Category: music

A few weeks after he was fired from his positions with NEC’s youth orchestras for having engaged a former child sex offender as videographer, the widely-loved conductor and teacher talks about the lead-up to the controversy, its aftermath, and his own errors in judgment.

“[The composer’s] own idea of what his proudest legacy would be – he called it his favorite of all his works – was the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a retirement home in Milan for musicians who had reached age 65 and found themselves in dire straits. … Casa di Riposo still stands today beside a busy Milan traffic circle, still active.”

“Most concerning to Cleveland-based fans is word that the orchestra soon may be spending four weeks a year in Miami instead of three.” But orchestra officials say that “more time in Miami will simply mean less time in Europe – specifically, in cities where the orchestra is not already in residence.”

“Despite the demise of Napster more than a decade ago, music fans continue to use file-sharing sites to discover and share music. In certain circles, especially more underground and fringe scenes, music blogs and sites are indispensible ways of discovering new artists, as they’re mostly ignored by mainstream magazines and websites.”

“Despite classical’s deserved reputation as the whitest of genres, Asian attendance rates match or surpass the national average up through the 45- 54 age range. To put it one way, the younger the classical audience gets, the more Asian it becomes. To put it another, the only population that is disproportionately filling seats being vacated by old people dying off is Asians.”

“It’s true the internet has been brilliant for artists in many ways, giving them an alternative route to make contact with and sell directly to fans, but record labels do much more than distribute to retailers.”

Up until now the implications for former “niche” genres – classical, jazz, world – have been largely overlooked. In a world where listeners no longer define themselves along firm genre lines, music is increasingly just that – music. As a result, we are now witnessing a musician-led movement gleefully adopted by listeners, in which classical is being rebranded from the ground up. Even the term “classical” itself seems obsolete in the face of what’s being produced and consumed.

Just over a year after the Honolulu Symphony’s ignominious collapse, musicians and backers have created the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra, which has announced a slate of eight classical programs to be performed in Honolulu from March through May of this year.

Despite a 90-day extension of bankruptcy protection, orchestra management “expects a plan of reorganization to be filed with the court in February, with an exit from bankruptcy in late April or early May.”