John Supko: “As Bill [Seaman] and I saw it, human creativity can be defined as making connections – governed by unpredictable, subjective forces – between seemingly unrelated bits of information. Music is particularly well suited to serve as a model for the creative process. Human composers have multiple components of information – melody, harmony, rhythm – at their fingertips. … These elements tend to implicate each other and emerge together from the composer’s imagination. Bill and I wanted to emulate this organic emergence of interrelated elements in the computer.”
Category: music
Paul Jacobs: Classical Musicians Are Not So Much Advocates For Their Art But Apologists
“So much of our understanding of the arts in this country is bound up with the individual tastes of the listener or consumer. The primacy of classical music as an artful or superior genre has gradually diminished. Increasingly, classical musicians are not so much advocates for their art as apologists. This is not a trend I observe, however, in great art museums.”
Angry Ex-Wife Destroys $1M Worth Of Violins In Luthier’s Workshop
“The alleged victim, Daniel Olsen Chen, 62, a Norwegian national living and working in Japan, is a former violinist who maintained a making and repairing workshop in Nagoya. He posted a video of the destruction on his YouTube channel, AV Daniel Violin, and has claimed that in total 54 instruments and 70 bows were damaged, including his own Amati, the value of which he places around 50m yen ($450,000).” (includes video)
How Opera America Helped Spark A New Era In American Opera
“New music is a culture that tends to romanticize risk, and I think we ought to push back on that romanticizing. For all its aesthetic innovation, new music remains a job for many people.” Perhaps the same could be said of new American opera. Debates over its future highlight a complex web of expectations concerning not only the importance of radical artistic vision but also the commercial realities and conventional operatic norms of larger institutions that cannot afford to fail in the same way that smaller organizations might.
Background Music In The Office Is Coming Back (Dept. Of Terrifying Trends From 50 Years Ago)
“For decades, it was thought that playing music in our places of work would boost morale and productivity. Before it terrorised hotel guests and shoppers, Muzak originally set out to rally workers with 15-minute cycles of slowly climaxing, terrible music.” (These days, thank heaven, offices seem to be turning to Spotify.)
Struggling Cleveland Institute Of Music In A Turnaround?
There are a few factors at play here. One is the influence of a new president with a less-than-traditional background — he hails from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s business operations rather than academia. The other is a recently completed effort to assuage the concerns of one of the institute’s accrediting bodies, which institute officials say has made the institution stronger.
They’re Still Making Violins In Stradivari’s Hometown
“In under three minutes, you’ll meet three violin makers who love what they do and are proud to carry on their city’s rich tradition. As you could probably imagine, building instruments of this quality takes time; one luthier reveals she only make a handful in a given year.” (video)
Opera Tampa’s Artistic Director Suddenly Resigns
“[Daniel] Lipton, 76, was the company’s second artistic director, succeeding 17-year director Anton Coppola in 2012. He had completed five years of a six-year employment agreement … His resignation is effective immediately.”
The ‘Gay Jewish Kangaroo’ Who’s Shaking Up German Opera
Barrie Kosky, for the past five seasons artistic director at the Komische Oper, “has had a revitalizing effect on the company, one of three full-time opera companies in Berlin, thanks to his riotous productions and his eclectic repertoire choices.”
Has Classical Music “Recovered” From Atonality?
“The tyranny is now gone and tonality is back. But the restoration of reality has not taken place all at once. What began emerging from under the rubble of 12-tone music back in the 1960s was minimalism. In it, tonality returned with a vengeance but was, at first, more like a patient from a trauma ward gradually recovering consciousness. The traumatized patient slowly comes out of a coma, only gradually recovering motor skills, coordination, movement, and coherent speech. The musical movement known as minimalism is the sometimes painfully slow rediscovery of the basic vocabulary of music: rhythm, melody, and harmony.”