“The work [by Giuseppe Penone], titled Foglie di pietra (2017), was commissioned by the luxury fashion brand Fendi and placed outside its flagship boutique. But getting the work installed required negotiations with an array of state bureaucrats, including the landmark authority and the ministry of culture.”
Category: music
Increasingly, Computers Are Providing The Soundtracks For Video
Jukedeck is a program that enables users to choose the length of a piece of music, its style, the instruments featured and even climactic moments to heighten emotion. “Given what we know about how music’s put together, why can’t computers write music yet?”
Alan Gilbert Wanted To Save The New York Philharmonic. What Happened? ‘Philosophical Differences’
“As Mr. Gilbert prepares to leave, it is clear from interviews that things did not go quite as planned. … And it’s in doubt whether some factions of the organization really want change after all: The pathbreaking new-music happenings that marked Mr. Gilbert’s early tenure have been scaled back in scope and daring in recent years because of what he called, in a recent conversation in his studio at Geffen Hall, ‘financial pressures and, I would say, philosophical differences.'”
Alan Gilbert *Did* Change The New York Philharmonic For The Better, Says Anthony Tommasini
“[He] has expanded the mind-set of the Philharmonic – the major legacy of his tenure. His artistic priorities now seem embedded in the orchestra’s identity. It must champion contemporary music. … It must continue to appoint dynamic performers as artists in residence and give them a say in programming. It must regularly leave Lincoln Center to perform unusual programs in spaces large and small, from National Sawdust in Brooklyn to the massive Park Avenue Armory.”
Can You Ever Really “Know” Classical Music? (The Virtues Of Ignorance)
“Many people, myself included, have criticised classical concert programming for an over-reliance of a limited pool of familiar music. But would we want a concert series like the ‘antilibrary’, a constant stream of new discoveries and world premieres? You could argue that a narrow repertoire is a sensible response to an overwhelming avalanche of potential scores – that at least it allows audiences to develop a deep relationship with a certain set of pieces.”
How Big Data Is Replacing Execs’ Taste And Intuition At The Center Of The Music Biz
“Whereas in the past, the industry relied primarily on sales and how often a songs were played on the radio, they can now see what specific songs people are listening to, where they are hearing it and how they are consuming it.”
Opera And Broadway Have A Fruitful Relationship – If Only More Opera Fans Understood That, Says Anne Midgette
“It seems arbitrary to assert that Broadway musicals exist in a separate category from an art form that happily embraces popular forms such as opéra comique, Singspiel and operetta (all of which involve spoken dialogue interspersed with sung numbers). Those opera lovers who profess to look down on musicals act as though the genre were best represented by Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick.”
What Happens To Art, And Music, When The Sources Of Revenue Just Float Off Into The Ether?
This is a big, big problem: “The digital distribution of music is not fairly compensating the people who create it, and continual touring cannot make up the difference.”
The British Airways ‘IT Problem’ Meltdown Strands Curtis Institute Musicians In London
The first of two groups got as far as the gate when all flights were suddenly canceled, which looks like it was the right thing to do: “When members of the first Curtis group finally got through passport control — as if they were reentering a country they never actually left — they found their luggage right where they had checked it. Apparently, the conveyor belts didn’t even work.”
The Summer Music – Especially Opera – Competition In The UK Is Pretty Fierce
There are betrayals, arguments, backstabbing … and it’s all good for those who love to watch classical music outside in the summer. “Rival conductors’ batons may not yet be clashing in combat, and it has not quite come to picnic-hampers-at-dawn, but there is a new and marked element of serious competition between the growing number of rivals.”