Category: music

“Album sales have fallen to a new low after Rihanna topped the UK chart with a weekly sale of less than 10,000 copies for the first time since modern statistical records began.”

“The city’s largest cultural group, having run up $5 million annual deficits in recent years, is facing a daunting accumulated debt nearing $20 million. … Symphony management has resolved that the bleeding must stop and is amid increasing fractious contract negotiations with the committee representing its 93 musicians to replace the four-year agreement that expires at midnight Aug. 25.”

The son of a doctor from Sierra Leone and an English mother, Coleridge-Taylor was a favorite student of the influential composer and professor Charles Villiers Stanford and was championed by Edward Elgar. In addition to a career as conductor, professor and competition judge, he composed a number of successful chamber, orchestral and choral works, including the phenomenally successful (in its time) cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

“In the wake of Modern Guilt and The Information, Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form–twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded.”

“Dr. Lesiuk’s research focuses on how music affects workplace performance. In one study involving information technology specialists, she found that those who listened to music completed their tasks more quickly and came up with better ideas than those who didn’t, because the music improved their mood.”

In the off-season, “spend a few leisurely hours in advance getting ready for music that is new to you. In most cases, it is not difficult to track down a recording and some reading material about the piece and the composer. This way, you’ll arrive at the performance fully alert — and entitled to look ever so smug.”

“Now that it’s easier to make a recording than to play Carnegie Hall and the standard repertory has been recorded to death, more artists are staking out their own niches by championing and recording forgotten composers of past eras.”

Pauline Oliveros “eludes induction into the pantheon. In place of scores suited for assimilation into the Western classical canon, Ms. Oliveros offers ‘Sonic Meditations,’ a 1971 collection of text-based contemplations, meant to facilitate communal music making. Deep listening, a discipline she developed during the 1990s, bypasses conventional music theory in favor of expanding consciousness through cultivating a keener ear.”

A manager might think headphones keep workers in their own little worlds – but it’s a world in which they perform more quickly and end the day feeling happier to be at work.

“When you’re a mediocre busker, existentially challenged by the apathy of passers-by, any attention feels like good attention.”