Category: music

“The Iranian national symphony orchestra has been disbanded for lack of funds, musicians said Monday … Orchestra members told the semiofficial ILNA news agency Monday that they have not rehearsed together and have not been paid for three months. … The orchestra was reactivated just last year, after a two-year break.”

“Watching [the ensemble] from the front row in late August was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in what was seen as an endorsement from the ruling theocracy … Just two months later, the musicians are out of work, funding has run dry and a nearly 80-year-old institution that survived wars, coups and the 1979 Islamic Revolution was declared Tuesday in an apparently irreversible ‘coma’ by media.”

“The likeliest scenario would involve building on the site of the parking lot at the corner of Franklin and Grove streets.”

Twenty-three-year-old Pavel “Kolesnikov, who played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23 with the Calgary Philharmonic for his final recital, receives $100,000 in cash and will now also take part in an artistic and career development program valued at $500,000.”

“Monday morning, the institution announced a new, three-year deal with the musicians had been ratified, bringing the negotiation process to a notably swift and uncontentious conclusion.”

“The book’s title is a reference to the Cloud Atlas Sextet, written by a fictional, young 1930s composer named Robert Frobisher, the protagonist of one of six loosely connected narratives that make up the novel.” In the book, author David Mitchell describes the piece in some detail – but director Tom Tykwer (himself a msuician) and his colleagues couldn’t both follow the description and make the music “satisfying for the film.”

The piece is scored for violin, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, and piano; the composer in the novel describes his inspiration this way: “Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.” J. Bryan Lowder unpacks all those references.

“I am dismayed by the ratcheting up of hostility, the evidence of poisonous internecine warfare. The musicians’ blogs, in particular, are painful expressions of hopes, dreams and aspirations being destroyed. How an orchestra comes back from such an experience with relationships and trust totally wrecked, I have no idea.”

“Everyone in the music business knows that is not the business we are in anymore, that a stream on Rhapsody or Spotify, or a download at iTunes or Amazon — all these different things — are a meaningful part of the fan experience. And to have genre charts that don’t reflect that? I can’t believe anyone would be arguing for that.”

“The aching music may remain one of Mexico’s top cultural exports, by which the country is known worldwide, but its fortunes have fallen in its homeland.” A new school in Mexico City may change that.