Category: music

“After holding its performances in an improvised mix of venues around the city for the past three decades, SFJAZZ finally has a place to park its piano. When it opens on January 21, 2013, the new 35,000-square-foot SFJAZZ Center will be the first standalone jazz performance hall in the U.S.”

“The data shows just how mainstream filesharing is now. It isn’t just members of Anonymous sitting behind their Macbooks downloading the obscure doom metal of Sunn O)))) the culprits are your next door neighbours, your relatives, your own kids and perhaps (probably) even you.”

“Having already raised $106 million since August 2007, the company seeks to raise at least another $59 million by the end of 2014 – with the overall goal of $165 million heralded as the largest fundraising drive in the history of Houston performing arts.”

“In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both).”

“Taylor’s action, filed Sept. 13 in Superior Court in L.A., seeks at least $2 million in compensatory damages, plus interest and a declaration that the musician is contractually entitled to 50% of net receipts for digital downloads and ringtones.”

“The 24-year-old played Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, accompanied by the Halle Orchestra, to take the title. The competition’s founder, 91-year-old Dame Fanny Waterman, announced the £18,000 prize in Leeds Town Hall.”

“The data suggests that Ed Sheeran – with his album + – is, so far this year, the most illegally downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 cities, towns and villages covered by the research.”

“It was not Stravinsky’s music that did the shocking. It was the ugly earthbound lurching and stomping devised by Vaslav Nijinsky, the greatest dancer in the troupe but a novice choreographer, that offended the Paris public, for whom ballet was all about swans and tutus and elevation. Once the whistlers and hooters got going, nobody even heard the music.”

“Did your parents tell you that today’s music is getting poorer and too loud? Well, maybe they were right. But we will offer a different hypothesis: what if it is all about economy of resources? If today’s music still satisfies listeners the same way pop music did 50 years before, then maybe its creators are simply better at crafting pleasing songs.”

Zambello will retain her position as artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival in Upstate New York, which she took over last year. She will also continue to direct productions around the world, although, she says, “I will be scaling back on some of my work” to spend more time in Washington.