Category: music

“This is a perfect metaphor. Much of the visual stuff I’d planned isn’t working – because there’s a big head in the way. The head is bigger than it should be, just like Berlioz’s, Cellini’s and mine.”

“Schlock, at its finest, is where bad taste becomes great art. Schlock is music that subjugates all other values to brute emotional impact; it aims to overwhelm, to body-slam the senses, to deliver catharsis like a linebacker delivers a clothesline tackle. The qualities traditionally prized by music critics and other listeners of discerning taste — sophistication, subtlety, wit, irony, originality, “experimentation” — have no place in schlock.”

“Would a ‘classical music ESPN’ work in bridging the gap between our great musical institutions and every cable-subscribing home in America? By leveling the media playing field, could classical music once again compete for the attention of American households?”

“Only two weeks after severing ties with former director Ian Campbell and reversing its March vote to his plan and shut down the company, the board of the San Diego Opera has picked a new leader. William Mason, the highly respected former general director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is the opera’s new artistic adviser.”

“Classical music has much to be ashamed of, but it can point with some pride toward increasing gender parity in the makeup of orchestras, toward considerable progress in the representation of female composers, and – caveats aside – toward the historic empowerment of the diva.”

“One of the knee-jerk settings in collaborations like this is to have the orchestra do the big soupy chords, the sweeping string section. That to me is just window dressing. My intention is to bring an orchestra into contact with electronic music in order to make it do something provocative, aggressive.”

“It is hard to say what is more surprising: that such a thing as a mandolin orchestra exists in New York City in 2014 — or that mandolin orchestras were once everywhere.”

“With wedding music or random cocktail receptions, it is easy to offer rote performances and make an easy buck. But for the concerts that I’m sure most of us NewMusicBox musician fans love to perform—the concerts with music by living composers who have poured their energy and love into writing it—we can’t just phone it in. And we shouldn’t.”

“Organisers said the success of the concert will be judged by how many people have fallen asleep by the end.”

Discordant sounds are just one element of dissonance. One reason the term is elusive is that the concept is both subjective (“What is harmony to one ear, may be dissonance to another,” as the writer Joseph Addison put it in 1711) and contextual.