“[The agreement comes] less than two years after a strike that led to the cancellation of several local concerts and a high-profile East Coast tour.” Said the chair of the musicians’ committee of that strike, “I think everybody was a little unnerved by what happened,” which made these negotiations smoother.
Category: music
Should New York City Opera Be Revived? (Where’s The Upside?)
“Can NYCO-R compete with smaller innovative works such as “Why is Eartha Kitt trying to Kill Me?” at the fashionable (le) Poisson Rouge, or the sexy twist on opera that Operotica and L’Opera Burlesque offer? Does New York need another “major” opera company and will a resurrected NYCO will be able to find its footing in the even more crowded field of smaller opera companies and recapture even a modicum of its former glory?”
Cincinnati Symphony Had Bigger Audience, Balanced Budget In 2014
“Even as many American orchestras around the country are struggling, tens of thousands of people flocked to Music Hall last year to hear Brahms, Beethoven and Boyz II Men. Cincinnati is the smallest city in the nation that still supports a full-time, 52-week orchestra. The nation’s fifth oldest orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony is one of just 14 year-round orchestras in America.”
Cult Fame And Its Discontents: Alex Ross On Henryk Górecki
“No classical composer in recent memory, not even the inescapable Philip Glass, has had a commercial success to rival that of the late Polish master,” whose Third Symphony, in a 1992 recording on the Nonesuch label, sold more than a million copies and has been sampled numerous times in pop songs and film scores. “Yet he was skeptical of the frame in which his work was being received. His friends and associates report that he disliked modern pop culture, and, to a great extent, modernity itself.”
Tinnitus Punishes Musicians And Music Fans – Can It Be Fixed?
“There is good recent evidence suggesting that as well as damage to hair cells in the cochlea causing tinnitus, connections between those cells and the brain could also become damaged by noise exposure. “
Yes, We Can – And Should – Enjoy The Music Of Richard Strauss
“It seems more and more obvious that the composer’s critics were merely looking for the wrong things.”
What’s It Like To Write A Composition About Frank Gehry’s House?
“The new piece, for four musicians, tries to evoke the Gehry home with means both literal and conceptual. As with much of his music, Norman acknowledges, there’s a chance that some listeners will find ‘Frank’s House’ as unpleasant as those neighbors in 1978 found Frank’s house.”
Keeping Music Alive
“Making sure our music survives is about a lot more than just writing it down. It has to do with teaching our harmonic language and melodic style to those who learn from us. It has to do with nuance, experience, storytelling, and subtlety.”
The Cello From 1694
“It’s from Cremona, the period and the place of the golden age of instrument making. Everything was right about the instrument, the arching, the varnish. It was in, for a cello of that age, impeccable condition. … [But] this cello took quite a while to sort of come into its own soundwise.”
Pop Music As Serious Art (So Tell Me Something Else I Don’t Know?)
“Pop has long been resident in the hallowed halls of academe. Pop music studies have a place in university music faculties on almost equal terms with classical and world music. It has its own journals, distinguished elder statesmen and iconoclastic upstarts. Pop’s arrival at the top table is part of the revolution that swept through universities in the Seventies with the arrival of cultural studies.”