While the orchestra isn't changing performance venues, the 20,000-square-foot Stella Boyle Smith Music Center will include a 300-seat auditorium for rehearsals and student and chamber performances as well as offices, practice and education rooms, and instrument storage. The projected cost: only $9 million. - Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Composer-performer and "soundscape ecologist" Bernie Krause has used 5,000 hours of field recordings, made over 50 years and featuring 15,000 species, to create The Great Animal Orchestra, commissioned in 2016 by the Fondation Cartier in Paris and opening this year in the US and Australia in 2023. - Artnet
The Grapevine Gathering in the Hunter Valley wine region and Unity Forever on the coast southeast of Melbourne have been called off, as have the touring punk festival Full Tilt's dates in Adelaide and Brisbane. Promoters have begged the federal government for a COVID cancellation insurance plan. - The Guardian
Dausgaard, 58, had seemed a good fit for his position, which he had held just since fall 2019. But he was separated from the acclaimed orchestra for much of 2020 and 2021 because of pandemic-related travel restrictions. - The New York Times
"The recorded music industry may no longer be laser-focused on the compact disc, but the format's sales grew in 2021 for the first time in 17 years, driven by superstar product boosted by retailer-exclusive collectibles, as well as by older catalog titles." - Inside Radio
"I’ve been working to know myself apart from my identity as a musician, which I always held in higher regard than my inherent worth as a human being. Even for musicians, life is much bigger than music, but I never really understood that until now." - Medium
Of vinyl, Ralph Kirkpatrick, a perfect winter for merging records - and a desire for order. "The forms and functions of the WTC offer something like an architectural experience — you wander through Bach’s arches, the keys catching and coloring the light." - MSN (The Washington Post)
“It became clear, just in a matter of days, that the only way to salvage the school was to actually do a mass evacuation and airlift of the entire school community.” - Berkshire Eagle
Seattle Symphony music director Thomas Dausgaard has abruptly stepped down from his post, midway through his third season at the top of Seattle’s flagship orchestra. - Seattle Times
The urge to be static rose concurrently with the urge to change. And so, in the twenty-first century, we’re presented with a choice: to look ahead or to look down. Not back or backwards, not into the past (because pastness cannot be and is not always equated with stasis), but down. - NewMusicBox
Deep in the red-dirt semidesert of interior New South Wales, composer Georges Lentz and architect Glenn Murcutt created the Cobar Sound Chapel, visually a cross between Peter Zumthor and James Turrell, with a 24-hour "digital string quartet" by Lentz on loop. - T — The New York Times Style Magazine
Local 171 of the American Federation of Musicians, representing 71 SSO musicians, had offered to forgo the settlement if board members would instead resign and the money go toward putting on a 2022 concert season. - MassLive
"Even though (usual venue) the Crypto.com Arena has a basketball or hockey game or a concert booked nearly every night until mid-April, enough artists and executives voiced reluctance about appearing to convince the Academy to postpone the show." - Variety
After 20-odd years singing leads at the world's top companies, Kwiecień retired from the stage in 2020 due to long-term injuries. He became artistic director at the opera house in the Polish city of Wrocław — just in time for the pandemic. - Limelight (Australia)
Buyers want way more records than the only two remaining pressing facilities in Southern California, can supply. That’s true globally, too: There aren’t enough manufacturers to meet the renewed demand, and too few workers available to run them. - Los Angeles Times
