Tag: 02.16.17

Music Is One Of The Last Places Where Mentorship Is Sorely Needed, And Sometimes Sorely Lacking

A conductor who had Michael Tilson Thomas as a mentor for years says, “If I don’t mentor folks and get involved with them, then who’s going to care for the next generation? In my mind, a mentor is someone who can actually serve as a role model for what a great person or a great musician might be, and that’s where you’re going to get folks hopefully emulating and striving to do that kind of work. … Those are the kinds of musicians you want around.”

Soon Machines Will Be Able To Tell When Something Goes Wrong Just By Listening

“We’re developing an expert mechanic’s brain that identifies exactly what is happening to a machine by the way that it sounds,” says Amnon Shenfeld, founder and CEO of 3DSignals, a startup based in Kfar Saba, Israel, that is using machine learning to train computers to listen to machinery and diagnose problems at facilities like hydroelectric plants and steel mills.

What We Know About How People Use Music In Their Daily Lives

“I think one of the most interesting things is the number of people who really don’t have music playing in their homes. It’s quite striking across the nine countries we surveyed. Something as simple as entertaining friends and family: 84% of people in Sweden, 83% of people in the U.K., 79% of people in the U.S. don’t play music when they have friends over.”

Is Science Moral?

“To label science as moral or immoral completely misses the point. Science is amoral. Science is a collection of facts about the natural world painstakingly carved out by a community of scientists who engage in detailed quantitative research and data analysis. This is true even for computer simulations of detonation shock fronts of explosive devices, for example, and even of engineers and technicians putting bombs together in an assembly line.”

Irwin Stambler, 92, Author Of ‘The Encyclopedia Of Pop, Rock And Soul’

He was trained as, believe it or not, an aeronautical engineer, and he wrote books on aviation and space exploration as well as biographies of musicians. But he’s remembered for his encyclopedias on rock/pop/soul, musical theater and the “American songbook,” country-and-western, and (with his son) folk and blues – the first comprehensive scholarly reference books these genres had.

Why Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Skin Of Our Teeth’ Is Suddenly Relevant Again

Seems like we hadn’t seen much of Wilder’s second-most famous play in recent years; Wilder himself once wrote that “it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.” Laura Collins-Hughes talks to three prominent directors – Carey Perloff, Bartlett Sher, and Arin Arbus – and playwright Paula Vogel about both the script’s problems and why this might be a good time to produce it again.

The Original Svengali Was A Conductor, And Other Goodies From The Novel That Gave Us The Word

That novel was Trilby (you may recognize that name as well), which was written as a serial for Harper’s Monthly by George du Maurier (Daphne’s grandfather) in 1894. The title character was a tone-deaf working-class girl whom the conductor-pianist Svengali hypnotized and turned into a world-famous opera singer. As Emma Garman recounts, both of those characters got as far beyond their creator as the monster did with Victor Frankenstein.