Music

Back in the late 1960s, Charlie Perrière was a struggling young musician in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, and about to leave for Congo when he was personally summoned by President Jean-Bédel Bokassa — the one who later crowned himself Emperor (just like his hero, Napoleon) and fed prisoners to crocodiles and lions. Bokassa told Perrière not to emigrate and subsequently drafted him to lead the president’s personal orchestra. Not only did Perrière survive, he became famous enough that, more than 40 years later, young rebels pillaging the capital spared his house. – Narratively

Amazingly, not only has the group continued the girls’ education online, it has used the constraints to its advantage by bringing in guest artists for master classes and increasing one-on-one instruction. At a time when many of the girls are deeply moved, not to mention upset by recent events, the continuation of study has doubtless been a lifeline. – San Francisco Classical Voice

In Barcelona, they performed for plants. But at Madrid’s Teatro Real, it’s a real staging for a real (though smaller) audience. “The opening scenes of merriment have taken on a sombre tone, with the chorus clad in black and white and spaced exactly 2 metres apart. Minutes into the staging of La Traviata, the surgical masks come off, timed with the rising notes of an orchestra led by a conductor standing behind a plastic screen.” – The Guardian

Conductor Kazushi Ono and the players of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra spent two days at the Bunka Kaikan concert hall in mid-June with researchers from a university and medical school in the Japanese capital. They experimented with various seating schemes, measuring aerosol spray from the musicians’ faces and working out how to balance hearing each other with keeping each other safe. Ono writes about the results. – Maestro Arts

Amy Helm: “It’s interesting as a musician to go to so many different places and play for so many different people and have such a direct connection with them. That’s not something you get in a room of a hundred people or several thousand people. It’s nice. And it’s right on time. And then you get a little window into what they’re dealing with.: – NPR

A three-day “herd immunity” music festival scheduled to take place in Ringle, Wisconsin, in mid-July is taking this energy to the, uh, extreme. With the exception of drive-in concerts and performances streamed online, live music events have largely been cancelled for the foreseeable future. Health experts have warned concerts could be “superspreaders” of COVID-19 and predicted they wouldn’t be feasible till 2021. – Mic

They’ve been trying for years to bar Trump from using “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as his walk-off music at rallies – and their efforts have always been in vain. Until now, perhaps. “The group sent out a statement saying it is enlisting BMI, the performing rights organization that oversees public use of the song, in their quest to keep the track from being used for politically partisan purposes. And the band says there’ll be a lawsuit if the president continues using the song without a license.” – Variety

The band names are a symbol – just a symbol, perhaps, but a strong one. However: “The question is not, “‘hould bands whose names have ties to slavery change them?’ The question is: Are we committed to looking our awful history in the eyes, admitting that it led us to a place in which Black people in America are still systematically mistreated, and doing everything we can to fix that?” – Vice

And can brainwaves explain it? There’s a place at “the frontiers of biotechnology and experimental music” trying to figure it all out. – Aeon

Aluna Francis: “We not only need to give credit to the artists that created the genre, we also need to establish a long-term plan to secure a healthy future for dance music that is culturally and racially inclusive.” – Pitchfork

There’s truly no way to perform the craft of being an orchestra conductor right now. So they, like most of us, are doing other things: “For conductors with steady work before the pandemic — globe-trotting and rarely home — the aftermath of cancellations has amounted to a surprise sabbatical. They have learned new languages, picked up old instruments, and composed. And they have begun to reimagine performances for the coming year.” – The New York Times

Larry Morton: “I thought that digital would completely replace things like physical phone books and all that. Certainly digital is a huge part of the business, and it’s growing quickly. But there’s something unique about that physical touch between musicians and their music books. There’s something about that relationship. if you’re learning a difficult piece and you’re really scrutinizing that score… you know we have nearly all of it available digitally. People still want to touch that page.” – MakingMusic

The Catalyst Fund, a three-year, $2.1 million program launched in 2019 by the national support organization, is designed to help its members identify, confront and ultimately correct what Jesse Rosen, the League’s president and chief executive officer, called built-in “systems of inequity.” – Chicago Sun-Times

“Classical musicians of African descent have existed on the margins of obscurity for centuries — in the classroom, the concert hall, the record industry, and on the radio,” says Terrance McKnight, evening host at New York classical radio station WQXR. In this radio special for Juneteenth, he talks to Wynton Marsalis, Martina Arroyo (one of the great operatic sopranos of the 1960s and ’70s), composers Alvin Singleton and Leslie Dunner, Nashville Symphony principal oboist Titus Underwood, and other guests as well as listeners about working as an African-American in the classical music industry. (audio) – WQXR (New York City)

Steven Brosvik comes to Utah from the Nashville Symphony, where he was Chief Operating Officer. He has previously worked in management at the Baltimore, Houston, and San Antonio Symphony Orchestras. – Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

The band’s social media accounts and website were changed Thursday to reflect the new name for the band, which is made up of Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines and Emily Strayer. “We want to meet this moment,” read a statement on The Chicks’ website, which also noted that the trio recognizes the name was already in use by a band in New Zealand. – CBC (Reuters)

Jon Batiste, the jazz pianist and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” bandleader, has spent the last three weekends marching in the streets of New York, leading musicians and protesters through hymns and songs like “We Shall Overcome” and “Down by the Riverside.” – The New York Times

Lee Pringle, founder of the Colour of Music Festival in Charleston: “The average white orchestra fears that Colour of Music will shine a huge light on the fact that while you can’t put black musicians onstage, this guy in Charleston goes out and finds 89 who are willing to play and have master’s degrees from the same institutions as the white kids. … With 2,000 orchestras, less than 2 percent of the members on those stages are of African ancestry. It is truly the last water fountain for black people to drink from.” – Charleston City Paper

Bahl, who succeeds Thomas Wilkins at the start of the 2021-22 season, becomes the second conductor of color in a row to hold the music director position in Omaha. An Indian-American born and raised in the Bay Area, Bahl has worked as assistant conductor to Kurt Masur in Europe and Christoph Eschenbach in D.C. – Omaha World-Herald

As one development exec for a major company puts it, “During a crisis, it’s not really the time to go out and ask for those five-year campaign pledges. It’s the time to say, ‘how are you’ and ‘how can we as an arts organization be of support during this time?’ ‘Is there anything you need from us?’ ‘What are your ideas and thoughts?’ And among the people we’re close to, that we’re asking those questions of, those who are able to do something are stepping up, in some ways unasked, to support us in meaningful ways.'” Observes another, “People who love opera really love it. You can raise a lot of money from people who love opera because it’s a secular religion.” – San Francisco Classical Voice

“I survived the gun-to-the-head modernism, back when I was a student — you know if you weren’t crunching elbows on the keys and counting up to 12 all the time, you weren’t being much of a composer. I decided I didn’t want to go that way. I came up as [an Episcopalian cathedral] singer and singers don’t often sing in 12-tone technique and things like that. I’ve used it, but it wasn’t a natural fit and so I’ve spent most of my career trying to be honest with myself. I call it ‘authenticism’ — that’s my ‘ism.'” – San Francisco Classical Voice

The 78-year-old renowned conductor said the coronavirus had ‘’destroyed music,‘’ with shuttered venues depriving the world of ‘’spiritual food” as it faced a pandemic that still threatens uncalculated economic repercussions beyond the lives lost. Even during two world wars, Muti noted, theaters stayed open to provide cultural relief except during the worst of the bombings. – Chicago Tribune

From Taiwan to Germany to Spain to Quebec, lockdowns are lifting and orchestras are figuring out ways to make music again. David Patrick Stearns looks into what they’re trying, from Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Beethoven symphony cycle with the (carefully spaced) Orchestre Métropolitain in a largely empty Montreal hall to Prague’s Collegium 1704 performing Baroque music with masks on (even the woodwinds and singers) to an opera in Salzburg where the characters all hate each other so much that they stay socially distanced anyway. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Much like those nervously gathered to listen, the program was a little all over the place; but the intimacy of the experience — and our collective hunger to hear just about anything — gave the feeling that audience and performers were conducting the same experiment: just being there. Even before the first notes were played, I found myself getting lost in the music of chitchat and laughter — our own birdsong. – Washington Post

The Gran Teatre del Liceu filled its 2,292 seats with plants for a performance by the UceLi Quartet, which it called a prelude to its 2020-2021 season. The string quartet serenaded its leafy audience with Giacomo Puccini’s “Crisantemi,” in a performance that was also made available to human listeners via livestream. – NPR

“I had worried that the just-for-me performance would be awkward. The prospect triggered flashbacks of unwanted serenades by accordionists and fiddlers playing for tips on European restaurant terraces. And though I was game for playing my part in the flirtatious conversation, I was mindful of the stern warning On Site Opera had sent ticket holders to uphold “a respectful artistic experience for all.” The last thing I wanted was to try something cute that would come out creepy.” – The New York Times

So here’s how choirs are reinventing themselves. – CBC

Francesco and Grazia Lotoro have spent their lives collecting and cataloguing “symphonies, operas, scores and songs that were composed and performed under conditions so horrible one imagines that music would have lost its ability to encourage and to soothe.” Their project now: To raise money for a “citadel” that is “known formally as the Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria [and] is to include a museum, a library and a theater, at a cost of roughly $45 million.” – The New York Times

Music that unites protestors is not new, and it wasn’t new in the 1960s either. “Music at protests reminds dissenters of their humanity, even when the powers-that-be attempt to strip away their personhood. It gives strength. It takes the mind away from a place of fear and pain, and focuses the body to resist. And at times, the music is the only way the message can be shared.” – OPB (Portland)