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;...
Aloha's ultra-low latency service connects artists remotely, effectively eliminating the lag time that interrupts the creative flow. This allows artists to collaborate and play together live, as if they're in the same room. For the San Francisco Opera's classically trained artists whose in-person music collaboration has been put on pause during the pandemic, this means that important musical cues...
There were staggered arrival times, temperature takers at the entrance, plenty of hand sanitizer, mandatory masks (a few of them fabu-fied with sequins). Every second seat was kept empty. In the pit, Gustavo Dudamel conducting a 50-piece orchestra; onstage, 75 singers, headed by tenor Gregory Kunde and soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, in Verdi's Otello. "Spain is an outlier here in...
The Italian-British conductor has been music director at Covent Garden since 2002; at the end of the 2023-24 season, he'll move three miles or so across town to the Barbican, where he'll succeed Simon Rattle as chief conductor of the LSO. - The Guardian
Michael Morgan believes the power of the symphony orchestra lies in its ability to be harnessed for a diversity of musical styles and genres. As such, he views the orchestra as a way to bring people together in community, especially groups that have historically been excluded from these kinds of arts and culture spaces. “Our primary question is ‘who’s...
Mere months after her star turn in 20 Feet from Stardom, the singer was in a car accident so terrible that she spent five months in the hospital and years undergoing rehab. "Clayton said her family sat by her bedside crying profusely while a team of doctors came into the room. 'I wondered, ‘What the heck is going on?’'...
Small-scale, outdoor productions could take place in nearly every park that has a bandstand. They just need some attention, and the concerts need some intention. "They are structures unlike any others: halfway between the outside world we crave and the domestic interior to which we have been urged to retreat. They are often beautiful – flashing their finials –...
The singer Yseult, a Parisian whose parents are from Cameroon, won the award for Best Newcomer at the French Grammys in February, and she has millions of fans and YouTube views. But when she won and said, "This is not just a victory for me, it’s a victory for my brothers and sisters. We have snatched this, our freedom,...
Music was inextricably linked to Austen's creativity - she practiced, when she had access to a piano, every day, and copied friends' sheet music note by note. During the times her family didn't have a piano? As far as scholars can tell, she wasn't writing. - Colorado Public Radio
