Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who holds an endowed chair at the University of Chicago, identifies three lies (her word) at the heart of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal opera. (She makes fair points, but did she honestly expect that a Viennese comic opera written a century ago – and set 270 years ago – would seem realistic about such matters, or that audiences would take it as such, in 2017?)
Category: music
Detroit Symphony Receives $15 Million Gift
“DSO officials announced a $15 million gift from the William Davidson Foundation. Of that, $5 million comes in the form of a challenge grant, which, if matched, will add to the DSO’s small-but-growing endowment. The balance will support a variety of DSO programs. Three other foundations already jumped in to make that happen.”
Albany Symphony Gets Largest-Ever Donation: $7 Million
The late Heinrich Medicus, a philanthropist and a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy, NY, bequeathed the money specifically for the orchestra’s endowment. “The symphony will also be the beneficiary of half of the undesignated residuals from Medicus’ estate, including property and his art collection, part of which is up for sale this weekend at the Stair Galleries auction house in Hudson.”
Wear Whatever You Want, Just Come See Us, Says Scottish Opera’s New Campaign
“Tongue-in-cheek posters display messages such as ‘you don’t have to dress up for the opera’. The posters, shared on social media to target a younger audience, also dispel perceptions that you need to speak the language to enjoy an opera, or that you’ll need binoculars to see the stage.”
Change La Boheme? Are You Frickin’ Kidding?
“These new takes on this classic of classics raise the question of whether “La Bohème” should be messed with at all. We seem to have an almost instinctive desire for this piece to remain the same, to be the opera we encountered as children. Is that something we should resist or accept?”
When Pierre Boulez Went Electric
Boulez’s goal for the French Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique “was not to replace instrumental with electronic music, but to work so that the two would mingle and, in Boulez’s words, ‘live together like cotton and rayon.'”
A Death-Obsessed Canadian Composer Who Died Young And Violently Gets A Moment Of Warmth And Performance
“The Canadian composer Claude Vivier should be the great downer of modern music. But so shimmering are Vivier’s drones, so sweetly childlike his invented languages and mystical geographies, so energetic his need to communicate his cravings and insecurities, that the effect is one of warmth rather than dread.”
From Broke Alt-Rock Guitarist To In-Demand Hollywood Composer
Tyler Bates, who has scored both Guardians of the Galaxy movies and a whole lot more, says, “The thing I love about film is — as nerve-racking as it is because it’s not like they give me a locked picture to score — it’s frenetic and a triathlon, but when you work with geniuses and studios that have massive investments in a property, you know what it’s like to be alive. You are running alongside failure, everyday, all the time.”
The End Of ‘American Idol,’ And The Dream Of Unity It Once Represented
In the context of Kelly Clarkson, the inaugural winner of the show, and her new album – which is both lightly political and aimed at a casual pop listener – we can see the end of whatever unity the country was thought to possess, musically and otherwise, in 2002.
The Fascinating History Of The Metronome
“The tenacious timepiece seems to have ticked through time immemorial, but its form and application to musical life were hundreds of years in the making, beginning with the 16th-century scientist Galileo’s discovery of the pendulum’s isochromism: regardless of amplitude, the pendulum will take about the same amount of time to complete one period, or back-and-forth swing. This discovery could be applied to timekeeping, Galileo realized.”