David Allen: “Mr. van Zweden has been a prolific recording artist, churning out an average of three albums a year for more than a decade. … Over the past month, I listened to all of them, more than three dozen, a total of 52 hours. What did I learn?”
Category: music
Meet The Orchestra Of Disabled Musicians That Grew Out Of The 2012 Paralympics
“The resistance that they come up against in being fearless, brilliant and bold doesn’t usually come from within, but from others. I’m talking about the British Paraorchestra, … performing challenging works, playing all manner of instruments you’d never hear in traditional orchestras, adding spikes of technology and pushing themselves to the limits of their hard-practised skills. Did I mention that they are disabled? Does it matter? Unfortunately it does, but that’s what we are here to try to change.”
How Great Visual Artists Have Staged Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’
From Marc Chagall through David Hockney, Maurice Sendak, and William Kentridge to Jun Kaneko.
Why Are Classical Music’s Biggest Stars Lining Up To Perform In “Mozart In The Jungle”?
“The show’s ability to draw so many A-listers is both a testament to its growing success, and a reflection of the fact that there are now far fewer opportunities for classical artists to appear on television, which is still an important medium for reaching, and appealing to, new audiences.”
What Do America’s Opera Directors Think About The Impact Of HD Opera In Movie Theatres?
David Devan, Opera Philadelphia: “I think it’s raised the game in terms of people’s aesthetic and performance expectations. If you can go to a movie theater and hear a great singer with a great orchestra with a gazillion-dollar set, that raises the bar for everybody. It did help me raise money to improve the quality of what we put on in the Academy [of Music]. This isn’t about my ego; this is about the necessity of doing work that people will come to. That means there’s a higher standard of care that we must meet.”
What Happened To Great Composers (Do We Have Any Today?)
“The truth is, it’s over. The confident forward march in British music that handed us a lineage of great composers – Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle – has shattered. Given that all the obvious “isms” have been exhausted, composers now face an existential crisis over where music might head next; and, anyway, our culture has decided to privilege ephemeral celebrity over anyone who cares enough about the future to utter anything difficult or challenging. And clued-up composers realise that.”
San Francisco Symphony Cuts Back On Community Outreach Projects
“The SFS Board of Directors is said to have voted to discontinue the Community of Music Makers (CoMM) at least temporarily, and make a deep cut in the Instrument Training and Support (IT&S) program for middle and high schools in San Francisco.”
A Singers’ Rebellion At Georgia’s National Opera House
“[Alleging] absence of repertoire, corruption, nepotism and threats of unfair dismissal, world-famous Georgian opera singers such as Mzia Nioradze, Tamar Iveri, Nana Kavtarashvili, Anita Rachvelishvili, and Lado Ataneli, with members of the Tbilisi opera choir, are up in arms at the current situation in [the company] and have named their artistic director Davit Kintsurashvili ‘unprofessional’ for having only staged three operas in the two years of his leadership at [the Georgian National Opera and Ballet Theater].”
Music Producers Need To Make Existential Shift In How They Think About Selling Music
“To take an academic look at music marketing, the traditional ‘sale’ was usually somewhere near the end of a customer experience journey: awareness, discovery, interest, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation, and advocacy. Now we have a situation where the ‘play’ is conceivably part of every step. So thinking holistically, if we view ‘experience’ as the product of a record label now, we need a way to measure it effectively, and that’s why it feels like there is a data ‘arms race’ going on at the moment.”
Bernstein And Stockhausen – How They Reflected The 1950s
We have much to learn from how Bernstein and Stockhausen dealt with their ’50s: not relying on the nostalgic old formulas that lie behind so much new music and supposedly new digital thinking, none of which is nearly as new as “West Side Story” and “Kontakte.”