“Digitizing braille music isn’t as easy as just scanning the page. The tactile notations require multiple steps for accurate transcription, and their history of touch means the dots are sometimes smashed or otherwise unreadable.”
Category: music
Tunisia’s Religious Jazz, And The Dangers It Faces After The Revolution
“Stambeli, a uniquely Tunisian hybrid of musical genre, healing practice, and religious ceremony, [is] deeply rooted in the history of a specific community: the descendants of slaves brought to the region from sub-Saharan Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also has close links to Sufism.” But the changes in the country since the Arab Spring (notably the Saudi-funded spread of Salafism) are combining with older ethnic prejudices to put a lot of pressure on stambeli‘s remaining practitioners.
Seattle Public Library Now Allows Patrons To Download Local Musicians’ Music
“PlayBack is open to all Seattle-area musicians who record or perform in the city of Seattle and have had an album produced within the last five years. PlayBack is intended to be an ever-expanding collection of Seattle’s musical culture, and a total of 100 new albums will be available each year through the Library’s catalog.”
Kansas City Symphony Sets Attendance Records, Virtually “Selling Out” Its Season
“The symphony reported a record of nearly $5 million in total ticket revenue for its 2015-16 season, with $2.9 million of that in subscriptions. Perhaps more impressive, the symphony series performances sold 95 percent of available tickets, on average.”
Sydney Opera House To Get $156 Million Upgrade (Is That Enough To Fix The Acoustics?)
The bulk of the spending in the four-year, A$202 million project, funded by the New South Wales state government, will be for a renovation to fix the notoriously bad sound in the opera house’s concert hall.
The Chinese City With A Hundred-Year History Of Western Classical Music, Brought By Russian Jews
“The arts – and especially classical music – flourished here throughout the early 20th century. Nicknamed the St. Petersburg of the East, Harbin was home to a thriving Jewish community that helped build a rich cultural scene, including China’s first symphony orchestra, [founded in 1908 and] made up of mostly Russian musicians.”
More And More Orchestras Are Exploring Virtual Reality
“At least a half-dozen professional orchestras have created 360-degree films for use with VR headsets, among them, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Most aim to replicate a concert hall experience, whether on stage – so the viewer can hover over a violin section or an oboe soloist – or in the audience, where the 360-degree view also includes rows of empty seats.”
Montreal’s Classical Spree – A Way To “Save” Classical Music?
“At the Virée classique, at just about the time an ordinary person starts to wonder when the concert will end, it ends. The audience disperses for lunch or some shopping or whatever, and then regroups in different combinations at another hall nearby for another shot of music.”
What’s A Harpsichord For? It’s For Proving Us Wrong, Says Its Newest Star Player
“Think the harpsichord is an inherently limited instrument, too quiet, too inexpressive, too inferior to a modern piano? That, [Mahan Esfahani] argues, implies asking the wrong question to begin with. Think a harpsichordist must naturally align with an early-music movement that awakened so much interest in his instrument? Wrong. … Think that the harpsichord is exclusively an instrument for the music of centuries past? Wrong.”
Has Los Angeles Become A Hotbed Of Contemporary Music?
“A grassroots new music community (or as ‘grassroots’ as anything which is tied to higher education can be) is in a true dialogue with the larger artistic culture, and the promise of the LA Philharmonic to make Los Angeles a contemporary musical destination seems to have finally taken root. An LA aesthetic has emerged, and I can’t help but notice a bit of pioneering Wild West in the raucous brew.”