"A Danish man has gone on trial in the city of Aarhus over accusations that he fraudulently made 4.38m kroner (more than $635,000) in royalties on music-streaming sites. ... Prosecutors allege … the huge numbers of streams required to generate that amount of money could not have (come from) genuine users." - The Guardian
"(It's) a finely tuned and precisely orchestrated operation, requiring months of advance planning and permitting, a crew of nearly a dozen workers and an all-hands effort by the musicians themselves." Michael Andor Brodeur watches as DC's National Symphony prepares and sets off. - The Washington Post (MSN)
AI is already changing how musicians compose and play music in ways hard to imagine only a few years ago, opening up new horizons for creative expression and challenging traditional conceptions of musicianship. - San Francisco Chronicle
Hervé Boissière, a former senior executive at Naïve Records who went on to found Medici.TV, where he is CEO, and who's also executive director of the European classical cable TV channel Mezzo, will join Verbier Festival founder Martin Engstroem as the helm of the summer event in the Swiss Alps. - Gramophone
Rhapsody in Blue opened up a wider set of debates about the relationship between “high art” and popular art, about racism and cultural differences, about black music and black identity, debates that continue to shape contemporary culture. - The Guardian
Prison authorities see a threat to security in a staggering array of literature, art and music. Connecticut has banned 334 individual books, magazines and pieces of music as security risks. Besides “La bohème,” Puccini’s opera “Manon Lescaut” is also banned. - Operawire
"Normally they would pre-record the music and run playback while musicians and conductor Leonard Bernstein (as played by Bradley Cooper), mime along. But that’s not how Cooper, also the co-writer and director of the film, wanted it." - AOL (Los Angeles Times)
“Many of the performers only saw details of their redundancy during the interval, when they opened the notification backstage. Despite this, they went back onstage to finish the performance." - MSN (The Telegraph UK)
Molly Lewis: "People often don’t have a reference for whistle music apart from a jingle or a riff in a bad pop song. … I think it’s a beautiful instrument." - Washington Post
Remember Lil Nas X and “Old Town Road” (2018) or, gosh, Beyoncé and “Daddy Lessons” (2016)? The discussion rages on as country music stations at first weren’t playing Bey’s two new country singles. Things seem to have changed during the week since the Super Bowl. - The Guardian (UK)
"Paramore singer Hayley Williams decried a Tennessee House of Representatives dustup this week where a Republican lawmaker blocked a resolution honoring the Grammy win of Black musician Allison Russell while allowing a similar resolution honoring Paramore to go forward." - The Tennessean
Last year, public outrage caused the broadcaster to abandon its plan to dissolve the 20-member BBC Singers. Now the network has announced a partnership between the Singers and the VOCES8 Foundation that's evidently meant to provide more revenue, though the Foundation will not give direct financial support. - BBC Music Magazine
All labor action planned for February has been called off as the company and the Musicians' Union have come to a revised agreement about the instrumentalists' fate when ENO moves from London to Manchester. - The Guardian
Donato Cabrera ends his 10-year term as the orchestra's music director this summer; with no successor yet appointed, Slatkin will serve as Artistic Consultant. (In fact, the Vegas Phil's executive director hints that there may not be a single music director going forward.) - Las Vegas Review-Journal (third item)
"Jukebox" opera was hardly unknown in centuries past; it was called pasticcio. And while Schubert was a master of vocal music, his operas are rarely revived. (Blame the bad librettos.) So conductor Raphaël Pichon has taken highlights from those operas and put them together with a new story. - The New York Times
