Category: music

“The company is looking for a 2-per-cent rollback [in compensation] across the organization. … The atmosphere among staff has been described by someone with knowledge of the situation as ‘a bit of a revolt.'”

“Mahler said his time would come; the question now, for me, is when it will go. For the symphonies, up until the last, are all flawed, in different ways, but primarily because they peddle sentimentality as courage, heroism, defiance and piety.”

Music actually isn’t universal – or at least its meanings aren’t. “Beethoven’s Ninth is an especially slippery reference point, and may have triggered very different associations among guests at the summit. The message Ms. Merkel probably intended to send — promoting a culture of tolerance and brotherhood — may have been garbled.”

The regulations are a problem, stifling creative growth, but so is expensive real estate. “Hong Kong’s indie bands are forever searching for places to perform — a further indignity for working-class musicians and fans in a financial hub where the night life caters largely to people on corporate salaries..”

The city’s former mayor Emanuel Cleaver, during whose administration the museum was opened, says that the financially troubled museum – in a building owned by the city, with artifacts owned by the city, and with a third of its budget coming from the city – needs the entire city to view it as a point of pride. City Councilor Quentin Lucas: “When you look at the successful museums in Kansas City, those that have broader buy-in from a larger community are the ones that are successful.” But how to make that happen?

Composer Pierre Sauvageot’s piece “mixes building noises with classical tones” – and the residents, who also speak various words or phrases as part of the piece.

Mark Hanson will become only the fifth executive director of the Symphony since the position was created in 1939. Like his predecessors, he combines training in arts management with a history as a practical musician.

“‘Classical’ and ‘contemporary’ are old-school binary. They are market-driven categorisations that have become less and less applicable since musique concrète, since the AACM, since the cassette tape, since the internet, since globalisation. Now is the age of cross-pollination. Maybe now is the age of no terms at all.”

“How did they choose that particular pitch? Was there some kind of mega-music conference where the powers that be decided that A440 was to be the tuning standard? Yes. Yes there was. Several, in fact.”

In recent decades, “Toscanini’s musical reputation has faded badly. Some of his old fans have shifted their loyalty to the work of other conductors—to Furtwängler, say, whose soulful expressiveness and spontaneity have been held up as musically and emotionally superior to Toscanini’s fiery propulsiveness. In the revisionist view, Toscanini rushed through passages that other conductors would turn into contemplation or mystery or sheer loveliness. He offered a maximum of line, a minimum of texture; he was all athlete, no philosopher.”