Category: music

“But why Phaedra in a Beckett festival? Yes the Racine/Lowell/Britten links were evident, but how to join Beckett and Racine? I had to trace my own constellation of connections from one great artist to another and, without wanting to deny the audience their own chance to join the dots, here are just a few of the discoveries made.”

“Music, at least in terms of noodling around on the piano, strumming a guitar or trying out new things on the violin, actually hardly features in the struggle. Typically, this is all about grades, age and a formal classical instrument, a trio which is locked together in a pressurised algorithm calculated to result in a place at a youth orchestra or decent secondary school.”

“America doesn’t have anything like this. It’s the envy of the world.”

“The score is fearless. Maybe that’s what they thought was masculine about it. And maybe that’s why Ethel Smyth, with all of her in-your-face attitude, ran afoul of the group she called the ‘Male Machine’.”

“Now that I’m an adult, now that I’m a father, I understand the world a little better. And I understand sometimes more than people think I understand. You know when you are in a turbulent situation, you have to see beyond the turbulence instead of putting more things in the turbulence. That is Maestro Abreu’s vision.”

“Classical radio is a business like everything else, and the American Public Media Group has the right to sell a station to any entity they like and for any price they deem acceptable. But the manner in which the company went about doing so was wrong, unconscionable and, frankly, despicable. … But what are the prospects for a new classical station arising from the ashes of Classical South Florida? To be honest, not great.”

So why do so many artists take this route? Well, it allows them to reassert their musical bona fides, and even when critics find said bona fides wanting, these efforts tend to net tremendous commercial success. These albums tend to fall into three basic categories: Legitimate, Enh … Passable, and — how to put it? — This is Not Your Best Work.

Published in Plos One, their study found empathetic people preferred more mellow, low-energy music.
While those who were “systemisers” – people who seek to analyse patterns in the world – enjoyed punk, heavy metal and more complex music overall.