Graham Strahle writes about the results of a study of 40 young adults who attended concerts explicitly designed to cut down on concert-hall formality.
Category: music
Musicians Are Being Warned Not To Talk About Influences On Their Work Our Of Fear Of Copyright Charges
A recent court judgment has worried many in the music industry that acknowledging music and musicians who influenced you could lead to charges of copyright…
The Slow Fade Of Classical Music Journalism – And The (Early) Signs Of Its Revival
A longread by Joseph Carman surveys the damage of the past few years, especially at regional newspapers, and the newer fora in which coverage of classical music is surviving and growing. As ArtsJournal’s own Doug McLennan tells Carman, “We’re in that period where it’s not obvious yet what’s going to win out as the best way of doing all this. But I have no fears at all that it’s simply going to vanish. It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s an evolution. And evolution is painful sometimes.”
Pop’s Attention Economy Is Seriously Distracted
“It’s harder to devote the time to finding out about and writing about a new band’s debut or second release. So you have an increasing number of albums that are released and sink without trace because something from one of the more established acts came along, attracted everyone’s attention and few people spent the time required to decipher the new act’s work.”
Music Meta-Data – If It’s Missing, Does It Exist?
“The back of the original CD, and the LP, lists personnel. There is studio information and other details. On other releases there might be liner notes or additional images. This material is what I fed on as a young listener, and I’m still hungry for it today. Much of it disappears when I rip a disc to my hard drive, and online services generally don’t fill the gaps. Sure, background is available to varying degrees in a constellation of mutually supportive and competitive complementary services, from Discogs to Genius.com to Wikipedia to AllMusic.com, but that collective effort doesn’t satisfactorily fill the metadata void left when online albums are shorn of their contextual information.”
How New Generation Classical Musicians Are Selling Their Art
Nadia Sirota: “When I got to Juilliard in 2000, I encountered a pretty sad, fatalistic attitude: We’re teaching you something we all love and believe in but we don’t know how to get you employed.” She and her friends were energized by that depression, convinced that a) classical music couldn’t possibly be dying since it felt so intense and essential to them, and b) the only way to save it was to sell it to their uninitiated peers.
Does Opera Need Movie Directors To Save The Art Form?
“With all due respect, opera critics risk missing what the rest of us will see and hear in the new era in which an increasingly significant portion of the audience is at cinema relays: the cross-cutting between scenes, the aesthetic reconstruction of theatre-bound drama through montage and even, sometimes, sophisticated sound design denied to mere opera directors. Just the things, in fact, film directors are good at.”
The Countertenor Pushing His Fach Into The 21st Century
Anthony Roth Costanzo has ” pushed beyond the old-music limitations of traditional countertenors, performing new works written for him by composers including Nico Muhly, Jake Heggie, Suzanne Farrin, Steven Mackey and Matthew Aucoin.” New music star Claire Chase says, “what Anthony is doing is making that tool [the countertenor voice], with its range and its versatility, viable for composers in the 21st century.”
Another Replacement In The Met’s ‘Tosca’ – But This One Is James Levine (!)
The new production by director David McVicar, which opens at the Met’s New Year’s Eve gala, has already lost its original star tenor (Jonas Kaufmann) and soprano (Kristine Opolais). Now its planned conductor, Andris Nelsons (Opolais’s husband), has withdrawn as well – and he’s being replaced by a maestro who is certainly available and knows his way around the house and the score. (But with Levine’s fragile health and this production’s bad luck, we can only hope he actually makes it.)
Osmo Vänskä Will Stay With Minnesota Orchestra Until At Least 2022
“The orchestra announced Monday morning that the longtime music director has signed a new, three-year contract through its 2021-22 season. The extension came early – Vänskä’s current contract expires at the end of the 2018-19 season. … The new contract would extend his total tenure to 19 years, matching the orchestra’s two longest-serving music directors, Emil Oberhoffer and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.”