Category: music

“It’s not just a question of whether you like the music, or think you like it; it’s a question of knowing that it exists. Although Glass has written 11 symphonies, [conductor Dennis Russell] Davies says that when a major American orchestra was recently approached about performing Glass, the response was, ‘But he doesn’t write symphonies.'” Midgette talks with Davies about understanding the music Glass has actually written (as opposed to what some people think he’s written).

29-year-old Alberto Chines performs the Estampie Retrové (ca. 1360) from the Robertsbridge Codex on a concert grand. (For versions played on instruments of the type, and in the tuning, for which the piece was most likely written, click here, here, and/or here.)

HMV said it was closing the stores across Canada because it was losing tons of money. But upstart music retailer Sunrise Records is making a major bet it can expand quickly to make the stores profitable. “A lot of the younger consumers still love having something tangible,” argues the company’s enterprising young CEO

Francesca Dego, in a Q&A, asked about her musical guilty pleasures: “My guilty pleasures are usually not musical! Does not practising count? I’ve gone on holiday a couple of times without my violin and although I try to convince myself that bringing it would have been useless, because sunbathing and practising don’t coexist well, guilt usually strikes after a couple of days.”

Maybe. Of course, “many rival camps on the identity of Beethoven’s ‘immortal beloved’ have developed over the years,” but it could be a married, religious aristocrat who held the key to Beethoven’s heart – and his later, more intense work.

The New York Philharmonic faces off against the Vienna Phil, both turning 175 years old this spring, in a joint exhibition of their archives in Manhattan. Can the NY institution measure up to this? “‘Damn and blast it! Confound it! Wake up!’ the conductor and composer Otto Nicolai wrote in his impassioned draft of the Vienna Philharmonic’s foundation charter.”

Shocker: What should win Best Score and what is going to win Best Score aren’t remotely the same.

“Why then, when we think of music, do we think of Chuck Berry’s Gibson 335, Mick Jagger’s lips, the cover of Revolver, Michael Jackson’s zombies, Blue Note’s stark photography, and Madonna’s breasts?” As one music historian points out, “It just didn’t occur to people that you could correspond the music to some kind of visual image. Someone had to think of that.” Scott Timberg looks at the history of what happened after someone did think of it.

“The path of least resistance for anyone with a lot of sound-making tools is to keep making more sounds. The path of discipline is to say: Let’s see how few we can get away with.”

Many members of the audience may not notice that some of the more fantastic effects in the score are its main themes contorted beyond recognition. But the filmmakers do wink at the audience when they include a more traditional kind of chopped and screwed track: the slowed-down mix of Jidenna’s “Classic Man” that plays in the background in this scene.