Category: music

For example: “Head-bobbers: Audience members who fall asleep during concerts. ‘Hey, Bob. Check out the head-bobber in the front row.'”

The old company, Opera Ireland, was shut down in 2010 to make way for a new Irish National Opera – which was never actually formed. Now two smaller companies who share an artistic director are being merged: they’ll form the main resident company in the capital, Dublin, with some productions traveling to Wexford and Cork.

“Nielsen released its latest annual midyear music report, and thus far in 2017, on-demand audio streams topped 184 billion, up 62.4% over the same time period last year. When video streams are added to the equation, the total soars to 284 billion streams, an increase of 36.4% versus the first half of 2016. The gains in streaming have been more than enough to offset the continued decline of physical and digital sales: overall audio consumption has grown 8.9% despite a 17% dip in the former and a 19.9% drop in the latter.”

“We have started to make music of today part of our normal way of doing business. We’re not restricting music of living composers to a far corner of the summer and calling it ‘new music week.’ That sort of new-music ghetto is, to me, not the best way to present it. It suggests that new music is its own thing, and not connected with anything else. We think this music belongs on the same concert as Beethoven, Dvorak, and Stravinsky.”

Speaking in May over lunch at a restaurant here, Anja Harteros, 44, politely but firmly deflected certain questions about her personal life. “These are private reasons,” she said, “that I didn’t want such big travel, with big distance from home.”

“Minczuk was appointed music director of the Theatro Municipal Orchestra of São Paulo earlier this year. He is also the music director laureate of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra in Canada and conductor emeritus of the Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira in Rio de Janeiro. He recently completed a 10-year term in Calgary, becoming the longest-running music director in its history.”

In the U.S., it gets played on the Fourth of July a lot. Wait, what? “We think of the 1812 Overture as this very American piece and we play it on the Fourth of July for whatever reason, which is just nutso for so many reasons. Last year, I watched a very grown man cry to this piece of music and I was like, ‘Are you sure?” Do you even know what it’s about? Have you just been assuming the ‘1812 Overture’ is about the American War of 1812. Guess what? It’s not!!'”

Music isn’t like natural sounds, and it isn’t like speech. “Music conveys meaning since all its constituent sounds – notes – elicit tiny emotional responses, and these are locked together in a coherent narrative through imitation.”

What’s happening in the wig shop, the orchestra green room, the opera ballet rehearsal room and many more departments that each fied into the master illusion.