“Having begun its first season three years ago, the videogame oriented content continues to make waves among the more, erm, ‘reserved’ concertgoer crowd. While many programmers and conductors appear to roll their eyes at such a debasement of their art, they still gladly take the money that’s off-setting the orchestra’s annual 2.8% decline in sales. “
Category: music
The Prize That Caused Upheaval At Carnegie Hall Now Has A Winner
Augustin Hadelich, “a sensitive player with a wide repertoire that includes Bach, Beethoven, Ligeti and Thomas Adès, was selected to receive the prize by a panel of judges who considered all the young singers and musicians presented by Carnegie Hall last season.”
Philadelphia Musicians Sign A One-Year Contract
“The contract, which runs through Sept. 11, 2016, will keep the music going as the organization, which emerged from bankruptcy protection three years ago, charts its future.”
What’s Wrong With The Classical Concert Experience In The 21st Century? Maybe The Way We’re Mucking About With It
Philip Clark: “For decades, all the talk has been about how musicians dress; about the timing and duration of concerts; about the historical distance that audiences feel from classical music … Orchestras and ensembles have been experimenting with these strategies for years. … All this stuff – plunging string quartets into the dark, worrying about what shirts to wear or applauding between movements – speaks of a poverty of ideas. If you have nothing to say about content, talk instead about procedure.”
Classical Music Isn’t Exclusive Or ‘Elitist’ Unless We Make It That Way
Brigid Delaney: “Classical music is incredible. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t brought up with it, or don’t know how to pronounce the composers’ names … I wasn’t, I can’t, and it still lets me in … Experiencing this magic doesn’t ask much of you – just that you pay attention and surrender to it.”
Kaija Saariaho On Composing And Teaching Composition
“When I’m still imagining the music in my mind before making notes is the most problematic. I try to imagine the music first: that’s very precious. The first idea includes the tempi, the orchestration, which are not difficult to imagine. But to reduce the possibilities for harmonic use and pitches, that is the most time consuming before starting the actual composition.”
Robert Moses Vs. Jane Jacobs: The Opera (Yes, It’s Real)
“It’s called A Marvelous Order – the phrase is drawn from Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities – … [with] music by composer Judd Greenstein, choreography by Will Rawls, and words from Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist Tracy K. Smith.” Says director Joshua Frankel, “The biggest challenge is we don’t want to make this, Moses is Darth Vader and Jacobs is a perfect angel from heaven.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra Is Still In Trouble
“The orchestra’s problem isn’t hard to see. It is under-capitalized. It has the quality of a top-tier ensemble, but lacks the endowment to support it. It needs more money to program and market properly, and if it were programming and marketing properly, it might attract more money. The Philadelphia Orchestra is the city’s longest-running chicken-and-egg problem.”
Classical Music Under Threat (No, Not That One…)
So how many classical traditions might there be? By my reckoning, at least 15, and though they seem diverse, they coalesce into a handful of stylistic families.
Prediction: Pandora’s Entry to Concert Ticketing Business Won’t Reduce Service Fees
“It’s always easy to vilify Ticketmaster, and I think it’s much more complex than that. It’s really the whole system, the whole concert industry collectively — including the artists, by the way — sometimes because they’re getting some of those ticketing fees as well.”