Category: music

“Elizabeth is a fascinating character, for one thing. She starts with nothing but a horrid upbringing and finds herself singing alongside the most famous music hall performer of the day. I loved the way the story moves around chronologically as well – not something often done in opera – and a particular challenge, especially since I could tell the pace of the piece needed to be very quick. Not to mention the quirky inclusion of historical characters like Karl Marx!”

“The music flowing out of the record player sounds distant, muffled, surrounded by whispers. The singer’s voice alternates moments of clarity with crackly sputters– as if coming out of a wormhole from a windy day in the Fifties. You can get the sense that what is being played is no ordinary vintage record: indeed, on the platter, instead of a vinyl, is the X-Ray of some guy’s skull, cut in the shape of a disc.”

“Young people like to play, so if you can make the material they’re trying to learn more kinesthetic, it helps it to stick a bit better. It’s a way to transform the classroom into a living, breathing art, so that it becomes a part of them, as opposed to material that they’re supposed to absorb and spit back out.”

The “decision caused immediate outrage among some members of the symphony, and a number of them are refusing to play the fund-raiser, saying that allowing the orchestra to be conducted by Mr. Prager, who has suggested that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest, among other contentious statements, would be tantamount to endorsing and normalizing bigotry. Some are even encouraging others not to attend the concert.”

“Since its start in 2008, SoundCloud has been a digital space for diverse music cultures to flourish, far beyond the influence of mainstream label trends. For lesser-known artists, it has been a place where you can attract the attention of fans and the record industry without having to work the usual channels. There is now a huge roster of successful artists who first emerged on SoundCloud, including the R.&B. singer Kehlani, the electronic musician Ta-Ha, the pop musician Dylan Brady and the rapper Lil Yachty, to name just a few.”

Behind the scenes its experience has been like that of a child of warring parents, and its development has been pulled this way and that by the vested interests of its steering group.

When he was a young man in Macon, Georgia, “it was clear he had a good ear and the passion, but for a while, the furthest point he imagined going in his musical career was becoming a band director. And then his worldview opened up” – thanks to Victor Yampolsky at Northwestern University. “Now two years into his role as associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, he’s come a long way from leading a convocation of action figures.”

Things seemed amicable enough at Gilbert’s farewell concerts at Geffen Hall and in the New York City parks. But at a 70th anniversary concert for the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara last week, reports Mark Swed,”there was no acknowledgment of its music director from the orchestra during the bows – no tapping of bows on stands, practically no glances from the players at the conductor. … When [L.A.] Master Chorale Music Director Grant Gershon hugged Gilbert the stage suddenly became radiant, despite the orchestra musicians pointedly looking the other way.”

The program, “which is to begin this coming season, will make the orchestra and the Kimmel [Center] even more organcentric: commissioning new works; programming additional organ concertos and orchestral works that weave organ in and out of the overall texture; holding community concerts, recitals, and postlude concerts; and providing real-time program notes that explain the way the organ works.”

“Whether businesses or researchers, these teams are trying to answer the same question: can machines create music, using AI technologies like neural networks to be trained up on a catalogue of human-made music before producing their own? But these companies’ work poses another question too: if machines can create music, what does that mean for professional human musicians?”