Category: music

“At 78, flinty and opinionated yet warm, … he has, for decades, been making thought-provoking, heart-wrenching music about issues that dominate the headlines today: the perils of incarceration, the tension between the government and the governed, the struggle for gay rights, the decimation of the industrial working class.”

Famed conductor Valery Gergiev led Saint Petersburg’s celebrated Mariinsky orchestra through pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergei Prokofiev and Rodion Shchedrin in front of a crowd of Russian soldiers, government ministers and journalists.

“When we became independent, all we had was people. Today, all we export is music, maybe because it was always the easiest art. You don’t need any material to sing.”

“When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.”

Steve Lopez: “Alvin Mills is 94. Two conductor’s batons rest on the tray of his walker, within arm’s reach. He might drop or misplace one – you never know – and it’s good to have a backup.”

“TouchTunes already boasts the distinction of being the biggest digital jukebox service in North America. However you feel about the influx of Internet-connected jukeboxes into neighborhood hangout spots, the trend isn’t likely to slow down, especially with user experience improvements like this one. But be careful.”

“The theft occurred in the 1840s, when a German scholar visiting the university surreptitiously snipped a page from an 11th-century manuscript known as the ‘Cambridge Songs.'” The thief wasn’t busted until 1982, and the page turned out to be the key to the collection, without which the songs’ melodies probably couldn’t have been deciphered.

“Like many Zombie Symbols, there is a kernel of truth, but even that truth is based on a fiction. The horned helmet was basically invented (torn out of its limited historical context and radically repurposed) during the last quarter of the 19th century to flesh out a nascent sense of Nordic identity in Germany.”

Stephen Lord, music director of Opera Theater of St. Louis talks about reviewing applications, resumes and headshots (recordings don’t help, he says); the thing that matters more than looks and size; and what’s not-negotiable in terms of voice and technique.