Category: music

“Based on the music cognition literature, we propose two hypotheses for why some musical pieces are preferred over others. The first, the Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis, states that unexpected events in music directly lead to pleasure. The second, the Contrastive-Surprise Hypothesis, proposes that the juxtaposition of unexpected events and subsequent expected events leads to an overall rewarding response.”

Matthew Halls, halfway through a four-year contract that saw him take the Oregon Bach Festival in the direction of historically informed performance, says he doesn’t know why he was fired, and the University of Oregon’s press release is not useful (“We look forward to a wider range of programmatic choices, community events, and cross-departmental relationships with UO faculty, staff, and students,” for instance). “Halls said he was not well versed in the specifics of his contract, which was to have expired in 2020. ‘I can’t begin to communicate the personal sadness I’m feeling,’ he said.”

The Salzburg Festival is so jammed with usually superb performances – six or eight every day of the six weeks it runs – that it’s hard to tell if anything has changed since a new artistic director took the helm. It’s still star-focused, and “The Vienna Philharmonic, a luxurious, willful house band, remains formidable.”

Messaien’s “Catalogue of Birds” is “an absurd undertaking for a pianist. Its sprawling score demands that performers master three hours of complex music: the painstakingly transcribed sounds of European birds.” But Kigawa is performing it today in Greenwich Village. How?

OK, this is just cool, especially if you’re mature enough to remember the launch of Voyager in 1977: “Using audio from the original tapes from the 1970s, a small team in California has put the Golden Record on vinyl for the first time. The set contains three LPs and a book of the photos that were encoded in the original record.”

The makers of “Serial” and “S-Town” want you to think so. “As podcasts grow in popularity and ambition, they’re proving an exciting laboratory for original music, essentially creating a new art form.”

Yes, Somalia was under military rule, but it was a military rule that supported the arts and music. One singer from the time:”We had bars in Mogadishu and five nightclubs. We travelled from city to city and performed in hotels and bars. Those were the golden years.”

“Death to American” chants aren’t working, so it’s time for “Rapping with Sailors.” Seriously. “Iranian clerics have long insisted that rap music is the devil’s work, but they had no complaints when Amir Tataloo, a rapper with a hard-partying, gangster-style reputation, turned into a nationalistic admirer of Iran’s military effort in the Persian Gulf.”

Artists, on the other hand, can benefit from the backing of a deep-pocketed establishment to make vast artistic productions that revolutionize not only how an audience responds to an opera, but how they respond to the art. The music, libretto, and elaborate trappings of the opera house provide the armature on which a total artwork can be created. Now it’s just a question of getting the right audience in the seats to witness it.