Category: music

“Members of Save Our Symphony Minnesota have made it clear they’re not going away now that the lockout has ended. More importantly, they’ve made it clear to the board that they want Henson gone and Vänskä back … But understand, many of the board members are corporate heavyweights. Most corporate heavyweights don’t react well to ultimatums.”

“I heard drama; I saw drama, great swaying, soaring playing full of determination and vigour, its pace never letting up. (I’m stunned how still the rest of the audience appeared to manage to sit. My head had gone a bit I think.)” Soccer writer Neil Atkinson visits the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.

In addition to the cash award, the prize, given by Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, will do four residencies at the school over the next two years and have a work performed by the Chicago Symphony.

Gustavo Dudamel had to stop the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of John Corigliano’s First Symphony on Friday night when an inebriated latecomer decided – very loudly and a bit violently – that he shouldn’t have to wait for a break in the music to enter the auditorium.

“In the 1940s, the Jazz Record Center became the default clubhouse for a cabal of distinctive gentlemen: exiles, recluses, characters so outsize in their eccentricities that they felt invented, except better. Here there was not a sense—as with the archetypal Outsider—that a choice had been made. Here, the earliest collectors of 78 rpm records found each other.”

Partly by doing outreach at places like Ikea. Yes, Ikea flash mob Beethoven 9.

It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.

“Even teachers who know very little about traditional music could assign interesting fiddle tunes to their students as a break between scales and etudes. It would be a moment in the middle of a practice session to reflect on just how much musical tradition exists in America. It would be a moment to recognize that most, if not all music comes, in some way, from folk traditions.”

“A number of rocks, when struck, made ‘distinctive (if muted) sounds.’ They judged that enough made sounds such that once, they all would have rung, and furthermore saw marks on the rocks that might—upon further forensic testing—prove to be strike marks.”

“Bach’s restless, radical new style fits within history — with the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War, the shifting of nations and the Enlightenment, which encouraged individualism.”