Category: music

“The music industry is not yet taken seriously as a career in Morocco, says Haddadi, who comes from a family of engineers and doctors. ‘When I told them I wanted to work in the music industry, as a woman, I’m going be working late at night, go on tour, they were like: “Are you sure?”‘”

“Its story is so contemporary, though, that it could almost have been written yesterday. It charts the creation, supposedly in America, of a city of pleasure with no history and no moral compass – and its destruction in a morass of consumerist malaise and addiction, with inhabitants put to death for the crime of having no money.”

“A new app, in development, will allow students to, say, spend five minutes a day on ear training using their smartphone. Or do their sight reading. There’s an app being designed for parents of very young infants to aid in their development; the first in a series of digital products for parents of children up to age five, to be launched in a few years.”

What, no Disney?

“I can’t remember the last time I saw an excerpt of actual music—with ledger lines, key signatures, rests and notes—in a mainstream book about classical music, or in a program note at a symphonic concert or almost any other context where classical musicians actually make music. This has all been banished. The visual presence of music—except rarely as a fuzzy decorative background over which something else has been printed—is seen as off- putting, even terrifying to newcomers.”

“Tracing its roots to the city’s first professional orchestra created in 1924, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic was formed in 1988 under the musical direction of Joel Levine and with the strategic vision and guidance of many civic and corporate leaders, committed to its future.”

Sara Mohr-Pietsch of BBC Radio 3: “Someone asked me the other day if the reason there are fewer women composers represented at the highest level was that male composers were simply better. My response was unrepeatably rude. Frankly, it’s too ludicrous a question to validate with a polite answer. My litmus test for those kinds of comments is this: replace ‘female’ with ‘black’, and ‘male’ with ‘white’. Now put the question to me again, and see how comfortable you feel asking it.”

“Musically, these bands helped shape and were in turn influenced by jazz’s development through the early decades of the 20th century. Brass-band tradition has evolved in the decades since to embrace other styles, such as funk, R&B and hip-hop, irritating purists while enticing new fans. Still, the form’s communal function has never waned.”

The New York Youth Symphony pulled the piece this week after learning that it includes a musical quotation from the “Horst Wessel” song, the Nazi anthem.

Justin Davidson: “These two not-yet-senior composers … have double-handedly resurrected the grand symphonic manner that, like the novel and the painting, has died any number of times.”