Category: music

“When listening to sad (as opposed to) happy music, people withdraw their attention inwards, and engage in spontaneous, self-referential cognitive processes,” reports a research team led by Liila Taruffi of the Free University of Berlin. “Our study suggests that the multifaceted emotional experience underlying sad music, often described by listeners as melancholic yet pleasant, shapes mind-wandering in a unique way.”

The audience laughed and cheered. It was an odd feeling sitting in that concert hall with a press ticket in my pocket and knowing that nearly everybody around me was laughing at a critic’s alleged narrow-mindedness. (Aside: Is something bad but historically “relevant” worth performing?)

“BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson poured all of his soul and much of his fortune into seeing the orchestra flourish. But his ambition for it to rival the best European orchestras remained out of reach until he lured the German Kaiser’s favorite conductor to Boston” in 1912. Five years on, no less than Teddy Roosevelt declared, “Muck ought not to be allowed at large in this country!”

“And this is key: [Yasuhisa] Toyota” – known for Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie – “played a leading role in choosing the team that will make it possible, as [former Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan] Mills puts it, ‘to build from the inside out rather than the outside in.'”

Marin Alsop, JoAnn Faletta, Simone Young and others have broken many barriers in the orchestra world. Anne Midgette looks at the generation of women behind them ready to take the podiums.

Also, can there be such a thing during a time of tenuous and not at all secure employment, if employment there is at all? “Mid-career generally seems to refer to someone who has spent a good number of years pursuing their vocation following their formal studies, but is not yet approaching old age and retirement. This can be a somewhat confusing designation for many of us.”

“All music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before. I think all great music exists somewhere along that. In music, you’re speaking a language of things heard already. You’re just rearranging it in a way that is unique. You use sonorities that have been heard before, like I use major chords. But even if you don’t use major chords, everything is along the lines of some kind of reference.”

It finished the season in the black to the tune of $7,123. The period orchestra also reported a record-breaking year in donations, with more than 1,000 members and donors giving more than $975,000: a 63 per cent increase over the previous record set during the 2015/16 season.

“The past few decades of work in the cognitive sciences of music have demonstrated with increasing persuasiveness that the human capacity for music is not cordoned off from the rest of the mind. On the contrary, music perception is deeply interwoven with other perceptual systems, making music less a matter of notes, the province of theorists and professional musicians, and more a matter of fundamental human experience.”

And that’s not exactly common in opera. So which work is this? The Mother of Us All, Virgil Thomson’s and Gertrude Stein’s fantasia about Susan B. Anthony and the fight for women’s suffrage in the U.S. (The description is Anthony Tommasini’s.)