Category: music

“Fair trade deals with the ethical treatment of labor in the production and supply chain rather than the ethical sourcing of materials, so it works well for a field like music, where the primary product is good vibrations. The fair trade movement is a project 50-plus years in the making, with a core set of criteria by which to evaluate if products have been produced ethically.”

“According to Operabase, an opera-statistics website, the world’s 40 most-performed opera composers last season were all dead. The most-performed living composer, Philip Glass, only saw his operas performed 66 times, compared with 2,586 performances for the top-ranked Verdi. Contemporary theatre, in contrast, is not only performed regularly, but attracts large crowds.”

Only two seasons after the orchestra arose from the ashes of the long-troubled Honolulu Symphony, the Hawaii Symphony’s board is feeling confident enough not only to give its musicians a two-year contract but also to add an additional two weeks to each season.

“Symphonic music in gambling resorts isn’t unknown (the Philadelphia Orchestra plays the casino mecca Macau on its Far East tours). Still, with Atlantic City’s economy faltering … you might expect entertainment to trend a little lower rather than aim at a classical niche.” But not at the upscale Borgata, which just hosted Yuja Wang playing a Shostakovich piano concerto.

“In the obituaries and tributes that will flood the media in the coming hours and days and weeks, Castleton will not play as large as the major international ensembles Maazel shaped and led … But for the Washington region, Castleton offered a closer and more personal look at Maazel’s life and work, and even family.”

“If you didn’t have a good day — after putting your whole life into getting to this moment — it could be over in a flash. It’s heart-breaking. It’s human beings doing this.”

“This is a piece that reflects the life of a G, F, or A type star. This pulls together two major interests of mine: astronomy and composition. This piece is for a middle-sized orchestra with the addition of saxophones, but a few future projects I had in mind would be smaller chamber works. Specifically, I wanted to write a piece about the western United States.”

“Total physical album sales were down 14.9% in the US in the first half of 2014, to just shy of 121 million units. CD sales led the way down, falling by 19.6% (there were still nearly 63 million of them sold), while digital album sales were down 11.6% to 53.8 million units. Set against that, the 4 million vinyl albums sold are an irrelevance.”

The DSO parted ways with José Reyes last July, and issued a press release about that. Then the (already bizarre) story grew even more intense.

“The way that 78s are nothing like LPs has to do with the music recorded on them. 78s are often the only remaining example of a recorded song. Since metal masters were usually not made of 78 recordings, as Petrusich puts it, “if the records themselves break, or are crammed into a flood-prone basement, or tossed into a dumpster, then that particular song is gone, forever.” It took a couple of chapters to really sink in for me. But think about that for a second: There are amazing songs out there that no one living today has ever heard, or will ever hear.”