Activists who support Ukraine are protesting a three-concert series at New York City's famed Carnegie Hall this weekend featuring Russian conductor Valery Gergiev. - NPR
"Among Lyndon Terracini's artistic achievements have been the staging of two complete Ring cycles – with a third scheduled for 2023 in Brisbane – the incorporation of digital screens into set designs, and the huge success of the annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour." - Limelight (Australia)
It's a good idea: audiences like it, and excellent music gets revived in the context it was meant for. It's not the technical difficulty of synching precisely with the film. The difficulty, writes Michael Phillips, is with which movies are and aren't available and why. - MSN (Chicago Tribune)
Orchestras still face the possibility of disruption by future waves of the virus, making planning difficult. In some bustling international markets, including China, quarantine rules are so strict that tours are nearly impossible. - The New York Times
The streaming age has been hard on independent musicians. In 2020, analytics company Alpha Data examined data based on 1.6 million artists who released music to streaming services and found 90 per cent of plays were generated by one per cent of artists. - The Conversation
"Letters of complaint have been sent to the organisers, the Recording Academy, arguing that the tracks in question – by two separate artists, Jon Batiste and Curtis Stewart – have been 'mis-categorised'. Their objections have absolutely nothing to do with quality, but genre, say the musicians." - The Observer (UK)
"Now we're working on a new record, and someone recently asked me what the endgame is, like, 'Oh, you're making a record, what's the endgame?' And it's not really how it works. The endgame is I die. Making music is a practice." - The New York Times
In this production, via recordings, "singers from six prison musical groups — a mix of over 100 men and women who are incarcerated as well as about 70 community volunteers — are the ones singing the 'Prisoners' Chorus.'" - NPR
I’d never encountered the 432 Hz phenomenon. Its lore has all the hallmarks of your archetypal conspiracy theories. No one version dominates, but most accounts include a selection of the following tropes. - Van
The joint program of the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is now working with its first class of fellows, who get commissions for new scores as well as mentorship from Esa-Pekka Salonen, Edwin Outwater, and Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser. - KQED (San Francisco)
This year, RSD offers 411 new releases, a fact that should leave those in the physical music business seething. Thanks to Brexit and the pandemic, we simply can’t make enough records. There is an international shortage of the various components required. - The Guardian
The research, involving well over 350,000 people in more than 50 countries, tested subjects for the "Big Five" personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) and classified the (Western) music that respondents liked in five descriptive categories (Mellow, Unpretentious, Sophisticated, Intense, and Contemporary). - Ludwig Van
It's called the organetto, and though no originals survive, there are hundreds of depictions of the instrument in art and manuscripts of the era. Based on those pictures, makers have begun building organetti. There's even a star performer on the little keyboard. - Early Music America
“We used to play shows in Sydney, we can’t really get them much any more. There are no venues to play at. It’s a really hard city to crack. I don’t want Melbourne to be that. That’s terrifying to me. Because what do we do then? There’s nowhere to play.” - The Guardian
"Eva B, once a little-known rapper from (a) Karachi urban-slum settlement" — and who now draws millions of viewers on YouTube — "says her brother had told her if she wanted to rap she had to wear a veil, but that it is now a part of her identity and personality as a musician." - The Guardian
