Category: music

“Currently, the Kronos Quartet is touring with her Harp and Altar, the Albany Symphony Orchestra (where she is composer in residence) is premiering her newest orchestral work this spring, and she has two Carnegie Hall commissions.” Not to mention her recent opera premiere in Manhattan.

“What you’re seeing is that big festivals like T in the Park are as big as they can be. Boutique festivals are cropping up everywhere – Knockengorroch in the southwest of Scotland, for example – and that’s actually driving this growth.”

“The piece, thought to have been composed in 1767 or 1768, was found in a notebook in an attic. Researchers recently determined there was strong evidence Allegro Molto is a Mozart composition.”

“I know I’m only one person, but to me, in light of all of these things and in the context of a very long history, it is highly insulting to classify a composer by gender because it perpetuates the myth of a sub-group. It’s even further insulting to imply that our ensembles have made, or should make, programming choices based on gender.”

Oops. Someone wasn’t paying quite enough attention to music release dates in earlier seasons of Mad Men.. That’s hard to believe, given the show’s penchant for accuracy – and now it’s fixed.

“”You don’t need a PhD to understand my pieces,” Jennifer Higdon says. “I work hard on making sure they communicate to everybody.”

Want a new Mozart? On Friday, you could have heard one – discovered in a notebook from 1780 in an attic in Tyrol last summer – at Mozart’s home in Salzburg.

“After one week, the mice whose personal soundtrack featured Enya, one of the sound frequencies, or no music at all “rejected their grafts acutely,” the researchers report. Their hearts gave out 7.5 to 11 days after the transplant. In contrast, those exposed to Verdi or Mozart “had significantly prolonged survival,” the researchers report. Median survival times were 26.5 days for those who heard Verdi and 20 days for those exposed to Mozart.”

How they choose first-chair players, run rehearsals, decide on interpretations, check balances – and even stay with a soloist who skips an entire page of music.

“The company, famed for its Gilbert and Sullivan operas, stopped producing work in 2003 after it was unable to secure funding to enable it to continue. Since then it has operated a music hire library, which supplies the orchestral parts for Gilbert and Sullivan operas to professional and amateur societies. Next year, however, the company will return as co-producer of a new staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance.”