Category: music

Patricia Rozario, a Mumbai-born soprano who made her name singing the music of the late John Tavener and now teaches at London’s Royal College of Music, has been making regular visits to her home country to give young singers advanced training in opera technique – and then creating opportunities for them to perform. Last month, Rozario and her colleagues produced the first opera seen at Mumbai’s old Royal Opera House in some eight decades.

Granted, this isn’t truly a first – an opera singer and a violinist have done the same thing – but it’s for a very good reason.

“Many, many questions remain. Considering how personality-driven the festival was during Helmut Rilling’s long tenure, will a significantly sized audience be willing to show up for a festival that changes direction year to year? Will the festival hold to its Bach roots, or consider them disposable? What is the “true story” behind what appears to be a divorce?”

“Women in audio deal with unique challenges that come from working within a cross-section of two traditionally male-dominated fields. Because of the technical nature of their jobs, they experience issues similar to those many women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—face, such as struggling for respect and being second-guessed by their peers. On top of that are the added pressures of the competitive and fickle music industry.”

“Pamela Z is a collector of “found” sounds, memories, objects, and sensations. She can imagine a sound in nearly anything, a cabinet for example. It’s not unlike Philip Glass’s notion that music is innate in all things. Her studio is filled with found things, including old typewriters, rotary telephones, bits of technologica; plastic water jugs — a staple for sound artists; three gas masks from World War I, picked up for one of her gigs with a trio called The Cube Chicks; a floor-to-ceiling collection of LPs that could fill a record store. In the 1980s, she worked for five years at Tower Records in North Beach.”

Andrew Katzenstein listens to the devotional songs Coltrane created for her California ashram – “a complex and sometimes befuddling blend of gospel, pop, rock, and Indian religious music. … The unexpected combination of styles and influences are held together by the passion and devotion of the congregation. As unusual as the ashram recordings might sound to listeners, they contain the music of a religious community that viewed these performances as a sacrament.”

“To answer this burning question, we turned to Raj Patel of the design and engineering consulting firm Arup Group and Kate Wagner of the viral architecture blog McMansion Hell. She’s also studying acoustics at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, synthesizing her interests in music and architecture. What did we learn?”

“[Lily Arbisser] hopes to someday sing center stage at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, but for now, she works there behind the scenes as a cue-caller: the person responsible for making sure an opera’s subtitles appear at exactly the moment when the performers onstage sing their lines. Each night’s performance is slightly different, and if the timing isn’t just right, it can ruin the punch line to a joke or give away major spoilers.” (audio)

YouTube said Saturday the song’s lyric video broke a record for that site, with more than 19 million same day views. Swift crushed the previous record set by “Something Just Like This” from The Chainsmokers featuring Coldplay, which received 9 million views in 24 hours.