Category: music

“With its efficiently managed “visitor experience”, OHP has hit on a winning formula, striking a nice balance between being posh and being fun. There’s no black-tie dress code, and the champagne party atmosphere doesn’t seem restricted to Lord Snooty and his toffee-nosed pals.”

“In the effort to prove the burgeoning rock scene of the sixties a worthy subject of critical inquiry, rock needed to be established as both serious and authentic. One result of these arguments—the Rolling Stones vs. Muddy Waters, Motown vs. Stax, Bob Dylan vs. the world—was that women came out on the losing side, as frivolous and phony. Whether a teen-age fan or a member of a girl group, women lacked genuine grit—even female critics thought so.”

“It was an extremely new experience to be sitting in the three-tiered performance hall, listening to the kind of song and live music that was so good it belonged on an album.”

“Davis asked to sit somewhere else during rehearsals and performances – an unusual request because the principal flutist and principal oboist sit side-by-side in front of the woodwind section. She said she didn’t want to sit so close ‘to someone who was very enraged.'”

I have a whole lot of editorial control as far as picking stories out. I would say probably 75 percent of what I do is unrelated to the orchestra; it’s just generally about classical music. Twenty-five percent relates the orchestra. But I don’t see it as a direct “try to sell this concert.”

It’s an ambitious project, and a challenge for the box office. Undaunted by the idea that the original Spring for Music festival, at Carnegie Hall, had trouble attracting audiences to unfamiliar ensembles playing unfamiliar work, Shift’s presenters have opted for programs focusing almost exclusively on living American composers, with a healthy dose of multimedia for good measure.

Computer scientist Shahriar Nirjon, working with a team at the University of Virginia, found that the tempo of songs played a role in producing a certain heart rate in study participants. They found that people who listened to calming music reported lower anxiety and heart rate; similarly, they could increase a person’s heart rate by playing songs at a faster tempo, he said.

“The trick is that as with a lot of what’s taking place in the music industry these days – witness the backroom deals between the major labels and the streaming services, most of which leave the musicians out of the equation – the financial relationships are mostly opaque.”

There are more established young composers who write operas, but if contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Aucoin has to be it — although his promise as a composer, conductor, pianist, poet and critic extends well beyond opera or any other single form. The conductor Johannes Debus says that the range of Aucoin’s talents exemplifies “Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for everything at once.”

“The best answer seems to be that, yes, such events can be important. But there is a major caveat: They matter when both governments involved want them to matter. In this case, the evidence suggests that both Washington and Havana are interested in better relations. So this visit is likely to have a small place when the history of U.S.-Cuba rapprochement is written.”