Esther Nelson added a fourth live performance to the BLO’s season, using the extra production to highlight contemporary works by both up-and-coming as well as established composers. Through the "Opera Annex" initiative, the BLO brought opera out of the traditional theater space and into the world, holding productions inside a temple in Brookline, the JFK Library and Museum in...
"Today, in London’s seven top orchestras, women only account for 3% of all the timpani and percussion positions. In fact, there are more men called David with jobs in percussion than there are women." - The Guardian
The opera's wardrobe team crafted the mask from materials used in making its corsets -- with a billowy shape aimed at allowing ample room for singers to belt out song, while tightly sealing in aerosols that could potentially spread the virus. - NBC
"It seems like a good time, as the pandemic continues to block live performances in all but a few socially distanced, outdoor shows, to revisit the topic of performing for the camera. … Their responses range from poetic to practical to pensive to feeling trapped-in-a-digital-prison and beyond, … the musicians all say their professional careers now and forever...
"A great maestro, through the sheer force of his or her spiritual presence, can inspire musicians to play not with our hands but with our hearts." Barbara Bogatin, longtime cellist at the San Francisco Symphony and former principal in the Milwaukee and New Jersey Symphonies, explains how one little explanation from the likes of Kurt Masur or Esa-Pekka Salonen...
To cope with the huge income shortfall caused by the pandemic, South Carolina's largest performing arts organization will let go of conductor Ken Lam after next season; concertmaster and principal pops conductor Yuriy Bekker will become the orchestra's artistic director, with guest conductors being engaged for core classical concerts. - The Post and Courier (Charleston)
"It’s difficult to imagine a Grammy ceremony that doesn’t rely on genre as its organizing principle—I suppose that would entail the bestowing of just one award, Best Music—yet genre feels increasingly irrelevant to the way we think about, create, and consume art." - The New Yorker
Classical purists clutch their hearts in disgust at the mere suggestion of their holy shrines teaching business skills like freelancing or contemporary styles like pop, rock, or electronic music. But consider that the geniuses we hold in high regard from ages past — the very ones we teach in classical schools now — were trail-blazing innovators in their time....
The pioneering Black composer's Fantasie Nègre No. 3 in F minor was thought to be incomplete: only the first two pages were known to have survived. Here's how musicologist Samantha Ege found the rest of the piece tucked away in the archive of music discovered in Price's old summer house in 2009. - BBC
Robert Black comes from a family of brass players in suburban Chicago; his mother is a high school band teacher. He's currently finishing his sophomore year at Rice University in Houston remotely and says he's committed to finishing his B.A., though he may transfer to a Wisconsin school. - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The song cycle, with music by Jake Heggie and sung by baritone Joshua Hopkins, was inspired by Hopkins' sister, who was murdered by her ex-partner on the same day that he murdered two of his other exes. When she got the request, Atwood wasn't sure she could fulfill it. But "she ended up writing the sequence in one session....
Andra Day, who plays Billie Holiday in the new movie The United States Vs. Billie Holiday, explains how she felt when she heard it as a child. "It's in my DNA. It's in our DNA ... I think as a nation. And as a people, as Black people. I remember being very quieted by the song, almost sort of...
According to NYU Stern School of Business professor and New York Times best-selling author Scott Galloway, the pandemic has accelerated the progression of trends in all industries, including music, by approximately 10 years. This means that whatever trend affecting a music organization before the pandemic is now ten years ahead of schedule. - Ludwig Van
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...
