Category: music

Mezzo-soprano Wendy White, who fell Friday night when a platform buckled on the set of Gounod’s “Faust” at the Metropolitan Opera, seems not to have been hurt badly.

One 11-year-old at Gaza’s only music school prefers to listen to Justin Bieber but loves playing the traditional qanun. “When I play, I feel happy, I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but I feel different, I’m in a different place.”

“That is the ever-present difficulty of recording: That the desire to communicate the music is balanced and sometimes even replaced by the desire to control the music.”

“What’s it going to take for a new Christmas song to enter the canon, after almost two decades since the last one? … In this environment, the next Christmas classic probably isn’t going to come to us; we’ll have to go to it.”

Let’s not be ridiculous about the demise of CDs. In some markets, including Germany, they account for well over half of music sales. And classical fans aren’t going to go all-download anytime soon.

“Police in Indonesia’s most conservative province raided a punk-rock concert and detained 65 fans, shaving off their spiky mohawks and stripping away body piercings because of the perceived threat to Islamic values.”

“For many vicars penning their sermons is what gets the creative juices flowing. The Rev Gavin Tyte has gone a little further, producing a rap and human-beatbox version of the nativity story, and a video to go with it that has attracted thousands of hits on YouTube.”

“New York City Opera is scheduled to begin mediation Monday with its two labor unions, in a bid to resolve a bitter contract dispute threatening to disrupt performances planned across the city this season, opera and union officials said.”

“A woman told police she stole more than $200,000 from the York Symphony Orchestra to support her gambling addiction while she was the orchestra’s office manager, according to charging documents.”

In terms of sales, “male artists had 238 hit songs (54.1 percent) and female artists had 182 (41.4 percent),” they report. But in terms of airplay, “male artists had 271 hit songs (61.6 percent) and female artists had only 151 (34.3 percent).”