“The phenomenon of multisensory perception can help us to understand why we assign metaphorical properties of softness, roughness or depth to voice. Think of a politician whose voice is flat. Flatness is a multisensory concept because it is both tactile and visual. We can recognise flat surfaces by either touching or seeing them. These sensory impressions inform us about the acoustic characteristics of voice, implying that it does not have variation in tone. Notably, flatness can also convey lack of sympathy and emotion on the part of the speaker.”
Category: music
What A Musician Needs To Survive Today
“You have to know how you’re going to make a living. You have to know how to write a grant proposal, you have to know how to talk to an audience, you have to know how to produce a concert, you have to know how to develop a professional network. This is what it is to be an artist today.”
David Lang’s New ‘Symphony For A Broken Orchestra’ (He Means That Title Literally)
The Pultizer-winning composer (The Little Match Girl Passion) has written the piece for 400 musicians, all playing damaged instruments from Philadelphia’s public school system. (The work was created as a one-time fundraiser – the money will be spent to repair the instruments and return them to Philly classrooms – but other school districts are already asking to perform the score.) Reporter Samantha Melamed checks out a rehearsal and talks to the composer about how to write music for instruments that are, by their natures (because they’re broken), unreliable.
Fired Oregon Bach Festival Director Was Under Investigation For ‘Discrimination [And] Harassment Based On Sex And Race’
A document from the University of Oregon, which operates the festival, showed that, when he was fired in August, former director Matthew Halls was the subject of two complaints. One was the widely-reported joke, made to an African-American singer, that someone who overheard it interpreted as racist; the second was that “Halls does not call on [women] during rehearsals and favors the men. … It is the responsibility of those in power not to perpetuate old patriarchal systems.”
Berklee College Of Music President Addresses Reports Of Faculty Sexual Misconduct
“Berklee College of Music president Roger Brown on Monday told a packed campus-wide forum that the renowned school has terminated 11 faculty members in the past 13 years for sexual misconduct. The admission punctuated an extraordinary day at the music school, with hundreds of students, many holding signs, marching down crowded Boylston Street at lunchtime to a gathering to discuss sexual assault and harassment at Berklee.”
”Marnie’ Screams For Operatic Treatment,’ Writes Nico Muhly, Who Explains How He Gave It One
In this essay the composer talks about why he and librettist Nicholas Wright worked from Winston Graham’s novel rather than the Hitchcock film, how he set a psychiatrist’s session and a fox hunt for the stage, and how to deploy English National Opera’s chorus. (Favorite line, about “the Marnettes”: “The effect should be as if her inner monologue is actually a warped recording of the Tallis Scholars singing a single chord from an obscure Tudor motet.”)
BBC Viewers Upset By Sound Levels For New ‘Howard’s End’ Background Music
The four-episode adaptation by Kenneth Lonergan of E.M. Forster’s novel has drawn plaudits from critics and high viewership, but many viewers have complained that the “most intrusive and dominating” music (as one irate Twitterer put it) frequently drowns out the dialogue. This seems to be a sound mixing problem rather than a musical one, and it evidently is not a new one for the network.
Rules Of The Road For Classical Music Concerts?
“To my colleagues who work in classical music, I have a request. Let’s stop with the rules. If there is in fact something wrong with classical music, consider that it has everything to do with how we talk about it and nothing to do with anything else. And, if you are hearing music by Bach in a church performed by an internationally-known soloist who has been performing this music for nearly seven decades, being reverential is OK, not snobby or elitist. Likewise, some guidelines in the program may be entirely appropriate for a roomful of teenagers new to classical music-going.”
What The Walkman Hath Wrought
There was a time before all of this: “We are simply accustomed now to experiencing music in this deeply personal, albeit solitary, way. We disappear into headphones, stream a song via smartphone from the intangible, infinite web, creating a sonic landscape that mirrors our mood. We walk around the grocery store in Beyoncé-land.”
How Do Composers Survive When They’re Not Working At Universities?
“Merely a generation ago, the unaffiliated or the ‘freelance’ composer was a more common phenomenon in new music. With a more reasonable cost of living in culturally active cities such as New York City or San Francisco, composers could more easily build their lives around the pursuit of their craft, while earning a modest living doing a part-time side job.” No longer. So what do they do?