Category: music

Stewart Copeland: “My father raised me to be a big band white jazz drummer. He raised me to be Buddy Rich; he had me in lessons from the start, which cured me of jazz, but in fact, the Stravinsky and the Debussy stuck. … That music of the big orchestra doing dramatic things, very powerful, very rhythmic [things], really stuck.”

“Silent pictures didn’t come with scores attached — which leaves the composer plenty of room for interpretation. ‘That’s where it can get really revealing,’ [Michael Mortilla] says. ‘Something I see as tender or passionate, others might see as cruel.'”

“The producers have hired New York musicians as on-screen extras, making for a fun peer-spotting exercise. The second season is studded with classical-world celebrity cameos, including musicians like Joshua Bell and Lang Lang, and the Grammy-winning pianist Emanuel Ax, who played the interactive video game ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ at a dive bar during one episode. Gustavo Dudamel, the wunderkind Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, makes an appearance as a backstage handler.”

“It’s the grossest of understatements to say that cocktail pianists get no respect. … On the other hand, it’s also true that most cocktail pianists aren’t worth listening to, at least not very closely. … But a few such folk are true artists, and one of them, Cy Walter, was a very great one, among the finest popular pianists of the 20th century.”

It so happens that a significant amount of our choral literature draws from an historical context in which women were not able to participate. The SATB voicing, as we know it today, belonged to all-male choruses, consisting of both pre- and post-pubescent male voices. Consider the language. Soprano is Latin and ends in “o.” Even in 2016, even when discussing female roles through centuries of opera and the highest voices in our vocal ensembles across the world, women are given the title of “boy.”

“The three-year post, created specially for Aucoin, calls for him to conduct some L.A. Opera performances and write a full-scale opera for its main stage.”

A former baritone and an alumnus of the company’s young artist training program, Ryan Taylor, 43, is currently chief at the Arizona Opera, which he’s credited with turning around after a financial crisis.

When given the choice, why wouldn’t people listen to uplifting music instead of songs that could depress them?

“The grant, from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, based in Miami, is one of the largest ever to the company, which plans to launch the first iteration of the festival in 2017.”