"What might a young music director mean to an orchestra and to a city when an amazing crop of international and, for the first time, diverse young maestros and maestras is upon us? The implications go far beyond that." - Los Angeles Times
“Here it’s looked on with great suspicion. That drives me nuts, I have to tell you. England is a haven for culture whether it is pop culture or classical culture, literary culture, theatrical culture, this is one of the great addresses and yet we’re embarrassed by it.” - The Guardian
On April 30, Kosman will flip his critic’s notebook closed for the final time, retiring from the newspaper at a crucial juncture for classical music in the Bay Area. - San Francisco Chronicle
The five-concert tour to Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai, led by outgoing music director Jaap van Zweden and running from June 27 to July 3, will be the first visit by a full U.S. orchestra to the People's Republic since 2019. - AP
Where barely one million new vinyl albums were sold in the United States in 2006, that figure has grown every year since, soaring to just over 49 million units in 2023. - The Conversation
The saint is worshiped alongside the divine, and in many faiths, the line between the two is blurred. In the world of classical music, we effectively worship the Great Dead Composers as saints, the ones who transmit perfection into the musical world. - Van
It seems clearer that creatives using AI tools as a part of their own processes is considered more acceptable than administrators using AI to create or embellish creative work. - Opera America Magazine
Cultural memory—for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act—risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception? - The American Scholar
"Their level of experience ranged from novice to veteran, as quantified by the number of public performances they had given. The researchers placed electrode caps on their heads to record their EEG brain waves while they improvised to chord sequences and rhythms that were provided to them." - The Conversation
TikTok began life as Musical.ly, an app to film oneself lip-syncing to songs. Interacting with pop music was a core function of TikTok. Fans and artists shared music they loved, grafting it onto videos showing their lives and ideas. It was a lifeline to friends and culture during the pandemic. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
“TikTok is how you get the word out about a new song — and now you’re muting someone’s entire catalog? The labels say TikTok is so important and push their artists to , and now they can’t?” - Variety
In an attempt to tackle fraudulent activity on the platform, the digital music service now also requires a minimum number of unique listeners for royalties to be generated. In addition, the length of play-time required for so-called “functional content” (such as white noise) to generate royalty payments has increased. - Eurozine
Although distributors and streaming services frequently use language that places the blame on the artist for fraudulent activity detected on their accounts, it has become clear that artists are often caught in the middle of a crossfire between streaming services, distributors and fraudsters attempting to game the system for their own financial gain. - Variety
Said the 82-year-old this morning, "I woke up at 5:30 yesterday morning to get ready for rehearsal and I thought, what am I even doing? I was wobbly on my feet, and then I thought, I just shouldn't do it anymore." - NPO Radio 4 (Netherlands) (via Google Translate)
