Category: music

“This week the Billboard Hot 100, the magazine’s 55-year-old singles chart, takes a evolutionary step by incorporating YouTube plays into its formula.”

“It’s a great loss for the SPCO. We’ve said repeatedly to management that we will not be able to recruit or retain the talent that this orchestra needs to remain world class, and this is just a textbook example of that.”

For his second season as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-SÉguin’s “presence increases from nine to 11 weeks. Subscription concerts expand from 78 to 84, though ‘Beyond the Score’ lecture/concerts go on hiatus for lack of sponsorship. The single biggest innovation is a composer-based ‘micro-festival’ Oct. 31-Nov. 2. Three of the orchestra’s principal players will premiere new pieces.”

“The 62-year-old conductor has renewed his contract with the Los Angeles Opera for five more years, and will remain music director at least through the end of the 2017-18 season.”

“Jason Tramm has resigned from the struggling company he has led since 2008, saying the board’s vision is no longer in sync with his own” – and submitted a bill for $80,000 of unpaid sevrices. Says the board president, “The performances weren’t up to par, he wasn’t following protocol … If he feels he has to go on to bigger and better things, God bless him.”

Researchers at the University of Melbourne attribute to the amount of pleasure we take in music to how much dissonance we hear — the degree of “perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound.”

Andreas Mitisek “has built a reputation for putting on opera seasons that are eclectic in repertory, unconventional and even provocative in performance. It’s not for nothing that Opera News magazine last year named the Austrian-born Mitisek, 50, one of 25 people who will be major forces in opera over the coming decade.”

Orchestra Victoria, which plays in the pit for all of the Australian Ballet’s and Opera Australia’s Melbourne performances and performs concerts in the state of Victoria’s regions as well as the capital, “has been beset with official indecision, management instability and financial strife.” One unnamed figure calls the band a “complete and total basketcase”.

“[P]revious theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical properties of sound, the ear itself and an innate ability to hear harmony. … [But our] love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on any innate natural ability, according to a new study [from Melbourne researchers].”

“Composers tend to be both competitive (as the lifeblood of our art–performances–are of a limited supply) and not a little sensitive about their own self-perceived flaws. Humor, therefore, is a rare bird.”