Category: music

Sarah Cahill: “Composers and musicians need validation, but more than that, they need to feel their work is understood. I see that hunger when guests come on my radio show and talk about themselves, and I hear it from friends who throw everything they have – emotionally and financially and professionally – into a big new project, only to have it vanish into the ether without a trace. We’re all grateful for the excellent music critics in this country, but still miss the freedom and the space they once had, as we miss the daily ritual of reading a beautifully crafted music review.”

It hasn’t been said officially, but it’s widely rumored that her upcoming run as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier at the Met will be her final appearance in staged opera. Charles McGrath talks to one of her closest friends, her college voice teacher, a former manager, a former publicist, Met General Manager Peter Gelb, and others who have figured prominently in her career.

“Ryan Nunez had been a member of the chorus for a number of years and worked on staff as the group’s Administrative Coordinator since 2014.”

The 44-year-old tenor, famous for his skill at high-flying, difficult Rossini roles, has been named Artistic Advisor. “One of his first projects is to help develop a new opera with jazz musicians Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter that’s expected to premiere in 2019. One of his big goals is to show young people in Philadelphia that opera is cool.” Peter Dobrin does a Q&A with Brownlee about his plans – which, not to worry, include continuing to sing.

“It’s 2017, and EDM, a disposable culture from the start, is rotting in the trash. Battered by its association with bro culture and drug deaths, the genre has become America’s anthem for vomit and sexual coercion. Since the last time I was in Miami, SFX has gone bankrupt, Avicii has retired, and even Skrillex, once the genre’s poster child, is returning to his rock roots and collaborating with Incubus. So what happens to Miami Music Week, once the epicenter of America’s corporate dance music bubble, in today’s post-EDM world?”

The LA Philharmonic’s Youth Orchestra Los Angeles operates in an area where the high school graduation rate is 50%. But kids in this program? “The statistics coming out of the HOLA’s academic enrichment, visual arts and music programs speak to why demand is so high. Of the 63 students in those programs who were high school seniors in 2015, 100% of them graduated, and 97% went on to college.”

“The legislation offers tax breaks for recording and film scoring projects, as well as attracting groups who want rehearsal space to prepare for tours. If a touring band holds rehearsals and begins their tours in Georgia, and spend over $500,000 here, they will receive a 15 to 20 percent tax credit. Recording projects in Georgia that spend a minimum of $100,000 over a year’s time would also receive a 15 to 20 percent tax credit.”

“Rock music is in its jazz phase And I don’t mean it’s having a Kamasi Washington/Thundercat moment of extreme hipness. I mean it’s like Ryan Gosling’s version of jazz in La La Land: something fetishised by an older audience, but which has ceded its place at the centre of the pop-cultural conversation to other forms of music, ones less tied to a sense of history. Ones, dare I say it, more forward looking. For several years, it seemed, I was asked by one desk or another at the Guardian to write a start-of-year story about how this was the year rock would bounce back. But it never did. The experts who predicted big things for guitar bands each year were routinely wrong. No one asks for that story any longer.”

“The music industry remains greatly diminished since its turn-of-millennium heights: 2016’s $7.7 billion in revenue is only half of the approximately $15 billion that was being made in 1999. The internet—piracy, cheap single sales, and free streaming—largely caused the declines seen in the 2000s. So if streaming is helping now, it is first helping to offset the enormous losses caused by the technology that enables it.”

In a Q&A with Michael Cooper that also touches on how he sees his role as music director (he takes up the post in 2020) and his relationship with General Manager Peter Gelb, Yannick Nézet-Séguin says “The Met for the past few years has been involved in a lot of Met premieres, which were not world premieres … I like this, but I am really passionate about being personally involved in every step of the birth of a new piece. We will definitely get involved again in world premieres. And one way we found to make that work will be through collaborations with [the] Philadelphia [Orchestra],” where YNS is also music director.