announced the new “Tosca” 10 months ago, the David McVicar production has lost its star tenor, Jonas Kaufmann; the soprano singing the title role, Kristine Opolais; its conductor, Andris Nelsons, who is married to Ms. Opolais; and his replacement, James Levine, who was suspended this month after being accused of sexual misconduct. Now the last remaining star of the originally-announced cast has withdrawn.
Four Factors Make The Classical Music World Ripe For Sexual Abuse
“Classical music institutions like the Met don’t have to dig very deep in order to understand where things went wrong. Through decades of research, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center – which rose out of the feminist rape crisis movement of the 1970s – has identified five problematic norms that contribute to an environment in which sexual violence takes place. As a workplace and as an art form, classical music is at risk in four of them.”
Why The Rock Hall Of Fame Needs Fixing
Some 32 years after that first batch of inductees, with most, if not all, of the genre’s most influential practitioners voted in, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is facing its own midlife crisis. Just as rock originally was a hybrid of pop, blues, jazz, swing, country, R&B, gospel and folk, the music spawned a vast multitude of sub-categories in the half-century since its birth.