“Fans shared their frustration as the websites of official agents struggled to cope with the demand. Many fans spent an hour or more trying and failing to get through, although some were successful.”
Category: music
The Syrian Expat Philharmonic Is Made Up Of Musicians Who Fled To Germany
The group took some time to pull together, but the founders persisted. “After fundraising, the group performed their first concert in 2015, with 30 Syrian musicians and 20 from Germany. This year, the orchestra has 65 Syrian musicians from all over Europe.”
The Winner Of The BBC’s ‘Young Musician’ Competition Has A Pretty Clear-Eyed View Of A Solo Career
Sheku Kanneh-Mason has six musician siblings, but he turned to Nicola Benedetti (the 2004 Young Musician winner) for advice: “She advised that while I’m still young and studying I should learn as much repertoire as possible, because it becomes more difficult once you’re doing lots of concerts.”
Leonard Cohen Was Many Things, And One Was That He Was Unapologetically ‘Judaism’s Bard’
“It seems an obvious point, but it nods to a larger one that was either overlooked or underplayed in the extensive obituaries that followed Cohen’s death last week. Put simply, Cohen was an intensely Jewish artist — along with Philip Roth, perhaps the most deeply Jewish artist of the last century.”
Pop Music? Why That’s Really Only For Rich Now…
“Pop was a child of the 20th century, a form carried on gloriously uniform products that embodied their time just as perfectly as Henry Ford’s Model T did. Those were the days when capitalism was as democratic and egalitarian as it has ever got, and the products – or rather phenomena – at its heart were all the better for it.” No longer. Increasingly, pop culture experiences are only for the rich, only if you can afford to pay great sums…
China Starts Exporting Orchestras To The Rest Of The World
“Once, classical music generally travelled from the West to the rest. Now China is reversing the exchange, not merely performing Western classical music in China, but exporting it.”
We’re Classical Musicians. Where Do We Fit In The Trump Era?
“We might wish for music to be universal and transcendent on its own. But this wish can backfire, trapping us in apolitical grooves that serve the powers that be. We want to avoid using music as only a means of escapism, to go beyond catharsis and towards a way of engaging, as artists, in the discussion about where we go from here.”
How The Sounds Of Nature – All Cleaned Up – Became Major Commodities In The Record Industry
A man named Irv Teibel took the idea of musique concrète – which is, after all, what recordings of outdoor sounds are – and hustled it into a commercial relaxation-aid that fit perfectly with the America of the late ’60s and ’70s.
The Story Of The Casio And ‘The Tinny Electronic Music Revolution It Fostered’
“In the late 1970s, a man who had changed the business world by turning massive calculators into handheld devices decided that he wanted to scratch another itch. And with that itch scratched, he introduced a world of creativity to bedroom warriors around the country – a set of training wheels to the musically inclined.”
NY Phil’s $200K Composer Prize Goes To Louis Andriessen
The 77-year-old Dutchman, whose influence on contemporary music in the U.S. has been great, is the third winner of the Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, which also includes a commission for a new orchestral work.