At the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, there are currently 13 openings in the violin, viola, bass, flute and percussion sections, a high number of openings for the roughly 100-member ensemble. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"The campaign against classical music is worth examining in some detail, for it reveals the logic that has been turned against nearly every aspect of Western culture over the last year. - City Journal
The games are moving beyond the John Williams fanfares and national anthems, writes Michael Andor Brodeur. "And not just as background, but as a means of making the ultimate athletic test of human achievement more human." - The Washington Post on MSN
How it's working onstage: "When the guy comes to the rehearsal room he sometimes has this suspicious look. Especially in the beginning, when people were moving their chairs a little bit, he was like, 'Don't do that'." - BBC
Charles Packer's The Crown of Thorns premiered in Sydney in 1863 and was considered a masterpiece, sung every year at Eastertime by Australian choral societies — until everyone dropped it after 1936. Then, a few years ago, a collector found a score in a secondhand bookshop. - ABC (Australia)
The new HBO film Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage offers a chilling demonstration of how greed, cultural rot, and the vagaries of crowd behavior can make a concert into a generation-defining thing for all the wrong reasons. - The Atlantic
"From world-famous musicians to anonymous internet commentators, discrimination toward Asian musicians contains an ugly, common tenor: In this music, they will not replace us." - Van
As for the rest of Spotify’s Q2 2021, the company reported 365 million monthly active users—a growth of 22% YOY. Total revenue was €2.33 billion, or about $2.75 billion. That’s an increase of 23% YOY. - Fast Company
Yorùbá speech, that is. The West African language is tonal, using three different pitches, and dùndún drummers can adjust the tension on their drum heads to change pitch, stroke by stroke, to match Yorùbá syllables and words. - Smithsonian Magazine
The pipes and carillon bells of the instrument were discovered a century ago at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Scholar-performer David Catalunya says the pipes are near-perfectly intact and that, over the next five years, he'll make them playable again. - Aleteia
“Many of the first-choice people said, ‘Look I’m sorry, I’m not doing this any more. I have a family. I had to take another profession. Six months ago, I’d have welcomed it’,” he said. - The Guardian
"I felt so small. A half Navajo and half Apache girl writing 'fancy' music for a quartet — something I had never dreamed of or even crossed my mind." - Blavity
The Opera Festival of Chicago focuses on Italian works which may be somewhat familiar from recordings and broadcasts but rarely get professional productions in the US. They're starting small (two one-acts and a concert), but plan to work up to four operas per year. - Chicago Tribune
“When we made the decision that we couldn’t perform indoors in Music Hall, the hunt was on. Of course, the first obvious choice would be the Zoo,” said artistic director Evans Mirageas. - Cincinnati Business Journal
