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MUSIC

The Times’s ‘Five Minutes That Will Make You Love {Piano/Sopranos/String Quartets}’ Series? It’s Working

Says classical music editor Zachary Woolfe (who came up with the idea in the shower), "It has doubled our audience for classical music. It's gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it." - The New York Times

Portland’s Classical Radio Station Will Be Recording And Releasing Music By Nonwhite And Women Composers

When the staff at All Classical Portland was looking at how to add more diversity to its playlists, they found that the biggest limitation was how little recorded music by composers from historically marginalized communities is actually available. The station's "Recording Inclusivity Initiative" aims to start fixing that. - Current

10 Musicians Under 40 Who Are Changing Classical Music

They have YouTube channels, they expand repertoire, they perform in unconventional places. These are musicians who are building the future of classical music. - USAToday

After The Storming Of The Capitol, Classical Music Feels More Vulnerable Than Ever

Of course, this feeling (and the lack of funding, and alarm about orchestras' survival) started long before the pandemic, and long before the assault on the Capitol Building. But: "The trials of the past year have brought forth many of the qualities we already admired about classical music: its resilience, resistance, persistence and endurance. But permanence? I’m not so sure...

Colorado Symphony Can Breathe Easy For A Few More Months

A $2 million donation means that musicians and staff have salaries and health care through June, despite the fact that there's no revenue coming in from concerts. - Nine News (Denver)

Beaming Music To Potential Extraterrestrial Life

The SETI Institute is ready to take music to Mars, or wherever. While it's a listening project, it's also now a beaming project. A founding astrophysicist and a musician "have devised the 'Earthling Project': a call to people everywhere to upload snippets of song that plans to meld into a collective human chorus. An initial composition will be...

A Lawsuit Over Schenkerian Music Theory And A Huge Debate Over How Music Theory Is Taught

At its best, music theory creates simplified models that help us understand how compositions are conceived and constructed while leaving space for the mystery of artistic intervention. At its worst, it reduces composition to a numbers game, and dismisses enigmatic moments—often the most powerful ones—as irrelevant. - Van

Simon Rattle’s Departure From London: Sign Of A Post-Brexit Musical Exodus?

"At the darkest hour, with concert halls shuttered and musicians facing visa hell, Rattle’s defection is being regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a loss of faith. I have heard the word ‘betrayal’ muttered by senior figures. His appearance last week at the head of a petition for renegotiating EU access for British musicians was greeted with hollow laughs. Not...

78s Were More Than Just Caruso, Ma Rainey, And Dixieland — They Were Used For Recording Music All Over The Globe

In fact, outside North America and Europe, 78s were the standard record format well into the 1960s, and they hold an enormous variety of music from the days before globalization. A new anthology titled An Alternate History of the World's Music presents old recordings from places as disparate as Myanmar, Zanzibar, Ecuador, Albania, and Okinawa. - The Guardian

Wigmore Hall’s Free Streamed Lockdown Concerts Have Been Quite A Success. They’re Also Expensive.

The performances — by such well-known artists as Mitsuko Uchida, Steven Isserlis, and the choir Stile Antico — cost about £3,000 each for personnel and copyright payments, and that doesn't include artists' fees. This while the venue has had no ticket income for months on end. On the other hand, viewers have donated £750,000 so far, and Wigmore's membership...

A Need For Orchestras To Be More Nimble In Scheduling

Until the arrival of the coronavirus, the prevalent model was not particularly friendly to rapid response. Symphony orchestras did a good deal of planning two or three years in advance, although that was mostly big-picture stuff — there was still plenty of room for changes at the detail level. - San Francisco Chronicle

These Classical Music Organizations Have Always Been Focused On Racial Equity

The long-overdue work that larger institutions have started on in the wake of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests has been the day-in-day-out project of some other groups. Joshua Barone talked to people at seven of them — among them the Sphinx Organization, Imani Winds, and Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra — about what they do and what advice they'd...

Andreas Delfs Named Music Director Of Rochester Philharmonic

The 61-year-old conductor spent a dozen years as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony (1997-2009). "Once reportedly accustomed to a few sellout audiences a year, the orchestra reportedly sold out 30 shows within a year of his arrival." - WXXI (Rochester, NY)

Twenty-One Young Composers For 2021

Michael Andor Brodeur: "There is really no playlist to match this unstable, uncertain moment. And, honestly, right now I'm less interested in rummaging through the past for reference points. I'm just trying to find my way forward. In that spirit — and since we're feeling all inaugural — please find below the first-ever class of 21 for '21." -...

Metropolitan Opera Hires Harvard Law Dean As Chief Diversity Officer

"Marcia Sells — a former dancer who became an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and the dean of students at Harvard Law School — has been hired as the first chief diversity officer of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States." - The New York Times

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