“The Metropolitan Opera’s stage door, a plain entrance hidden in the tunnels of Lincoln Center, routinely welcomes star singers, orchestra musicians, stagehands, costumers and ushers. But a different bunch of visitors arrived there on a recent afternoon, carrying stuffed toy rabbits and ‘Frozen’ backpacks.” - The New York Times
Pires, 81 next month, has withdrawn from performances this week and next in three Portuguese cities. She also has concerts scheduled in Monaco on June 22 and The Hague on June 30; so far, those performances are still on, as is a July tour to Japan and Taiwan. - RTP (Portugal) (via Google Translate)
“Giancarlo Guerrero, 56, ended his 16-year tenure in May as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, where he put an emphasis on contemporary American music and oversaw more than 20 recordings that earned him six Grammy Awards.” - Chicago Sun-Times
Some fans are disappointed that we may never see the last two rerecordings, though Swift has hinted that she might be willing to release them, in some form, one day. - The New Yorker
Algorithms, which sort the listening public into ever-more-individualized niches, can cut both ways: They can introduce you to new artists, but they can also “rob you of the variety of emotional experience.” A result, is “a hunger for a more authentic view, a more definite emotional experience than commercial country often provides.” - New York Times Magazine
The Last of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla: "I think the fact that we kept the sonic fabric — that we didn’t do an orchestral score for the series — has been instrumental in keeping those fans of the games fans of the series, too.” - The Verge (Internet Archive)
Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that’s 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily. - The Guardian
County jails are incubators for hip-hop, especially in Broward county, which cultivated “legends like Kodak Black and YNW Melly … but the diversity of voices on Bending the Bars is a natural extension of the eclectic mix of detainees that can be found in almost any urban jail”. - The Guardian
“Arizona Opera took its search for a new leader international only to find the ideal candidate a few miles from its downtown Phoenix headquarters. The … company named Brian DeMaris, the artistic director of Arizona State University’s music theater and opera program, on Thursday to be its president and general manager.” - Arizona Daily Star (Tucson)
Like the qwerty keyboard, sitting through a three-or-more-hour performance in a language we don’t understand is a peculiar cultural phenomenon we accept only because it’s often the only option we’re given. It’s happenstance. And it’s a big part of what keeps opera from reaching more people. - The New York Times
Sales have held steady at around 31,000 a year for the past decade, but in 2024, fewer than 18,000 were sold, according to an industry census conducted by Music Trades. Upright pianos have been largely replaced by digital pianos. Over 188,000 were sold last year, according to the Music Trades census. - KERA
If the past tells us anything, it’s that seismic technological shifts have often served as a precursor for a changing of the guard at the record companies. - The Hollywood Reporter
While 33-rpm vinyl reigns supreme in popular culture and the central role of LPs in hop-hop sampling and scratching, 78s were by far the dominant recording format from about 1910 until the late 1950s — which means that just about every 20th-century American musical idiom that coalesced before the election of John F. Kennedy. - San Francisco Classical Voice
It turns out that X-ray film was just soft enough to be etched on by an electromechanical lathe. So one could take exposed X-ray film (with images of bones), trim it into the shape of a vinyl record, then use a recording device to cut a bootleg recording onto the film. - The Conversation
