Category: music

“Using 50 years of data from the U.K.’s list of Top 40 singles, the scientists built a formula that they call the ‘hit potential equation.’ It can predict, with 60-percent accuracy, whether or not a popular song will make it into the top 5, or if it will remain in the bottom 30 to 40 spots on the hit chart.”

“As his hearing got worse, he favoured lower and middle-range notes in his music, scientists have said in the British Medical Journal. An analysis of Beethoven’s music has found that once he became totally deaf, he began to use high notes again. Researchers say the findings explain Beethoven’s music, which has always been divided into three periods.”

“The orchestra saw a 300-percent increase in subscriptions sold last season, at least in part the result of incentives that gave concertgoers a free ticket to see superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma or “Star Wars” composer John Williams in exchange for purchase of tickets to 10 concerts. In addition, the CSO received nearly $3 million more in contributions than in the previous fiscal year.”

“[It] has become a tradition in the modern evangelical megachurch: the Singing Christmas Tree. In these productions, church choirs perform a musical celebration while standing inside an enormous Christmas tree platform that reaches to the ceiling, often accompanied by extravagant light shows, dancing church members, and sometimes even fireworks.”

Okay, make that “didn’t renew” the contract of its artistic director for the past 11 years, Susan McMane. Why the decision was made is a bit unclear…

“Christmas [as celebrated today] is, of course, a largely 19th-century invention: so are all those carols. Most of them aren’t hugely ancient. Most of them aren’t even carols, if you’re strict on definition. And the ones that are tend not to have particularly spiritual origins, mixing the sacred with the secular.”

Imagine the singers’ chagrin when they saw that the venue where they were to perform this past weekend announced them in lights as the “Denver *** Men’s Chorus.” Management at the L2 Arts and Culture Center blames the language filter in the marquee’s software.

“Early fans turned the composer from a cultural hero into a god of sorts, a fountainhead of edifying, ‘ethical’ music.”

“My gut reaction when I first read it was disbelief that this trend was being presented as being something new, as many of the changes and innovations that were mentioned seemed old hat to those of us who live and breathe new music.”