Category: music

“The Internet Music Score Library Project has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere. It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship.”

“The orchestra has no plans to hire permanent replacements for the 85 musicians who have been on strike for 21 weeks, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra president Anne Parsons said today. The concept of replacing the musicians raced through the symphony world like brush fire, after media reports … indicated that the DSO is prepared to move forward with replacements.”

In downtown Toronto, Sunrise Records – just across Yonge Street from the site of the once-legendary Sam the Record Man – has opened a new second-floor space dedicated to classical, jazz and blues CDs.

“What we can’t do, though, is pretend that the VPO is an orchestra just like any other. It’s not. It’s the living embodiment of an exclusionary philosophy that should, at the very least, give any thoughtful person pause.”

“The screen displays the various components of a track, which can be manipulated with a click of a mouse; pitch, tone, duration, pretty much every element of a composition can be tampered with.”

“In a radical change of policy for BBC Radio 3, the network’s controller, Roger Wright, has committed to broadcasting concerts live, every weekday evening, for 46 weeks of the year. … The decision rolls back a decision taken four years ago, when the Performance on 3 slot was shifted earlier to 7pm and began broadcasting mainly pre-recorded concerts.”

“The Atlanta Opera, one of the metro arts groups hardest hit by the struggling economy, is receiving a $9 million bequest from longtime board member Barbara D. Stewart, who died last year … The bequest is believed to be the largest gift in the opera’s history and one of the larger gifts known to a North American opera company.”

Librettist Richard Thomas: “What’s ‘worthy’? And who gets to decide? Everything is a fitting subject for an opera. Every life lived contains glory and tragedy. If we live our lives on a scale of one to 10, then most of us, most of the time, experience something between three and seven. Anna was ones and 10s from beginning to end.”

Alsop, who succeeds Yan Pascal Tortelier in the Sao Paulo post, plans to remain as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which she joined in 2007.

“A lot of the jaws that hit the floor when those two categories were announced were those of independents. Independent artists winning against Eminem? A lot of people were thinking, ‘This is insane!’ “