“In the 1940s, the Jazz Record Center became the default clubhouse for a cabal of distinctive gentlemen: exiles, recluses, characters so outsize in their eccentricities that they felt invented, except better. Here there was not a sense—as with the archetypal Outsider—that a choice had been made. Here, the earliest collectors of 78 rpm records found […]

Partly by doing outreach at places like Ikea. Yes, Ikea flash mob Beethoven 9.

It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.

“Even teachers who know very little about traditional music could assign interesting fiddle tunes to their students as a break between scales and etudes. It would be a moment in the middle of a practice session to reflect on just how much musical tradition exists in America. It would be a moment to recognize that […]

“A number of rocks, when struck, made ‘distinctive (if muted) sounds.’ They judged that enough made sounds such that once, they all would have rung, and furthermore saw marks on the rocks that might—upon further forensic testing—prove to be strike marks.”

“Bach’s restless, radical new style fits within history — with the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War, the shifting of nations and the Enlightenment, which encouraged individualism.”

“He is putting songs on smartphones in Africa, reviving moribund American record labels and making Lorde into a Grammy-winning global sensation. Above all, he wants to forge new partnerships with his industry’s erstwhile adversaries — the technology firms that have upended the way people get their music.”

“Participants across the board were better at identifying the more accomplished groups by watching them, not by listening to them. In fact, even when music and video were combined in clips, it was actually harder for participants to identify the top groups than by video alone.”

“While people’s strategies for ridding themselves of unwanted aural guests fell into one of two broad categories—distraction or coping—the most successful way to remove an earworm, they found, was to deal with it head on, by intentionally listening to the song or singing it out loud, no matter how embarrassing the song.”

“Black MIDI,” a subculture of electronic music remixing that mutated into existence in Japan five years ago, is an aesthetic snapshot of the early 21st century if there ever was one. It’s digital, viral, and truly “multimedia”–because it’s music, data visualization, and software demonstration at once.

“I had trouble enjoying myself. My brother did too. This by no means is to suggest that the orchestra itself was poor. Perhaps me and my bro are just uncultured, southern swine. More likely it was just not for us (and by extension a lot of people in my age range). I enjoy symphony music. […]

For a start, it’s because his approach to writing opera was, as he wrote, “Put aside intelligibility, put aside urgency of plot. Put in embellishment. Put in Maria Callas and Patsy Cline and Billie Holiday.” Mark Swed explains.

While she did just make her last opera appearance, she says, “One door closes and another door opens but as to retiring, I’ve never ever had that word in my vocabulary. Only thing is that other people have got it in their vocabulary because they can’t think of anything else to say.”

“Stephen Jay Carlton, the former executive director of the Los Altos-based Peninsula Symphony, is facing felony charges for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the nonprofit organization, prosecutors said Wednesday.”

“Opera Wilmington is now formally incorporated and is applying for federal non-profit status … Plans now call for the company to mount a production of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow, in English, July 25-27 … with a cast of student and local singers.”

Music is power. In his 2010 book on noise and silence, George Prochnik asked a series of provocative questions that began with this one: “Is it really true that all our reactions to sound are dictated by simple equations: loud, low sounds equal something powerful, so be scared or be prepared to mate; soft, little […]

That’s Turin’s Teatro Regio, “where performances increased to 110 in 2012 from 85 in 2005, even with a reduction in staff. Its orchestra and chorus have also just announced an ambitious North American tour.” And there’s one individual who seems to deserve a lot of the credit.

“While TV viewers could hear the song, they couldn’t see the orchestra in the Dolby Theatre. That’s because the orchestra was about a mile away from the stage.”

“Interestingly, it was the categories that seemed more objective such as ‘melodic memory’ and ‘beat perception’ that showed the strongest statistical correlation with wealth.”

“Viennese insist that theirs is an open, diverse, and liberal society, but their cultural envoy to the world is a living reliquary of long-ago revolutions. The orchestra lingers on those periods when the city was at the vanguard of musical culture, issuing a constant rat-tat-tat of shocks.”

Currently in his ninth season in Missouri, the American conductor has brought the orchestra back to (and maybe beyond) the national prominence it enjoyed under Leonard Slatkin. (He also recently began a second major post: artistic director at the Sydney Symphony.)

“In 1938, one of Granados’ sons sold the original opera to a prominent New York musician and publisher for $300 to raise money for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Other family members wanted it returned. The question of ownership remained the subject of litigation for decades until 1970 when the opera was […]

“We composers, we’re scavengers. Beethoven was a scavenger, Bach too – that’s one of the joys of being creative. Stravinsky is rumoured to have said that ‘a good composer borrows, a great composer steals’. That may be apocryphal. But it’s not without truth.”

There’s no lobby, the food is bad, the bathrooms are inadequate, and… Why is it so hard to take care of audiences when they spend a lot of money to go to the opera? Manuela Hoelterhoff unloads.

“Funk’s newfound popularity is fueled by listeners from a generation that has undergone the biggest class shift in Brazil’s history: tens of millions of people moving out of poverty to form a new middle class. If economic empowerment has given this new class a voice, funk has given many of its members something to sing.”

“Turning to music for comfort and solace is not a subject that is talked about much—not out loud, at any rate—in our community, even though it is a perfectly natural inclination, and something that many of us engage in regularly.”

“There is little film music as instantly recognizable as Nino Rota’s opening music played on trumpet, and only a handful of films as masterfully made as The Godfather.”

“Mr. Britell, who developed the on-screen violin music and spirituals, had a unique set of challenges: being historically accurate to a time period from which no recordings, and little musical documentation of folk traditions, were available.”

After a long midday meeting, the board came “to very strong agreement on leadership and a positive direction for the organization,” new board chairman Gordon Sprenger said in a statement. “However, we have more work to do before we are able to make a detailed public statement. We will share further news as soon as […]