The essay is beyond our ability to summarize, and well worth your time. A snippet: “In the end I had to come to terms with the truer nature of my duty. Why do we commit our work? Why do we perform? It is above all for the entertainment and transformation of the people. It is all for them. The song asked for nothing. The creator of the song asked for nothing. So why should I ask for anything?”
Category: music
Does This 300-Year-Old Ruggieri Violin Look So Good Because It Was Buried With Its Owner?
Violinist Chun-Yee owns the instrument, and it is pristine. After a performance in Israel, an audience member asked her about her Ruggieri. “My father often wondered about your violin,” she says he told her. “The reason he was wondering is he had heard that it had been buried with one of its owners.”
New York Times Classical Critics Pick Their Favorite CDs Of 2016
Five titles each from Zachary Woolfe, Anthony Tommasini, David Allen and James R. Oestreich. (Where’s Corinna?)
Rising US Visa Fees, Longer Processing Times, Are Making Touring Difficult For Canadian Musicians
“At $325 (U.S.) a band, it’s not cheap – particularly for new musicians trying to get a foothold in a crucial music market that, on a map, looks otherwise easy to enter from here. And there are other troubles for artists: The processing time for these visas has ballooned over the past several years from 45 days to nearly 120, according to the Canadian Federation of Musicians (CFM), which helps artists file for permits.”
City Of Birmingham Symphony Sees Local Funding Cut By 25%
The orchestra known as the platform from which Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons launched their world-beating careers – and where young wonder-woman Mirga just took over as music director – will be receiving the same amount of city funding it received in the 1980s (and that’s not adjusted for inflation).
Mark Swed: The Best Music I Heard This Year In LA
It’s easy to talk about the need for new things in classical music, but then you read about the highlights of Mark Swed’s listening diet in Los Angeles for 2016 and the concerns melt away…
The MP3 Format Compresses Music. Turns Out It Has An Impact On Our Emotional Responses Too
“This paper investigates the effect of MP3 compression on music emotion. We conducted listening tests to compare the effect of MP3 compression on the emotional characteristics of eight sustained instrument sounds. We compared the compressed sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories. The results show that MP3 compression strengthened the emotional characteristics Sad, Scary, Shy, and Mysterious, and weakened Happy, Heroic, Romantic, Comic, and Calm. Interestingly, Angry was relatively unaffected by MP3 compression.”
Washington DC Marching Bands To Sit Out Inaugural
At least one D.C. public school marching band has participated in the past five inaugural parades, but none applied for consideration this year.
It’s Not Easy Out There For Women Composers Writing Operas, But Here Are Ten Of Them Who Are Making It Happen
“We asked 10 composers to reflect on … what it means to be a woman creating opera today. Read what they had to say while listening to excerpts from their works.”
Alex Ross: The Music I Liked Best This Year
Recordings, concerts, experiences… and Saariaho. It was a remarkable and eclectic year of music-making in America.