Category: music

“Do we really have to worry about whether symphony orchestras are doing their job as the headlining ambassadors of music and culture? The ambassadoring act isn’t what it used to be.”

“Maazel, 84, appears to have taken his recent health difficulties as a wake-up call, and today announced his resignation from another current post; effective immediately, he is withdrawing from the music directorship of the Munich Philharmonic, and suspending many of his planned activities for the 2014-15 season.”

The primary change is that “samples and interpolations of previously written songs [will] be allowed in all Grammy Award songwriting categories, including song of the year. … Previously, samples or interpolations were allowed in only the Best Rap Song category.”

British singer Sarah Brightman is scheduled to begin training this year for a 2015 flight to the International Space Station where she hopes to become the first professional musician to sing from space, according to the company arranging the trip.

“If you kill the idea of downloads, ring the death knell of the shiny disc, and streaming becomes ubiquitous, great! But, what if we only reach a combined total of say, 20-40 mil subs in the U.S.? Then what? It won’t be sustainable.”

“Staging a Ring cycle in Connecticut with a digital orchestra is the dream of Charles M. Goldstein, a musician and would-be impresario who was once an extra chorister at the Met, and who founded the Hartford Wagner Festival with the idea that one day Connecticut could become the only place outside of Bayreuth, Germany, to perform entire Ring cycles every year.” Not surprisingly, lots of people in the music world object.

“The Danish composer … on Wednesday became the second recipient of the New York Philharmonic’s Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, an award that consists of a $200,000 cash prize and a commission to compose a work for the orchestra. The philharmonic bestows the honor every two seasons. The inaugural award, in the 2011-12 season, went to Henri Dutilleux.”

“It was a succès de scandale, which brought roars from vaudeville audiences and censure from social reformers, with all sides agreeing that ‘I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife – But Oh! You Kid!’ had captured the zeitgeist … It incited countless newspaper editorials, fulminating sermons by preachers, and at least one fatal shooting.”

“Members of the Streetwise Opera charity have performed beside long-term unemployed Londoners, students from the Central School of Speech and Drama, and ex-prisoners from the Synergy Theatre Project during a two-week residency at Covent Garden.”

“So why is the opera audience proving so stubbornly socially stagnant? I’d point at least one finger in the direction of an unlikely villain that has never really been properly dragged into the elitism debate: the total ineffectualness and inappropriateness of large-scale classical music advertising.”