Category: music

Amy Adkins, whose six-year tenure included a bitter 3½-month labor dispute at the beginning of this season, departs in July to head a hospital foundation.

Until about three weeks ago, the entire ensemble had been expecting to give the first concerts ever by an American orchestra in the country as part of this year’s East Asia tour. But Mongolia’s suffering through a severe economic crisis, and all that could be salvaged is a three-day visit by 18 of the Philadelphians. David Patrick Stearns (who’ll be with them) gives a preview of what’ll be happening – and explains why the Mongolians only gave three weeks’ notice that the whole orchestra couldn’t come.

“It’s a circular problem: classical music is a field strongly defined by role models and mentor relationships, and with few broadly visible women at the top, only so many young women feel compelled to enter and ascend the ranks. And due to concerns about optics and impropriety, the close mentoring of female students by male teachers can be fraught and complicated. But grim statistics and interpersonal dynamics aren’t the only factors that reinforce this imbalance: it’s also the subtle currents of problematic gender messaging—in academia, the media, and the culture at large—that can toxify the soil in which young female musicians hope to grow their careers.”

“It was composer pitted against composer: uptown vs. downtown, tonal vs. atonal, left brain vs right brain, and these musicians were NOT pulling any punches. Composers were antagonizing each other, questioning each other’s validity, and bad-mouthing one another; it was like the second half of the 20th century was when Western Music went through middle school, and it was brutal! … On this episode of Meet the Composer, we unravel one of the most contentious periods in classical music’s history.” (podcast)

Just now they’re in Helsinki, the start of a nine-city European tour under the baton of Osmo Vänskä. As Curtis president and former Philadelphia Orchestra principal violist Roberto Díaz tells David Patrick Stearns, “It looks great on paper, but actually doing it is really, really hard work. Preparing for events like this is a huge part of their educations.”

Joep Beving, who lives in Amsterdam, performed and recorded his “mood music” album, Solipsism, for the enjoyment of his family. Then, partly for fun, he made it available on music-streaming service Spotify. He never imagined that the contemplative, atmospheric piano tunes would draw such a vast audience worldwide. But such was the popularity of Solipsism that four record companies were soon fighting over him, and he has now been signed by Deutsche Grammophon (DG).

Linda Reichert, who co-founded the city’s Network for New Music in 1984, will step down as artistic director at the end of next season. “In its 33 years, the Network for New Music ensemble, flexible in size and instrumental makeup, has performed more than 500 new works plus 138 commissioned by the organization itself.”

That’s what Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter is doing, and Midgette “understand[s] the instinct. The performing arts have increasingly devolved into a field in which artists become cogs in a machine operated by other people, from managers and programmers through to stage directors and conductors. … Putting artists in the driver’s seat may seem like an ideal corrective. But bringing artists in as programmers, in capacities they’re not trained in, doesn’t necessarily alter the current model. Indeed, it may reaffirm it.”

A new study by Music Week magazine shows it now takes an average of 4.53 writers to create a hit single. The publication analysed the 100 biggest singles of 2016, and found that only four were credited to a single artist.