Category: music

“Hoping to make it easier for the city’s hardest-working musicians to make a real living, Justice for Jazz Artists (a coalition of musicians and activists with Local 802) has worked to pressure some of the city’s major clubs , like the Village Vanguard and the Iridium, to provide musicians with access to pensions later in life.”

“I don’t think it’s important,” says the Hungarian-French composer. “If you start from a point of view of doing something for the public, you won’t create a new world. … Never give what the public asks. You must give the public what it needs – even if they do not always know it! Many people will understand 100 years later.”

‘So many of these how-does-music-work articles and books seem to view music as one thing, as a standardized mechanical apparatus whose tricks can be figured out. And music is peculiarly prey to trivializing questions. Perhaps I’m overlooking stories in other fields, but I don’t seem to see headlines along the lines of ‘How do paintings make us feel?’ or ‘Why do movies with unhappy endings make us cry?’ or ‘What about thrillers makes us tense?’ ”

“Venezuela is not especially a deeply Catholic country, and El Sistema’s top rank of musicians do not display piety. But through the influence of Mr. Abreu, who professes deep religious devotion, the trappings of a church have emerged, even if the similarities are only a question of atmospherics. It is possible to extrapolate that a good part of El Sistema’s success is due to these trappings, or at least to the single-minded focus on spreading the gospel of social action through music.”

After a series of contract extensions that covered a few weeks at a time, “the Philadelphia Orchestra Association has signed president and chief executive officer Allison B. Vulgamore for three more years.”

“In a world where fans and the remaining performers are almost invariably in their 60s and 70s, or older, … whether because of an absence of charismatic individual stars, musical shortcomings or the way it has been relegated to Happy Days nostalgia, doo-wop has been marginalized as tacky music stuck in time.”

Florence B. Price (1887-1953), raised in Arkansas and trained in Boston and Chicago, went on “to write some 300 works and become the first black woman in the U.S. to be recognized as a symphonic composer,” with her Symphony in E minor premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.

“Rodolfo Cazares, a Mexican symphony conductor, was sleeping in bed with his wife in northern Mexico when masked gunmen burst into their home and shook them awake. … Seven months later, Mr. Cazares – a 36-year-old leader of the Bremerhaven city orchestra in Germany – and three other men are still missing, even after family members paid four ransoms to a presumed drug cartel.”

“In its proud and glorious mid-70s Manhattan heyday, disco was far more than that. It was a four-on-the-four bassline, euphoric strings, fierce cowbells and a soaring vocal straight out of the church and on to the dancefloor. More importantly it created a place – or rather it soundtracked a space – outside the mainstream. A place where black, Hispanic, gay and any combination thereof could come together and dance, love and just be without fear.”

“When I go to hear live music, I experience one of the few healthy things that our culture offers us: a chance to connect with members of our species without our differences being at the fore. Wouldn’t it be great to play music the same way? It seems like that should be the way it is, but our culture isn’t small enough to unify music making.”