Category: music

“The Australian Music Industry Network estimated the sector’s 65,000 musicians collectively spend anywhere between $10 million and $20m a year on domestic flights.”

Colorado Symphony musicians voted unanimously Tuesday to delay a decision on an emergency contract revision that calls for a 14 percent pay cut and a significant increase in performance time. “We felt like there was a gun to our heads the whole way just in terms of these deadlines.”

“Almost every church once had a pipe organ. But as mainstream churches merge, close, struggle to raise money, and use guitars, drums and ‘praise bands’ to draw younger worshipers, the pipe organ is waning as a fixture in many parishes. Some are showing up in landfills.” Enter the Organ Clearing House.

The claim that “for the LPO, music and politics do not mix” is not only philosophically wrong, it’s historically inaccurate as well.

“ArtPrize leaders always wanted other kinds of artists in the game. So this year’s competition, which runs today through Oct. 9, inaugurates a new exhibition center focused on music. Composers and performers working in rock, country, jazz, classical and other idioms will take their place as competitors alongside painters, sculptors, photographers, conceptual artists and the rest.”

The ensemble, “created on the lines of Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim’s Arab-Jewish West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and comprising Kurds, Arabs, Shiites, Sunnis and Christians, … [is trying to] help to unite a divided country living in the shadow of violence and terror.”

Columnist Anil Dharker: “[If] any art form struggles to survive in our country, it is western classical music. … Sometimes you wonder if western classical music has survived all these years only because Parsis live so long. … But there is an even more basic reason why soaking in western classical music might do us good, and this has to do with the very structure of their music and ours.”

“Crossover may be many things, but it is not dangerous. Daughters will come to no harm at an Il Divo gig. But the way some people in the classical music world talk about it, you’d think crossover was the devil’s music, Elvis with horns.”

“Peter Nero and his orchestra have agreed to split from the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, ending a six-year experiment that was bumpy from the start, stormy at the end, and never fully consummated.”

“With two weeks left before season-opening rehearsals, contract talks between the San Antonio Symphony Society and musicians are on hold after the musicians rejected management’s offer to cut more than $8,000 from last year’s base salary to around $23,000, a level the musicians say they cannot live on.”