Category: music

A Swiss humanoid robot is to conduct a Tuscan orchestra in the works of Verdi alongside Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. The robot, called YuMi, will be the closest a humanoid has come to mastering the nuances of a human orchestra director when he performs.

Disclosing the BBC would see a draft of the speech, he joked : “But of course, if I start to speak something completely different, I don’t think anyone can stop me.

“It was my first visit to the Bayreuth Festival, and I was wrestling with conflicting emotions. There was the thrill of realizing my long-held dream of hearing Richard Wagner’s music in the opera house he built, where some of my favorite recordings were made. But there was queasiness, too, at the inescapable memories of old photos showing the theater defiled during the Nazi era, festooned with swastikas and visited regularly by Hitler. Then I stepped outside at intermission on Saturday evening and checked my phone.”

Alan Iverson: “Ellington could connect all the dots—the social, the modernist, the intellectual, the populist, the personally poetic—for a vision of American music truly epic in scope. As great as Evans was, he didn’t have that kind of command. Fifty years ago, the basic connection to a larger audience was slipping away. The integrity of the song was getting diluted by the scale. A kind of darker and mysterious undercurrent was giving way to something lighter in affect.”

“Throughout its 80-year history, the choir has performed for presidents, on television and radio, and at places like Carnegie Hall and the Academy Awards. The choir toured the country and world and performed as many as 100 concerts each year.” But in recent years the school has been plagued by declining enrollment, cash shortages, and a sexual abuse scandal.

On Twitter, people have called the song the best thing to ever happen to me,” and another claimed “you’ve just blessed my life in the most wonderful and unexpected of ways.”

“With some interruptions, they document two Dylan shows from 1965, near the beginning of that fateful tour: one in San Francisco on September 11, 1965, and the other in San Jose from the following evening. As you might expect, the performances are enough to knock you out, but the sound quality is up and down.” (Alas, they’ve been removed from YouTube.) Andy Cush tells the story.

That’s what the lead singer says about David T. Little’s next opera, Artaud in the Black Lodge (yes, it’s a Twin Peaks reference), whose first part is getting a concert premiere in Los Angeles. (By the way, David Lynch has, in fact, opened a nightclub.)