Category: music

“While country music radio has historically been male-dominated, the issue about the lack of women getting air time picked up steam this spring when radio consultant Keith Hill said country stations that want better ratings should play fewer female artists.”

“I probably have, I don’t know, eight or 10 formal wear shirts. I haven’t worn one of them since he gave me that shirt. It doesn’t cling to skin, you don’t feel soaking wet and clammy an hour into a Mahler symphony or an opera.”

“Unlike the more formal records of Feldman or Cage speaking or writing, you’re privy in these conversations to the two men working ideas out rather than presenting finely worked philosophies or arguments. It’s like being given access to their combined creative process at a key moment in both of their musical lives.”

“So far Apple’s new service has had a mixed reaction in the music and tech press, and its impact on the music charts over all has been minimal. In a comparison of Nielsen streaming data for a dozen popular albums, most had increases of 10 to 20 percent in the week that Apple Music’s numbers were first incorporated into the charts, but had flat results or even a loss the next week.”

“Any Mahler symphony recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will help with ‘long and heavy lifting in the yard.'”

An easy fix would be to get an actual human expert to curate this stuff. Maybe even someone who enjoys classical music and actually knows what they’re talking about!

Yes, the programming is still restricted to ten operas, the theater seats are still hot and uncomfortable, you can still wait years for the privilege of buying tickets, and a Wagner descendant is still in charge, public funding or no. But the Richard Wagner museum is now far more forthcoming about the unsavory parts of the family history, production styles are about as Regiefied as anywhere in Germany, and (a huge change) about a quarter of the tickets are now available for purchase – by anyone – straight from the box office.

“Since peaking in 1996 at about $1.4 billion, revenue has declined almost every year since.” Now the company has $2 million in assets, $63 million in liabilities, and no employees.

“The tendency to associate classical music with murderous insanity is a curious neurosis of the American pop-cultural psyche. … Given all that history, I was happily shocked by an extended opera scene in the new Tom Cruise thriller, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.”

“Why do we have to work so hard to love new American opera? Part of the problem is that even those who love opera tend to think of it these days as a problem child: an acquired taste, a genre that has to work hard to win people over, an art form for which one must make allowances. Some try to conceal it as something other than it is, downplaying the word “opera” on marketing materials about works adapted from familiar books and/or films: they’ll like it, the reasoning goes, if only we can get them in.”