Music

“Bankers” are something that ENO’s previous two artistic directors didn’t manage to provide many of, and it’s now up to Annilese Miskimmon, their new successor, to get some. Fortunately, explains David Benedict, “she’s startlingly well-equipped for the job.” – The Stage

“With a barbed wire fence and border patrol dividing two groups of drop-in singers, one located on the beach at Border Field State Park in San Diego, Calif., and the other just metres away in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, the popular choral group performed a rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends by The Beatles. About 300 people took part on the U.S. side and 500 across the divide in Tijuana.” – CBC

The idea of a “best seat” is subjective and depends on how important a good sightline is to you and what sort of instrumental blend you enjoy. While describing sound in terms of “warmth” and “clarity” and “resonance” may seem subjective, these are in fact quantifiable acoustic terms. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“The year 1919 was pivotal in European culture, with bold portents for the postwar future — it was the year that Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus and Marcel Duchamp painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa. [Richard Strauss’s] Die Frau ohne Schatten, in contrast, was almost reassuringly conservative in its late Romantic musical language, in its fairy tale libretto about a fundamentally good-hearted emperor and empress, and in its celebration of fertility and childbirth as the foundation of marriage and society.” – The New York Times

The orchestra wear hard hats and gas masks, the choir emerges from a swirl of tear gas-like smoke, and as the music swells, cutaway shots show crowds thousands-strong marching through the streets of Hong Kong. – The Guardian

Joining all of us, “‘Why would they do that?’ Laurie Anderson, the avant-garde composer and musician who was the first artist interviewed on the show when it began back in 1982, said by telephone.” (It’s for more news and talk.) – The New York Times

As television’s center of gravity begins to pivot decisively to made-for-streaming product, the lack of residuals for such programming becomes more and more urgent for musicians. “This is an extinction-level event,” says Marc Sazer, long active in AFM Local 47 and the RMA, which is a related organization. “Our ability to make a sustainable living is facing extinction.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“On paper, John Zorn’s Jumalattaret … looks impossible: breathless vocalise; abrupt transitions from head-spinning complexity to folk-song simplicity; and, within the span of a single measure, whispering, squeaking and throat-singing like a winter storm. It’s the kind of piece that leaves you asking, repeatedly, over the course of its 25 minutes: Can a voice even do this? The answer, for Ms. Hannigan, is yes. It took a lot of practice, a thwarted summer vacation, and a well-timed email to get there.” – The New York Times

Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs. – Rolling Stone

Classical music institutions have a built-in challenge in trying to arrange exhibits for the public: Their default archival documents tend to be just the kind of dusty memento the stereotype is describing. – Washington Post

“We are essentially pattern-recognizing machines. Every great musician knows that a great performance involves building up tension to an eventual release. And that’s because that taps into our pattern recognition apparatus in the brain. Our brain is trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.” – PBS News Hour

“Annilese Miskimmon, the Belfast-born opera director who has drawn influence from Sondheim, Shakespeare and the Muppets [and is currently director of opera at Norwegian National Opera and Ballet], has been named as the new artistic director of English National Opera, after a search to replace Daniel Kramer, who announced in April that he would step down in July.” – The Guardian

The company has decided to eliminate the title of General Director and fold its duties in with those of the President and CEO, Christopher Koelsch. – Los Angeles Times

As part of three-year labor contracts agreed to in the summer of 2018, the Met has the right to present up to 17 Sunday matinees this season and 27 in 2020-21. Any Sunday show will be followed by a Monday off for both performances and orchestra rehearsals. And Tuesday-morning rehearsals will have limits. – Yahoo! (AP)

A record number of people had registered to be eligible for the sale, which started at 9am on Sunday and was finished in little over 30 minutes. A record 2.4 million people signed up to have a chance of securing a ticket. – The Guardian

The child whose “Wow!” captivated the classical music world “is something of a celebrity at Symphony Hall.” The Handel and Haydn Society invited the 9-year-old and his grandparents to a recent dress rehearsal where he mostly got a concert directly for him. But “before the dress rehearsal, Ronan wandered the halls and rode the elevator a few times (he is passionate about elevators). Then he spotted two musicians practicing trombone. ‘Yeah, music,’ he said.” – The Boston Globe

The last time The Beatles’ Abbey Road was #1 on the charts, a U.S. president was laying the groundwork for his later impeachment, and Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of the UK. This return to the top “sees the album set a record – the gap of 49 years and 252 days since its initial chart-topping run ended in early 1970 is the longest gap before returning to number one.” – BBC

How did New Age end up carrying so much baggage in our musical memory? Its fall from grace, when it once soared, might be due to New Age’s status as one of the most heavily marketed musical genres, making it the equivalent of aural snake oil, to be sold on the yoga-conference circuit and in corporate supplement chains. – The New Yorker

The drummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey has a lovely phrase to describe the practice of improvisation: “the adornment of time.” – New York Review of Books

It’s not just a matter of slangy terms like “happy dust” (German and Spanish have their own words for cocaine). Finding equivalents for the contractions and non-standard grammar in the libretto’s “Negro dialect” (as the Gershwins and Heyward called it) is challenging in itself, let alone when you only have 72 characters per screen. Here’s how the translators did it. – The New York Times

The page turner disturbs our illusion of musical command, threatening to shatter the audience’s suspension of artistic disbelief, where we disaggregate the magic of the sounds we experience from their more mundane physical and material realities: works that exist in published scores with broken spines and tweaked pages. – Van

Indeed, it has about one year to make itself sustainable: the musicians’ new contract expires next September, and the $1.6 million donated to cover the players’ pay while the orchestra is dark next summer was a one-time gift. But there may be some ways the orchestra can increase earned income as well as donations. – The Baltimore Sun

As social beings, we are hard-wired to interpret breaks in the flow of human communication. We recognize the pregnant pause, the stunned silence, the expectant hush. A one-beat delay on an answer can reveal hesitation or hurt, or play us for laughs. A closer listen shows musical silence to be just as eloquent. – The New York Times