It turns out that there is more to the question than appears on the surface, and multiple psychological studies have supported the idea that musical preferences are actually linked to our cognitive styles, or the way we think about, and react to, the world around us. - The Hill
"Born in 1778, in Biała Podlaska, Poland, Bridgetower started playing the violin at an early age. His father John Frederick Bridgetower (probably of West Indian descent) was a servant of Joseph Haydn's patron: the Hungarian Prince Esterházy. And the young Bridgetower was tutored by Haydn himself. … Later, Bridgetower went on to give the first public performance of...
The worried reporters would need to recruit community allies. Hire a public relations firm to sway public opinion. And most crucially: Figure out how to find rich people who might be persuaded to finance a rescue plan. - Washington Post
"Researchers have captured how they believe choral music would have sounded when played and sung in the now-ruined chapel at Linlithgow Palace, west Lothian, which was the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots and where James IV visited for Easter celebrations around 1512. … Gaming technology … allow specialists to model how acoustics would have been affected by long-destroyed...
The yazh is a seven- or 14-stringed harp, built over a wooden bowl resonator covered with hide like a drum, that's referenced in Tamil scriptures dating back to the Sangam period (6th century BCE to 3rd century CE). There are replicas of the yazh in museums, but none are playable. In a Q&A, Chennai-based instrument maker Tharun Sekar talks...
"With concerts in the hall canceled since March 2020, construction began in earnest over the past few months. Work is expected to continue for the next year and a half, with a reopening planned for fall 2022, the orchestra and center announced on Monday. That is a year and a half ahead of schedule." - The New York Times
Or at least, a Hollywood record store shuttered for many months by the pandemic: "'We’ve been waiting for a year,' said Silver Lake resident Kerri Barta, who was near the entrance on the cusp of access. Until COVID-19, a visit to Amoeba was part of the weekly ritual for her and companion Jason Yates. 'It’s been a big hole...
The Ashti Peace Choir, at the Yazidi refugee camp in northern Iraq, is trying to keep music alive despite the desperate history and circumstances of the women in the choir. The group, founded by a 22-year-old who has lived in the refugee camp since 2014, "has become part of an effort to preserve a vital part of Yazidi culture,...
One 53-year-old paramedic said, "I'd never written a song before. ... But I came home from work and said: 'I need to write this down.' I sat down, wrote some lyrics and put together a melody on my guitar. Putting it down on paper… I definitely found that helped." - BBC
Pitch is an abstraction: any given note doesn’t have a real-world referent. The existence of flutes that produce a family of fixed notes, however, suggests a developed tonal system of patterns and scales, a sense of right notes and wrong notes, a cultural and musical identity. This has evolutionary as well as cultural significance. - Literary Review
"I should say that a raga is not a tune. It's not a note, not a scale, not a composition — although the raga is sung in the framework of a composition. But you can identify the raga from a particular arrangement of notes that have to do with the way they're ascending and descending; a particular pattern in...
Certainly with international travel likely to be restricted in some form for a while, the chances are that international and local demand for festivals will still not be the same as they were pre-COVID. - The Conversation
Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber writes about his colleague Rebeca Omordia, a pianist of Romanian and Nigerian parentage who, since 2013, has been pursuing a project to find and present music by African composers working in Western classical genres. She's found more than 200 of them, and she presents their work every year in a concert series in London. -...
Joshua Barone: "Kurt Weill is often described as if he were two composers. One spun quintessential sounds of Weimar-era Berlin in works like The Threepenny Opera, and the other wrote innovative earworms for Broadway's golden age. His career was bifurcated, so the story goes — split not only by a shift in style, but also by the Atlantic Ocean,...
It has been an astonishing run. The school’s faculty over the years has been practically an index of maverick artists, including Darius Milhaud, at Mills for three decades beginning during World War II; Luciano Berio, who came at Milhaud’s invitation; Lou Harrison, who built an American version of the Indonesian gamelan percussion orchestra; the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros;...
