It’s difficult to see a way of easing social distancing for audiences to make theatres and venues viable during the pandemic, but this was not the case for performers. “There’s no finesse about the 2m rule at the moment. If you’re in a line rather than looking at each other, then it seems to be overkill.” – BBC
Category: music
Composer Shaina Taub Pulled Off Her Stoop And Arrested By NYPD
Taub, a composer who has written music for the Public’s Twelfth Night and As You Like It, was cheering on a peaceful protest on her street, from her own stoop, when she and her husband were arrested. – Vulture
The Musicians’ Union In Britain Calls For A Relaxation Of Coronavirus-Related Rules
For musicians, that is. Two meters (roughly the USian-advised 6 feet) of distance is just too far to be practical for performing musicians, according to Musicians’ Union leader Horace Trubridge. “Many musicians had been earning £20,000 a year or less even before coronavirus, and some were missing out on furlough payments and loans, he said, adding: ‘I can’t see anything really significant happening this year to help them out of this hole.'”- BBC
Abbey Road Studios Reopens With ‘Extraordinary Measures’ To Record Jazz Album
The recording studios in London, which didn’t close even during WWII, had been shuttered for ten weeks during the coronavirus lockdown. Managing director Isabel Garvey: “Ordinarily we would have an 80-100 person orchestra, but we’ve reduced that right down to 40.” And the main jazz singer? Is “joining the sessions remotely” from Paris. – BBC
How Ornette Coleman Radically Reimagined Jazz
Conventional jazz harmony is religiously chord-based, with soloists improvising within each key like balls pinging through a pinball machine. Coleman, in contrast, imagined harmony, melody, and rhythm as equal constituents. He sometimes said that he played around a melody, in such a way that he could hear it was there, but some listeners could not. – The New Republic
Artist Response To Injustice? Seven Musicians Speak Out
“What’s really important is to take a step back and look at the macro picture, and think through, how did we get here? What are the underlying causes? There’s this phrase flying around a lot for coronavirus, that the disproportionate impact on black or minority communities is due to “underlying health conditions.” Well, what were the conditions that created the underlying health conditions, and what can we do to start picking away at that? And it’s so unsexy, but the census helps a lot.” – NewMusicBox
One-On-One Corona-Concerts Are Now Spreading Through Germany
Last month, a few musicians in Stuttgart began giving intimate-yet-socially-distanced performances — one performer, one listener, a couple of meters of empty space between them — at the city’s currently-unused airport. Now two of the area’s publicly-funded orchestras, the Staatsorchester Stuttgart and the Southwest German Radio Symphony, have taken on the project. “The result has been an intense series of more than 1,100 encounters — first in Stuttgart, and now in five other German cities. And what began as a clever adaptation to coronavirus rules has since become something more profound — a means of establishing human connection, agency and meaning at a time when such concepts have been harder to foster.” – The New York Times
The Reggae Producers That Changed The Way We Record Music
Perhaps no innovations have been as far-reaching as the set of boundary-smashing experiments that a small group of producers performed on multi-track recording machines and mixing desks in a handful of Jamaican studios throughout an astonishingly creative period almost 50 years ago. These pioneers created not just a vast trove of still-exhilarating recordings, but completely reinvented how a recording studio could be used, what a producer was able to do, and what listeners expected from music. – BBC
How Those Mosaic Music Videos Are Made
The clap serves the same purpose as the clapperboard used on TV and movie sets. You, too, will be editing the audio and video separately; the clap creates a visual and sonic marker that helps you realign the two later. It also lets you align all the players’ videos with each other. – Wired
Frank Almond, Beloved Concertmaster Of Milwaukee Symphony, Retires
“Frank Almond, concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony for the last 25 years, has stepped down from his role. The violinist originally announced last year that this would be his last season with the orchestra, but, owing to the coronavirus lockdown, he has been forced to leave it incomplete.” – The Strad