Category: music

“The rapidly raised $50 million was a coup for Deborah Borda, who has only been the orchestra’s president and chief executive officer for a few months but is already putting her stamp on the organization. Ms. Borda has pushed the Philharmonic to rethink the costly and disruptive plans to rebuild its Lincoln Center home, hired a new executive team, and turned her attention to the shaky finances of the orchestra, which has run deficits for most of the current century.”

In a new, small-scale study, a Wesleyan University research team led by Psyche Loui and Emily Przysinda report the brains of jazz musicians are uniquely attuned to surprising sounds. Electronic monitoring revealed these players have “markedly different neural sensitivity to unexpected musical stimuli,” the researchers write. These musicians are trained not only to anticipate unpredictable turns, but also to engage with them in a positive, creative way. That dynamic reflex stimulates creative thinking.

Music is a product of a particular time and place and the context in which it is created can be dark, violent, exploitative, and even demonic.  To think seriously about music it is necessary to reckon with the problematic role it can play in culture.

“We are colleagues from different areas of the Penn State campus: One of us is a professor of meteorology, and the other a professor of music technology. Since 2014, we have been working together to sonify the dynamics of tropical storms. In other words, we turn environmental data into music. By sonifying satellite videos like those often seen in weather reports, we hope that people will better understand how these extreme storms evolve.” (includes video)

With his bullish idealism, Daniel Barenboim is putting a stamp on the State Opera and its satellite organizations that increasingly defines a large segment of Berlin’s cultural identity in his own image.

“The cult of the maestro has thrived precisely because of the uniquely difficult demands of the music: great power and privilege is sycophantically bestowed on those perceived to be geniuses, and behaviour that would be unacceptable in other contexts may be excused or swept under the carpet; different moral standards can be applied to them by virtue of their artistic brilliance.”

“A lot of old fellas are buying reissues of the records they had in their youth before replacing them with CDs, which they’re now getting rid of so they can buy the vinyl again. We’re talking Led Zep, Pink Floyd, etc – the usual suspects. But the main problem is an inability to plan releases properly. To promote a record you need to have a release date and a certain amount of time before that date to promote it. If you don’t know when your stock will arrive, it’s hard to set a release date … and if the record sells out fast, you need a re-press now, not several months later.”

That’s because, law enforcement noted, “the man accusing Mr. Levine of sexual abuse there three decades ago had been 16 at the time — which was then the age of consent.”

Why? Well: “The deal gives Spotify exposure to the Chinese music consumer market, as the country is not one of the 61 regions it currently operates in. The company is widely expected to list its shares on the stock market next year.”