Category: music

On The Band’s “The Weight”: “The song’s chorus centers on removing a spiritual load and the narrator’s charitable offer of assuming responsibility for it: ‘Take a load off Fanny, and you put the load right on me.’ Here, you also have the double entendre of ‘fanny’ in the vernacular sense and a rather loose lady. The ‘load’ is the weight of earthliness, of mortality.”

“At its best a new production of a well-known opera will provide some marvelous insight into what the work should mean to us. The trouble is, we can’t know in advance how much sense the production is going to make and therefore don’t know how much effort we should put into deciphering what is going on onstage.”

“The L.A. Philharmonic is expected to announced on Wednesday that Sharon will be named as the orchestra’s artist-collaborator, a newly created post that will involve curating projects for the orchestra, with the assistance of the Industry. The projects are expected to embrace multiple artistic genres and will take place at Walt Disney Concert Hall as well as other venues around L.A.”

Teddy Abrams: “All major arts organizations should not only have musicians on staff but there should also be a department of composition; people who are composing for the moment. In Bach’s time there was a department of composition in every church and state office; there was a constant need for new music. … Granted that might be a huge expense. But think of the effect.”

The Witches of Venice, an opera-ballet based on the children’s book by Beni Montresor, had its premiere at La Scala 20 years ago. It will finally have its U.S. premiere next summer, in a production directed and choreographed by Karole Armitage.

The researchers report in the online journal PLoS One that, compared to silence, the sound of their favorite songs increased risk-taking, while disliked music decreased it. Specifically, they write, “the frequency for accepting a gamble is 54.1 percent for favorite music, vs. 47.4 percent for disliked music. When no music was playing, the acceptance rate is 51.4 percent.”

“If traditional American opera audiences balk at a complex, modern work, how do we account for the warm reception Written on Skin received, and the cooler one for Cold Mountain?”

“Musical performances are among the few that demand you sit still and turn off your phone, and in the realm of the avant-garde, where there is rarely a narrative structure or a song, those can sometimes seem long. But art that forces you to sit and experience something, even if it makes you impatient, can be valuable in the same way that meditation and quiet spaces (churches, libraries) are valuable, in the same way that any inactivity is valuable.”

“A genre once aimed at vast crowds—Mahler imagined his symphonies being played in stadiums, for tens of thousands of people—now leads a more subdued, solitary existence. Much of its legacy is ignored in concert halls and can be encountered only on recordings.”

“Ms. Zhang, a lithe, delicate woman of 44, is a megastar in Beijing. She has performed for sold-out crowds here and in Shanghai, captivating audiences, including legions of young fans, with her sorrowful eyes, deep vocal intonations and graceful displays of martial arts. In 2007, she was the first star of the Peking Opera genre to perform solo at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s central government.”