Paweł Łukaszewski, now his nation's leading living composer, has written a lot of good music for choir. So have his Polish colleagues and predecessors going back centuries, he says, and he's started a festival in London to bring the rest of the world's attention to it. - Bachtrack
That's exactly what the London-based collective Gafa, run by Samoan-British singers, is doing for the next four Saturdays, in a costumed concert staging. The concept is that, like the Norse gods, the old Polynesian gods are facing their twilight as Europeans arrive. - The Guardian
Zohra, a 35-member women's youth orchestra founded in Kabul in 2016, was shut down as the Taliban returned to power, and many of its members fled the country, leaving their instruments behind. Now the group has reconvened in Qatar. - Yahoo! (AFP)
"I get bored or start counting the same thing twice, so I'd say probably close to 2,000." Two narrow walkways allow Mercer or his visitors to wander through the collection which, despite looking a bit chaotic, is meticulously categorized. -CBC
“People are being forced to do this, not invited. I’ve already had COVID, and I had a terrible reaction to a vaccine in my early teens that put me in the hospital. My doctor told me I don’t need this.” - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As of November 1, the 60-year-old native of France's Alsace region will be the director of the Opéra-Comique. Among his plans are revivals of key operas that premiered there such as Carmen, The Tales of Hoffmann, and Pelléas et Mélisande. - The Violin Channel
The eureka moment was the click wheel that enabled nimble search and control without a keyboard. Jobs wanted it as small as possible, with an apocryphal tale circulating that he tossed one prototype in a fish tank, pointed at the bubbles coming out and said they indicated dead space that should be removed. - The Guardian
A costume sale for Halloween heralded the semi-return to normal for an opera house whose costume shop pivoted last year to mask-making. Cleaning out felt good: "There is another life for our stuff, and another life for our company." - Vancouver Sun
But the long-term impact of climate change - and festivals' impact on the climate - is yet to come. For large festivals, "They’re basically creating a city. . . . They have to find resources, pack in all the water, equipment . . . and then in a few days, it’s gone." - Washington Post
Li, who earned fame in the West in the '00s and became a household name in China, was arrested with a sex worker — and promptly expelled from the musicians' union, crippling his career. State TV warned that "anyone who challenges laws and social morality is doomed." - Bloomberg Quint
“It’s not untrue that these genres are a kind of record company plot to sell us music but there’s a reason why this conspiracy has been so successful: they were recognising real communities and finding ways to serve them. - The Guardian
Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality. - The New York Times
Writes the Columbia University linguist and New York Times columnist of Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones and William Grant Still's Highway 1, U.S.A., "the tradition being appropriated here is based on a philosophy of composition and audience reception hardly inevitable." - The New York Times
“Audiences who were very reticent or uninterested in digital content became interested. I believe we cannot turn back from that whole process.” - Dallas Morning News
