Category: music

“Composing music for readers is all about homework. You have to get it right in the quiet in front of your score. You put it on the page, flop it out on the stands and count them in. With bands, you don’t have any score – you think on your feet. It’s not about homework. It’s about being ready to follow the trend or lead the trend. It’s much more spontaneous.”

Just 17 months ago, as the lockout dragged on and Osmo resigned as music director, it seemed just possible that the MinnOrch could shut down entirely. Now Osmo is signed through 2018-29 and the musicians through 2019-20, donors have pledged $6.5 million in new money to fund it all, and – get this – negotiations were completed with no lawyers involved.

“Soundwalk 9:09 … will ask NYC wanderers to email field recordings from the blocks separating what Adams calls the ‘Big Met’ and the new building. When the collection period ends on July 31, Adams will begin molding the recordings into a piece that will last exactly as long as its title, nine minutes and nine seconds. ‘I find the breath of the city itself, that roar, really beautiful, like the roar of the sea,’ Adams says.”

“Conducted by data analyst Andrew Powell-Morse, the study looked into 225 songs that have topped pop, country, rock and R&B/hip-hop Billboard charts for three weeks or more. “I turned to the Readability Score,” said Powell-Morse, who used writing-analysis tools such as the Flesch-Kincaid index, a readability test to measure reading difficulty, to determine the average reading level of a section of text.”

Alice Coote: “Having been stepping into male eyes for two decades now for around 70% of my working life I, by necessity, have had to dwell in a place where my mind feels increasingly separate from my sexual body. It has made it complex for me to return to daily life as a woman: I feel in sharp relief the way a … woman’s personal and public relationship power is utterly unlike that of a … male’s expectations and power relationship to the world. Cross-dressing on the stage reveals less to me about gender than it does power.”

Alan Jordan in a news release from late on Friday: “It is time for me to seek out new challenges with another orchestra, and for the VSO to find someone with new perspectives and ideas to continue the VSO’s progress.”

“The tour was designed not only to highlight the thaw between the nations, but also the thaw within the orchestra: It resumed playing together only last year after a bitter labor dispute led to a lockout that silenced it for 16 months. Now the orchestra is working to recapture what was lost.”

Peter “is always seeking selfish pleasure, forgets people and events and has no empathy for others. Barrie refers to him many times as happy, innocent and heartless.”

The Minnesotans are at the vanguard of what is expected to be a flurry of cultural cross-pollination now that there are signs of a diplomatic thaw. The relationship has been a fraught one for more than a century.

“What the printing press was to the samizdat publishers, this little hunk of metal became to a burgeoning scene of jazz fiends. It wasn’t long before a small community of music lovers began haunting his shop, snapping up record after record and lining Philo’s pockets with dirty money.”