Category: music

“The Wortham [Theater Center] was more damaged than originally thought and although Managing Director Perryn Leech and Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers say they don’t know where they will land, they know they have to go.”

That “information gap” refers to the data around who helped create a song. Publishers might keep track of who wrote the underlying composition of a song, or the session drummer on a recording, but that information doesn’t always show up in a digital file’s metadata. This disconnect between the person who composed a song, the person who recorded it, and the subsequent plays, has led to problems like writers and artists not getting paid for their work, and publishers suing streaming companies as they struggle to identify who is owed royalties. “It’s a simple question of attribution,” says Panay. “And payments follow attribution.” Over the last year, members of the OMI—almost 200 organizations in total—have worked to develop just that.

“The 2017 Proms welcomed nearly 300,000 concert-goers through the doors of the Royal Albert Hall, with one in five purchasing standing tickets which are sold on the day for £6. More than 35,500 tickets were bought by people attending the Proms for the first time and 10,000 under-18s attended concerts across the season.”

“Matthew Halls was removed as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival following an incident in which he imitated a southern American accent while talking to his longstanding friend, the African-American classical singer Reginald Mobley. It is understood a white woman who overheard the joke reported it to officials at the University of Oregon, which runs the festival, claiming it amounted to a racial slur.”

“In late June, the university lavished Halls with a new long-term contract containing a large pay increase that took him into six figures a year. But, less than two months later, the University of Oregon abruptly terminated that contract, ordering Halls to immediately cease any festival-­related work, and told him that it was scrapping tentative plans for him to teach at the UO.”

The star’s desire for a space “as personal and as intimate as possible” is certainly an intriguing goal, and what his performance at the Walter Kerr would freshly reveal is exciting to contemplate. It’s depressing, though, to watch as the running-up of prices ushers in an era of hard feelings.

“Although one of the greatest in classical music, the quartet literature is designed to be played in small venues, and performance fees have to be divided four ways. Making a secure living is hard. With the honourable exception of the University of Victoria, which has engaged the Lafayette String Quartet, Canada’s universities seem reluctant to emulate the example of their American counterparts in providing a secure working environment for these custodians of some of our greatest music. Meanwhile, they soldier on.”

Its six wizened members range from a relatively youthful 63 to a scarcely believable 97-year-old trumpeter. Jazz is more readily associated with New Orleans or New York than Shanghai, but the Chinese city has its own proud jazz heritage that flickers on. The Peace Hotel, completed in 1929 and a prime example of art deco architecture on Shanghai’s historic riverside Bund area, is in many ways central to it.

Silvestre Revueltas “wasn’t exactly a nationalist; folk music didn’t much interest him. He did, however, relish the popular idioms of his land. His music may call to mind Stravinsky at certain times, Mahler at others, as well as Bartók and Edgard Varèse, yet pulsing through its pages are the soulful sounds of the bands playing across the Mexican countryside, in villages and on ranches. This isn’t fusion so much as it is a celebration of both high and low, the refined and the rustic. What makes his body of work all the more astonishing is that Revueltas largely produced it during one turbulent decade – the final 10 years of his life.”