Category: music

John Haskell has a very Cagean – or Beckettian, or Joycean – experience: “I was craning my ears, or pricking up my ears, or opening the metaphorical doors of hearing, and we don’t have a word for what the mind does, the way it turns from object to object, turning from the moment in front of it to another moment, to a past or a future, and having heard the subway sounds and the voices behind the wall, I expected to hear a candy wrapper being opened, the crinkling cellophane echoing through the audience like music, or ‘music,’ but there was no cellophane wrapper. But in thinking about the cellophane wrapper I was hearing the music, which was part of the let’s-make-art-out-of-anything spirit that was in the air in 1952, when Cage composed 4’33”.”

As Renata Scotto once said, “You want to climb the mountain. You know you are supposed to climb the mountain. But it is so difficult.” What makes it so difficult? James Jorden gives a thorough breakdown of the part’s challenges, musical and dramatic, with audio and video examples.

“What we were looking for were moments when you could see the intersection between the opera and the city, and a thread that went right around Europe. We weren’t looking at the whole history of opera. We started from the time it became a public entertainment.”

“Slatkin criticizes management and musicians about equally in his overview. The former remained quiet for too long about its mounting financial troubles, and the latter failed to pose early questions about funding when times were flush. The musicians’ side issued misleading statements, Slatkin charges. Management should have granted the demand for an independent audit of its books.”

“The driving, spikey rhythm of Mars from Gustav Holst’s The Planets is probably not the most comforting sound to hear through a stethoscope. A UK scientist, Elaine Chew is analysing the heartbeat patterns of people with arrhythmia – an irregular heartbeat – and turning them into classical music, in what she hopes may become an important diagnostic tool for doctors.”

Take that, Met! “Since the opening of the company’s 2017/2018 earlier this month, subtitles are offered from suitably dimmed screens, in English, German, Italian, French, Russian and Japanese. A pre-performance information system provides such useful things to know as plot synopses, cast lists, and any general current news to do with the activities of the company … And in the near future, further adaptations are planned so that guests can even order their interval snacks or drinks from the comfort of their own chair.”

The machine called YuMi made its podium debut last week in Pisa, conducting the Lucca Philharmonic with tenor Andrea Bocelli and soprano Maria Luigia Borsi. Says the conductor who trained YuMi, “We basically had to find time to understand his movements. When we found the way, everything was pretty easy.”

“New England Conservatory boasts having one of the nation’s greatest small concert venues with Jordan Hall, but the 150-year-old school in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood has still struggled with a shortage of space. Hoping to solve that problem, the school [unveiled] a new, $85 million building on Thursday.”

Previously undisclosed emails reveal that the colleague at the center of the inquiry, the countertenor Reginald Mobley, denied to festival administrators that Matthew Halls had been racially insensitive. But clear reasons for the firing remain elusive. And the attempt to deal with an ugly personnel issue sotto voce — last week, university officials agreed to pay Mr. Halls $90,000 as part of a settlement with a nondisparagement clause — has resulted in a crescendo of criticism, from the festival’s hometown, Eugene, Ore., to England.

Described as the “most powerful song of the 20th century” by the Library of Congress, the suit against the existing copyright holders was brought last year by the same legal team who had successfully disputed longstanding ownership claims over Happy Birthday to You.