Category: music

“For five years club owners have resisted the union’s efforts and remain divided about the idea. Some accuse the 8,000-member union of trolling for new revenue to prop up the pension fund, whose main beneficiaries are mostly retired Broadway musicians, studio session players and classical musicians who are covered by union contracts. Though some jazz artists belong to the union, they generally work in nonunion clubs.”

“There’s a growing sense with the current generation of performers that those jobs they trained for aren’t there, so you have to make your own opportunities, and while you’re at it, build a new audience.”

“New York City’s musicians’ union has begun leafleting outside a major jazz club, the first salvo in what union leaders say is a campaign to gain pension benefits and a minimum wage for jazz artists.”

“As the curtain came down, that cultured-looking audience exploded into heckles and boos. The nearest thing I’d seen to this sort of behaviour was the crowd at a football match.”

“What if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.”

James Levine has withdrawn from all 2011 and 2012 performances at the Met.

“Some of it is classical, some of it involves pop stars across generations, and some of it is about animals.”

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra ran a $1.8-million deficit on an operating budget of $17.4 million in 2011 … DSO executive vice president Paul Hogle said it was a miracle that the deficit wasn’t as high as $5 million or more considering the [year’s] extraordinary tumult.”

“Driven by the idea that we take the highly evolved sound of an orchestra for granted, [the BBC] challenged skilled instrument-makers to recreate the sections of the orchestra with nothing but freely available junk. They then challenged the BBC Concert Orchestra to get a beautiful sound from this wreckage, and asked Charles Hazlewood to conduct them in a Prom.”