Category: music

“The list of heavy-drinking composers is worthy of Monty Python’s ‘Philosophers’ Song’. It includes Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. There are no reports of Bach getting drunk — but during a fortnight’s trip to Halle in 1713 his beer bill came to 18 grossen, which suggests that he got through eight gallons of the stuff (plus lashings of brandy). Berlioz and Wagner preferred opium, and it’s not fanciful to suggest that you can hear it in the Symphonie Fantastiqueand Tristan. Can you hear alcohol in the music of the boozers?”

WQXR in New York recalls the biggest stories in classical music this year. Stravinsky’s back, baby! Plus strikes, deaths, promotions, conductors stepping down and much more.

The Barenboim-Said Academy opened Thursday in the heart of downtown Berlin. “‘I’m sure you will believe me if I tell you that I once felt this day would never happen,’ he said. … The building contains a brand new concert hall, designed pro bono by Frank Gehry and named after Pierre Boulez, an avid supporter of the idea and a good friend of Mr. Barenboim.”

The violin disappeared after its owner, a Jewish man who ran a music business in Speyer, couldn’t escape Nazi Germany and committed suicide; it reappeared in 1974.

Considered as a healing practice—or a “tuning of mind and body”—Oliveros’s “Sonic Meditations” are, to an extent, unique in the history of musical experimentalism. In these works, experiments were not conducted on the music; the music was an experiment on the self. Anyone searching today for the complete box set of “Sonic Meditations” won’t find it, because, as the composer wrote, “music is a welcome by-product” of this composition. The experiments remain in each listener. Oliveros’s aims were clear: these works were intended to be transformational, even therapeutic, enacting lasting changes on the body and mind.

It’s a 1720 instrument by the inventor himself, Bartolomeo Cristofori, and Dongshok Shin plays one of the earliest pieces written for it. As long as you don’t expect the timbre of a Steinway grand (or the equal-temperament tuning Steinways typically use), the Cristofori sounds pretty good. (video)

While he says he can still do concert performances, that brain tumor continues to wreak its damage.

“[The $700,000 gift] allowed the two sides to agree on a new four-year contract, which was ratified by the musicians on Wednesday, without the cuts that management had sought.”

“TV is now enjoying a vogue of being cool, but the great era of TV cool was the 1950s. You could catch Miles and John Coltrane on TV, and jazz was all over its soundtracks. That and the movies were the mediums with the broadest and deepest reach in popular culture, and they brought jazz to millions in America and around the world. It wasn’t that they had to convert audiences into thinking jazz was cool, it was that jazz was inherently cool and hip, and movies and television used that to signify their own place on a spectrum of style, and even rebellion.”

“Is music meant to be ephemeral or enduring? And indeed, are those two goals consonant with one another, or at odds? For those who take as their mentors, our sources of inspiration, and our measures of quality long-dead Germans like Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, perhaps the ultimate goal would be to write, like they did, something of value that transcends our era. But can one write a piece with the goal that it become ‘an important part of the repertoire’?”