Category: music

“An agreement … went into effect this week, formally committing Metro to making sure that the sensitive stretch of its $1 billion downtown Regional Connector Project won’t add any audible vibrations. The agreement sets out a process for what will happen if those preventive measures fail – with a Music Center lawsuit to collect damages the worst-case scenario.”

“If you play with sheet music, playing [just] everything written, it’s really a bore, because you don’t know the way to do something different with that, to create some kind of fresh rhythms. It’s the way to move accents, the articulation when you play, and the very fresh manner, very tender with no rush. Most of the classical players play very square and rush.”

“[The study] shows new productions spearheaded by the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb have had mixed success. While they generally sell better than revivals, some performed poorly when brought back to the stage a season or two later.”

“Andrey Gugnin, 28, was declared the winner of the 16th Gina Bachauer International Artists Piano Competition on Wednesday night, capping two weeks of competition that brought 37 pianists, ages 19 to 32, to Salt Lake City from 14 nations.”

“The dominant music services act as if songs were commodities, more-or-less interchangeable digital files designed to be consumed and quickly forgotten. But if the sellers treat their products with such disdain and disrespect, why should consumers do otherwise?”

“The purpose of practising is so that we (offstage as engineers) make sure that we (onstage as pilots) are completely free to fly to the destination of our choice. That destination is one involving imagination and creativity and spirituality and danger and ecstasy of course, not merely the A to B of playing the notes, but without the nuts and bolts in place we will never be airborne. The greatest interpretative vision of the final pages of the final sonata of Beethoven will nosedive to oblivion if we can’t play an even trill.”

“In a lot of cases the halls are too big. I went to see a huge orchestra concert at Avery Fisher Hall, which is an excrescence in New York … and it’s like, let it close. That’s fine; it’ll be fine. They’ll find somewhere else.”

Sasha Frere-Jones: “Eno is widely known for coining the term ‘ambient music,’ and he produced a clutch of critically revered albums in the nineteen-seventies and eighties – by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2, among others – but if I had to choose his greatest contribution to popular music it would be the idea that musicians do their best work when they have no idea what they’re doing.”

“Opera ain’t what it used to be. More to the point, opera companies aren’t what they used to be. The art form is not standing still. It’s growing, uncontrollably, by leaps and messy bounds,” writes Mark Swed – who argues that the problems at U.S. opera’s flagship, the Met, are more about the Met than the art form, and that the controversy over The Death of Klinghoffer demonstrates opera’s innate power.

“Westergan said this week he and other musicians have been meeting with organizers of a ‘Save the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra’ Facebook page, to determine whether any of the nearly 2,000 supporters of that site are willing to explore fundraising options.”