Category: music

“Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra musicians are on strike after unanimously rejecting calls for a 15-percent pay cuts, pension changes and staffing cuts they say are proposed by management. Musicians are actively protesting in front of Heinz Hall in downtown Pittsburgh. As a result of this strike, all performances scheduled to occur this weekend, including the John Williams event have been cancelled.”

Players: If Pittsburgh Symphony Management’s proposed cuts were realized, “many of the PSO’s finest Musicians will leave. The Orchestra will be unable to attract replacements of the same caliber. The reputation and stature of the Pittsburgh Symphony would forever be diminished.”

“Researchers in New Zealand say they have restored the first recording of computer-generated music, created in 1951 on a gigantic contraption built by the British computer scientist Alan Turing.”

“The relatively confined space in that crowded part of the city [just south of Times Square] meant that the old Met had a glorious auditorium with excellent acoustics and sightlines that often made it easier to see other audience members than the stage. It had very little space surrounding the stage, meaning that scenery sometimes had to be put out on the street. … Things were so tight that the chorus often rehearsed in Sherry’s, the restaurant in the old opera house.”

“The initiative of the nonprofit New Orleans Airlift started back in 2011, and its assemblage of musical architecture, in which every structure is a playable instrument, has evolved into a large-scale experiment in reuse and collaboration. A cacophonous water tower, sonic telephone box, and shack of chimes are a few of the structures [musicians can play].”

“‘The first place I started from was the perspective that emotions exist to try to get us to do what would provide for the species,’ [David Teie] says. ‘They are a way of getting humans and mammals to adjust behaviors toward behaviors that would be good for species.’ Then Teie put himself in the feline’s shoes, trying to imagine what cats in their cradles want to imagine.” (sound clips included, of course)

The music-training program that started in Venezuela and now has many versions operating all over the world, has gathered passionate adherents. But its effectiveness is difficult to judge and many of its claims are unsubstantiated.

Executive director David Snead: Of the $13 million raised, “$8.3 million was for endowment, which will result in a quadrupling of the corpus, and another $5.2 million was raised for a new Strategic Initiatives Fund that is financing a triple-digit increase in education programs, national touring, 6 CD’s, growth in staff, new audience development initiatives such as these videos and online streaming of concerts and market research and a new brand strategy, increases in artistic budget, the commissioning of a new work by Gabriela Frank together with the Library of Congress, infrastructure and capacity growth etc. And the number of new subscribers has doubled in one year. As a result of all this, H+H has grown from a $3 million operation to a $5 million operation in the course of just a few years, all while posting 6 consecutive balanced budgets. So yes, the joint is transformed.”

Christopher Purves: “I think it’s much more interesting for the audience to watch a couple of old duffers trying to negotiate their way round this opera. … [Giovanni] exudes danger, mature sex appeal, total self-confidence, even though he’s no longer young.”