Category: music

Faint signs point to yes – maybe.

“Here we don’t have hundreds of years of classic music sensibilities limiting creativity. In fact, it is beneficial if you create something popular. After all, America is a capitalist society.”

“The new organization will operate under the tentative corporate name of the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance. The merger forms one board of directors from the two current boards, effectively turning the two nonprofits into one.”

“While concerts themselves are a great way for us to communicate with each other musically (as well as with a general audience), opportunities for performers, composers, or both (depending on the topic) to explore and debate amongst one another in a safe environment is healthy, necessary, and all too rare.”

The orchestra “has notions to do for classical music what the Venice Biennale and Art Basel Miami Beach have done for art.” Philharmonic officials describe the ten-day event, to begin in May-June 2014, as “a veritable playground of new and recent music from around the world.”

David Patrick Stearns: “Sometimes you need to submit to an artistic movement: Shelve as many doubts as possible, set aside questions about enjoyability, and just see what happens. … Often, I was happiest when I didn’t know how long the piece was going to be, making the experience like mountain hiking in dense fog: When you have no idea how close you are to the summit, the lack of anticipation grounds you in the moment.”

“In Cleveland, the players were bewildered during the first read-through of the score. Tensions flickered and were fanned by Boulez’s effortless, if glum, command of the music’s complexity. He could sing any instrumental part with exact precision … [He] could instantly hear if a note or a player’s timing was off, and he had no inhibitions about locating the exact source of error.”

“We need to be daring and break with convention if we are to show the world that classical music is not a sleepy, stuffy genre, but a force to be reckoned with, and something that can be enjoyed by all.”

The musicians of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra have now missed months of work. Minnesota Orchestra musicians have lost roughly $44,000 per player based on the previous average annual salary of $135,000.

“Billed as the first freestanding building in the West built for jazz performance and education, the center opened Wednesday after raising more than $60 million over more than a decade to build a home for SFJAZZ, the nonprofit that puts on the city’s jazz festival.”