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Engagement in music activities among young people aged 11 to 15 has been on a slow and steady decline since it reached a peak in 2011/12 when 77% reported participating. But this proportion has fallen dramatically over the last year from 70% to 61%.”
The opera is still being written, but it had its first major performance in Little Rock, at Central High School, to an audience that included some of the nine who integrated the school these 60 years ago. “In a scene in which the students explain why they volunteered to integrate the school, unaware of the dangers they would face, [Minnijean Brown Trickey] heard her own words from long ago sung back to her:
‘I sort of loosely thought,
So, well, why not?
I’m beautiful, I’m smart,
I’m talented. How hard,
How hard could this be?'”
During the many hours of Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” the reporter says, “I felt, by turns, agitated, frozen and delirious. But I also left with the clearest mind and best hearing I’ve ever known. Here’s how it happened.”
This month, for the inaugural concert, that means immigration. The orchestra’s founder and conductor: ” want people to leave the concert hall with the idea that orchestras can connect to current events. This is a perfect opportunity for classical music to shake the dust off its programming and become an active, viable part of the community. By taking a stance on social justice and doing a program on immigration, I hope we’ll encourage other orchestras to be movers and shakers.”
Soprano Charity Tilleman-Dick: “I went into the hospital with an epic set of cankles — my ankles were swollen to the size of pachyderm ankles. I thought that they were going to give me some diuretics and let me leave, but the following morning, I woke up. It was to the news that there were lungs, it was a match and we were going to Cleveland immediately to have a transplant.”
“The engagement with music is one of the most universal activities of humans that does not have a direct link to our survival as a species. Nobody ever died from music depravation, yet we work and worship to music, dance and court to music, make love and relax to music, rejoice and grieve with music. With the developments in migration, travel and technology over the past 70 years (which in retrospect we will probably regard as the most significant period of musical change of the past two millennia), two important things have happened.”
“In a new Reddit AMA with Darren Aronofsky, the director was asked by a commenter named chickenmagic (of course) if he considered staging his new movie as a play, to which he responded, ‘johan johansson and i are thinking about turning it into an opera.'” (Jóhannsson composed the score for the film.) This could make sense – indeed (as some have observed), it could make more sense than the movie does.
“The Metropolitan Opera, which has continued to struggle at the box office and face what it calls ‘economic challenges,’ has offered voluntary buyouts to 21 of its 243 administrative employees.”
“The call for attention to numerous details such as watching the conductor, listening to the other voices in harmony, reading the music and/or remembering the words all contribute to reaching this attentive, aware, and accepting state.”
Jon Caramanca checks out the finals at Carnegie Hall: “There were groups striving to make a cappella their lives, groups that formed as passion projects and groups that seemed intent on dismantling the a cappella establishment from within by taking advantage of the competition’s open format to import styles of singing you won’t see at most college pre-frosh weekends. At times, and especially during the awards portion of the evening, that made for a confusing mandate, with global folk songs pitted against choral lite-gospel, and smarmy pop-rock alongside the familiar complex multipart vocal harmonizing (with vocal percussion!) that is a cappella’s public face.”
