Category: music

“NCLB may have had no discernible effect on overall enrollment rates in music,” he writes. However, his analysis—which tracked 9th- through 12th-grade enrollment in music classes from 1982 to 2009—concludes that the law “likely exacerbated the underrepresentation of Hispanic students in all types of music courses.”

“This is a looming disaster: potentially, the government is turning back to the scorched earth policy for music education in the 1980s that resulted from Margaret Thatcher’s decision that local authorities didn’t have to ringfence the money they gave to their music services.”

Anastasia Tsioulcas: “Not only have many ‘regulars’ within classical music had their say, but the conversation has also reached a mainstream audience. Outlets that usually don’t touch classical music – ABC, Time, Salon and Jezebel among them in the U.S. alone – seized on the uproar, and we’ve had more than 500 reader comments here on Deceptive Cadence. After so much discussion, I feel compelled to add a few more thoughts.”

“His lawyer had no idea he was speaking to me, but [Salah] Salahadyn said he didn’t care. He took exception to the way I had portrayed him in the original story, and he wanted to clarify things.”

“It is an imposing instrument with 83 stops (types of sounds) and 6,489 pipes—more than 25 tons of high-octane power, brilliance, flexibility and coloristic variety. But the organ’s highest achievement is how beautifully it blends into the aural fabric of the orchestra and, a few quibbles aside, how well it sounds in the pleasingly reverberant 1,900-seat hall.”

“New technologies have dramatically transformed the way people listen to music. The system for determining how songwriters and composers are compensated has not kept pace, making it increasingly difficult for music creators to earn a living.”

“The Biennial is clearly a good idea for a great orchestra required to contend with the weekly parade through town of the world’s other great orchestras. The NY Phil Biennial approach, however, seems less about making sense of a contentiously noisy environment than merely adding to it.”

Said the aristocratic 80-year-old Spaniard, a longstanding and beloved guest conductor with several top U.S. orchestras, “After meeting with my doctors, … I have to recognize publicly that I have cancer … and the moment to quit professional matters has come.”

“After 34 years at the New York Philharmonic, concertmaster Glenn Dicterow will play his final concert on June 28. Dicterow has had the longest tenure of any Phil concertmaster, and he’s done everything from traveling with the orchestra to North Korea in 2008 to taking over when a conductor gets lost.” (audio)

“The acclaimed Budapest Festival Orchestra had seven of its bows seized at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Saturday because of what orchestra officials said were misplaced concerns that the bows contained forbidden African elephant ivory.”