Category: music

This year’s Pulitzer winner, Julia Wolfe’s “Anthracite Fields,” is a predictable nominee for contemporary classical composition, as is the ubiquitous Andrew Norman’s “Play,” yet a possible dark-horse is Gerald Barry’s uproarious setting of “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

“It might take Taylor Swift recording an album with John Luther Adams or (an even greater probability) Caroline Shaw recording with Kanye West for the folks in charge of the Grammy Awards to catch up with the breadth of music that people are now listening to and how they are listening to it. Once that happens, hopefully the various categories in which musical achievement are acknowledged by the Recording Academy won’t feel quite as straitjacketed.”

“One development in the classical-music Grammys during the last several years has been the inclusion of more diverse corners of this vast field. For many, that is a good thing — better than having Georg Solti (still the all-time Grammys champ), Vladimir Horowitz or the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra dominate year after year, as in the past. Yet patterns sometimes persist.”

“‘Dear audience,’ Mr. Harnoncourt wrote in the letter, which was in German. ‘My bodily strength requires me to cancel my future plans.’ He wrote of the ‘unbelievably deep relationship has developed between us on the stage and you in the hall,’ added that ‘we have become a happy community of pioneers,’ and urged audiences to remain faithful to that spirit.”

“‘We are living in troubling and volatile times,’ Mr. Freud wrote in the letter. ‘On an almost daily basis, the news is dominated by reports of horrifying and indiscriminate violence. Through its years of planning, none of us could have known how shockingly topical ‘Bel Canto’ would be at the time of its world premiere performances.'”

“The difference between European and Japanese music is that there is almost no common element, there is nothing shared between them. It’s a very different system. Like languages: the Japanese language is so far away from the European languages. When we see European languages—even English and French—they share 50,000 vocabulary words between them, but compared to the distance of all the European languages and Japanese language, it’s so far away. It’s the same with music. Very different.”

“If you want to absolutely precise, it boils down to about 15 seconds. We can tell with a pretty high degree of accuracy what kind of a player you are within the first 15 to 30 seconds. The rest of the time, we’re there to make sure that our initial assessment was correct.”

“It is the largest orchestra library in the world, and it is a treasure that has been hidden in plain sight. It tells stories of Cincinnati, of its musical organizations, its artists and its audience tastes.”