“They need the ritual, they want to be part of the whole spectacle. Sometimes people think that for student concerts you have to be casual and the orchestra has to be casual too. What we are doing is quite the opposite, and we are very successful in it. I think you should take the audience seriously. You should take the young audience and treat them like adults.”
Category: music
The Composer Who’s Also A Songwriter: Is That Weird?
“I had no mentors to guide me in compositional vision. I didn’t even know what to ask for. I was a suburban teenager with no family background in music, attending piano lessons each Tuesday and practicing four to five hours a day in secrecy from my rock-n-roll friends.”
Lufthansa Denies Boarding To Cellist Leaving For European Tour
“A cellist traveling to Spain for the start of the Curtis [Institute] European tour was not allowed to board a Lufthansa flight Saturday at Philadelphia International Airport … But this was apparently not a case of an airline simply refusing to let on a large instrument.”
Met Opera’s Young Artist Program Has A New Boss
“For 3½ years, Michael Heaston, 37, has been an artistic power behind the throne at the Washington National Opera, running the Domingo-Cafritz program and the American Opera Initiative … As of this month, he has started in an advisory capacity as executive director of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, and will take over the position full time Aug. 29.”
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s 87-Year-Old Bassist Collapses, Dies During Final Thirty Seconds Of Encore
Jane Little “debuted as a bassist in Atlanta on February 4, 1945, at the age of 16 and never stopped playing.” She was the world’s longest serving orchestra musician.
Could You Survive Without Your CDs?
“The Herculean task of searching through the rack, putting a disc in a machine, ejecting it to wipe the fingerprint that made it skip through track two and then putting it into the machine again felt so arduous in this new world that it may as well have predated the industrial revolution.”
The British Composers Who Took Minor Poems And Made Them Into Major Works Of Art
“Composers, however, have rarely hesitated … to treat their poets in cavalier fashion: changing titles, altering words, omitting or repeating lines or whole stanzas. Of course, poems have become known across the globe, carried by the power of music.”
Eurovision Gets Eerily Political
“The singer is an ethnic Tatar, and the song seems to make reference to Soviet abuses of the group in Crimea during World War II. (‘They kill you all and say, ‘We’re not guilty,’’ she sings in the song.) There had been calls for Jamala’s disqualification that cited Eurovision’s rules banning explicitly political songs, but the song survived in part because its references did not directly name specific historical events.”
Analyst: The End Of Music Downloads Is Near
Midia Research founder Mark Mulligan, who’s spent more than a decade scrutinizing the digital-music market, predicts the music download business will stutter at around $600 million in 2019—a depressing fall from $3.9 billion in 2012, when Apple’s iTunes Store (the world’s preeminent downloads platform) was at its revenue peak. In 2015, downloads declined by 16%, and they look to slide as much as 30% more this year.
Without Warning, Brussels Ends All Funding For European Union Youth Orchestra; Music Community Fights Back
EUYO chief executive Marshall Marcus writes about the extraordinary praise the band has received over its 40 years, the bureaucratic reason for the cutoff of money, and how the likes of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Barbican, and the Salzburg Festival are responding.