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MUSIC

Safely Playing Their Hearts Out At The Proms

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

Reviving Australia’s First Major Oratorio, 85 Years After Its Last Performance

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)

Dallas Symphony Is Selling Music As NFTs

Proceeds go to the musicians of the Met — which still isn’t regularly performing. KERA

Cautionary Tale: How A Music Festival Went Horribly Wrong

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

Asian Musicians On What They Really Face In The Classical Industry

"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

Spotify Now Has 165 Million Subscribers – More Than Apple And Amazon Combined

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

West African Talking Drums Really Can Imitate Speech, Say Researchers

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

12th-Century Organ, By Far The World’s Oldest, To Be Reconstructed

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

Simon Rattle: We’ve Lost Many Musicians in the Pandemic

“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

The Difference Between Music Education and Not

"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

New Opera Company Debuts In Chicago

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

How Cincinnati Opera Is Reinventing Itself… Outdoors

“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

Mockingbirds Create Songs Pretty Much The Way Humans Do

Timbre morphing, pitch morphing, stretch morphing and squeeze morphing: "Mockingbirds compose their songs much like human composers do, drawing phrases from other birds' melodies that follow these four basic morphing modes." - Wired

The Largest Wind Instrument In The World

Hint: It's in San Francisco. (And a musician just made an album with its tourist-pleasing self.) - The Guardian (UK)

Trying To Put On A Festival Amid Floods, A Plague, And Brexit

It's not easy for the Salzburg Festival, but performers and audience alike feel the reality that "peace doesn’t exist without its antithesis." - The New York Times

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