Category: music

“The reality is that humans adapt. It’s the tools that become irrelevant. It’s the heart that makes the music. I think people will find a way to embrace it. It’s inevitable.”

It’s an ancient Greek double pipe that has a bassoon-like reed, holes you can cover with a finger or a sliding device, and it was the coolest thing in Greek performance. “It takes a lot of practice,” says one modern aulos-creator and player.

Says the editor of a new anthology about women whose lives were changed by the women of country, “What’s amazing about these women is the way they were phoenixes without the fire: They rose up because it was their music, their family, their way out. I think almost every woman written about has had those moments where they had to face demons as they created such deeply personal music; but they all got there.”

“The case of Elliott Carter stands apart from the usual pattern of posthumous appraisals, not least because Carter lived to within a few weeks of his 104th birthday, and kept composing almost to the end. He may be the only composer in the history of Western music to have done so. Rather than leaving us just a handful of unusual works that slot neatly into the dotage thought inevitable before the Romantics or the transcendence Adorno heard in late Beethoven, Carter wrote dozens of pieces in a wide variety of genres. If Aaron Copland’s experience of composing (or rather not composing) in old age was like the turning off of a faucet, Elliott Carter’s was like whitewater rafting.”

His 1906 essay warns that mechanical music is “sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels” and was becoming a “substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.” Sousa was referring in this essay to recorded music, but also to mechanical instruments that played themselves–such as the player piano.

“For the year leading up to the 100th anniversary of its first concert on Oct. 24, 1919, the [Los Angeles Philharmonic] has hired Frank Gehry to design a permanent home for music director Gustavo Dudamel’s YOLA youth education project. The L.A. Phil also will premiere an unheard-of 50 new works that it has commissioned. It will reach out to community groups to distribute 10,000 free tickets to concerts and events, and it will partner with dozens of local and international arts organizations, from the organizers of Hollywood’s Academy Awards to London’s Royal Ballet.

Yes, staid old Philadelphia – where just 12 years ago poor Michael Hersch had a major premiere booed; where, as recently as 1986, fully half the audience walked out of Pelléas et Mélisande, for Pete’s sake – has started embracing contemporary classical. There’s Opera Philly’s O17 festival, the new October Revolution fest, a daring series at the Barnes Foundation, plus now-established outfits like The Crossing and FringeArts; next spring there’s even going to be Stockhausen’s 14-hour chamber-music cycle Klang. There are four serious new-music events in just the next week. David Patrick Stearns explains how the change happened and talks to some of the key players involved.

“A Globe investigation has uncovered a culture of blatant sexual harassment at Berklee with at least three male professors… allowed to quietly leave since 2008, after students reported being assaulted, groped, or pressured into sex with their teachers, according to court documents and interviews with more than a dozen people. Administrators at the renowned music school tolerated lecherous behavior, former Berklee students and employees said, and often silenced the accusers through financial settlements with gag orders attached.”