Born without eyesight on a Georgia plantation in 1849, "Blind Tom" Wiggins learned to play piano by ear and became a prodigiously gifted player, improviser and composer, mixing and (mis-)matching tunes into sardonic collage compositions of the sort Ives and Shostakovich would come up with decades later. He became one of the country's highest-paid performers — though he got...
Usually it's not possible because of slight (or more) lags in sound over the internet. But by tweaking software (and lots of experimenting) Dan Tepfer was able to figure out how to make it work. - The New Yorker
Alex Ross: "Music appreciation is having a resurgence, although the music being appreciated has changed. Early in the twenty-tens, song-explainer videos began proliferating on the Internet. When podcasts took off, dissections of the innards of pop hits were in demand. Now TikTok has its own pithy army of music theorists. I occasionally checked up on the trend, usually when...
The payout to a musician from a Spotify subscriber is about $.003 per stream — and only one-fifteenth of that tiny figure for a stream on YouTube. What's more, any new release of, say, the Bach Cello Suites "will be in direct competition with 133 other cellists, from Rostropovich to du Pré to Yo-Yo Ma. will also be...
"In nearly 50 years of musical life, I can count on the fingers of two hands the occasions on which I’ve heard boos erupt in the concert hall or opera house. Some of those memories are far from pleasant." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Carved instruments can be either completely made of ice, such as horns and percussion, or hybrids, like harps, in which the main body is ice with metal strings attached. … By studying and intricately blending materials — such as homemade clear ice and carbonated water, plus crushed mountain snow — can make instruments like violins and tune them...
Michael Andor Brodeur: "I'm 'here' to virtually attend a rehearsal of Stride, a stirring newer work from the British composer Anna Clyne. And Clyne is 'here' with me as well, watching along through the eyes and ears of Ted — a standard-issue mannequin head, purchased off the Internet and outfitted with a 360-degree camera and an array of microphones...
The opera festival in Cooperstown, New York, directed by Francesca Zambello, will offer — in "the most ventilated area we could find" — 90-minute abridgements of Il trovatore, The Magic Flute, and La Périchole as well as a Wagner concert program featuring bass Eric Owens, an evening of musical theater hits, and world premieres of a new dance work,...
“I think the future of that looks like we embrace the cinematic, and digital media side of opera to an even greater degree. And when we come back to live performances, those have to be a compelling reason to attend something live.” - LBPost
In less than three years, Merck Mercuriadis has become the most disruptive force in the music business. Put simply, Hipgnosis, his company, raises money from investors and spends it on acquiring the intellectual property rights to popular songs by people like Mark Ronson, Timbaland, Barry Manilow and Blondie. - The Guardian
"The world is watching. 30% of the members of the MET Orchestra can no longer sustain a living in New York City due to being faced with no salary from the Metropolitan Opera since April 1, 2020. This number will likely climb higher as the crisis continues." - Gramilano
Behind the new movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday stands a lot of history - and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks: "Jimmy Fletcher is literally, actually an agent for the United States and she falls in love with him. To me, this is all about how we love this country and it dismisses us, and how for Black people,...
"We can make music online and everything, but it's not the same as being onstage together." But there are benefits - like practicing in Golden Gate Park, having extra time with kids at home, and filming themselves running in from gardening to perform the William Tell Overture, or performing in a gorilla mask, for an online audience. - KTVU...
"It was not the 'alien' music that disturbed the Japanese audience" at the Tokyo premiere in 1914 (there had been a Western music school in the city since 1890), "but the threat to traditional hierarchies between men and women. Later, in the 1930s, feminist writers such as Ichiko Kamichika and Akiko Yosano criticised the opera for promoting a 'victim'...
The Bach Cantatas Website, founded 20 years ago by Aryeh Oron, includes texts from Bach's sacred works in multiple languages, discographies, history and analysis of each piece, and many other resources. It gets 15,000-20,000 hits a day and is used even by the likes of John Eliot Gardiner and Masaaki Suzuki, two of the world's leading Bach conductors. -...
