There’s an igloo concert hall in Sweden where performers play percussion and string instruments made of ice. Of course, “one of the major problems with conducting an ice orchestra is that the instruments eventually fall out of tune due to body heat from the performers and audience.”
Category: music
Use Bots To Bypass Ticket Buying Limits? The UK Can Give You ‘Unlimited Fines’
Well, that’s one approach to dealing with ticket touts and making it slightly more fair, if it works. The touts have no one to blame but themselves: “Last month, resale site Viagogo was accused of ‘moral repugnance’ for selling tickets to an Ed Sheeran Teenage Cancer Trust gig for up to £5,000.”
Some People Have No Reaction To Music. Nada. Zip. Let’s Try To Understand This…
“Previous research shows that the vast majority of people who enjoy music show an increase in heart rate or skin conductance—where a person’s skin temporarily becomes a conductor of electricity in response to something they find stimulating. Musical anhedonics, however, show no such physiological change to music. A recent study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, took those findings a step further by studying neural responses to music.”
A Couple Of Jazz Guys Sitting Around Talking… (And Then A Sexist Comment Bomb Goes Off)
The many online apologists for Ethan Iverson and Robert Glasper have been dismissing their sexist remarks as the clumsy gestures of good ol’ boys. But inadvertently sexist remarks, like inadvertently racist remarks, can be more telling, because they often point to more fundamental and systemic discrimination. The jazz world has a right — and, some would say, a duty — to criticize speech that promotes sexist culture, whether that speech had a malicious or benign intent.
A Sonata Misattributed To Felix Mendelssohn Debuts Under Its Real Authorship
Written in 1829, the manuscript of “Easter Sonata” was considered “lost” for more than 140 years, until the original turned up in a French book shop bearing the signature “F Mendelssohn.” The collector who bought it concluded the “F” stood for Felix. It didn’t…
Ending Weeks Of Disasters, Fresno Grand Opera Shuts Down
The California company, founded in 1998, had faced cash shortfalls, unpaid musicians, allegations of financial mismanagement, the firing of its music director, and a defamation lawsuit.
Former Fresno Grand Opera Directors Sue Company For Defamation
Ronald Eichman and Thi Nguyen, who were general director and associate director until the end of 2014, allege that the company and Matthew Buckman (Eichman’s successor) falsely accused Eichman and Nguyen of financial malfeasance and conflicts of interest in several stories published in The Fresno Bee last year. (The company itself promptly closed down.)
New York Times Critic Bonds With Taxi Driver Over Classical Radio
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about the immigrant cabbie who ended up recommending to her a composer she’d never before encountered.
Berlin’s New Gehry-Designed Boulez Hall: Music Of Intimacy And For Thinking
Frank Gehry’s oval design, with no stage, merely a center, genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible salle modulable, the possibility of the “thinking ear”: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest possible distance between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is just 14 meters. There is intimacy—the intimacy, its initiators hope, of collaborative endeavor.
SXSW Says It Will Amend Its Artist “Deportation” Contract Clause
Following an avalanche of criticism over what some bands said was a “deportation clause” in its performance contract, the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex., which starts Friday, released a statement on Tuesday saying that it would amend its agreements starting in 2018. The organizers of the festival, however, furiously denied that the language in its contracts over the past five years had been designed to encourage the deportation of foreign artists visiting the United States to perform at its event.