The program brings students from rival high schools together in a non-competitive environment to work and play with pros. Project Chamber Music's "secret sauce is how it fosters real interactions between students and professional musicians." - Oregon ArtsWatch
Except for church, around the corner from his place in Tuscany, it isn't that different from other days. "When you’re a singer, what night of the week it is doesn’t matter. ... I can’t tell you exactly what I do before I sleep. I’ll leave that to your imagination." - The Observer (UK)
"The apparent hack is weird because it flew under the radar. There was no obvious social engineering involved, and the only evidence that it occurred is buried in the weird algorithms of Spotify." Sure, that seems fine. - Vice
In a Q&A, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns says that yes, it has — even the recent visit by only 14 musicians (following the cancellation of a planned full tour). - MSN (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
On Thursday (Nov. 30), during Act II of Wagner's Tannhäuser, as the characters were singing about a natural spring, activists on each side of the top balcony unfurling banners reading “No Opera on a Dead Planet” and chanting that the spring was fouled by climate change. - Hyperallergic
"That’s not a matter of preference, such as not caring for sports or pets; it’s a pathological condition. Accordingly, it’s been given one of those Greek-derived diagnostic labels that allow us to imagine we’ve established a scientific truth rather than merely invented a term: 'musical anhedonia.'" - Literary Hub
After a baby seagull under the roof dislodged a bunch of asbestos in 2017, what was then a very decrepit Colston Hall was closed for a major overhaul. It took three years longer than planned, at nearly triple the original budget, but the Bristol Beacon is now open. - BBC
“Jews being held in concentration camps were unable to document what was happening to them by conventional means. Writing down or photographing this would have been impossible, so they turned to a long cultural tradition of telling their stories through songs and music." - Washington Post
In the digital age, around 100,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day, and they're sorted into one of more than 6,000 genre classifications. So how has this increasingly diverse landscape impacted the sub-cultures that organise themselves around music? - BBC
"Nuova Pratica, a group of up-and-coming performer-composers who aim to re-open the book on Baroque composition, … reject the idea that what they do is mere pastiche. …(Their) music issues an unspoken challenge to the idea that everything in the musical language of the Baroque has already been said." - Early Music America
"One of the big lessons on my mind recently is that certain types of communities are difficult to scale. We’ve spent a lot of years trying to grow as much as possible in order to maintain ourselves as an organization financially, and we’ve never found that the type of community we want to build has any shortcuts towards growth."...
“It looks like you’re looking at a normal piano through funny mirrors,” says Jonathan Biss, who will play Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto" on it with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a concert benefiting the foundation of the late architect, who died last March. - The New York Times
Paid attendance and box office income are both nearing pre-pandemic levels, though they're still slightly below those of 2019. Says CEO Jeff Alexander, "We're building our way back. … We're happy. We could be happier." - Crain's Chicago Business
With that sprawling stylistic range and its technical mastery, its enthusiastic curiosity about eminent and student composers alike, its precision and passion, the JACK has, since its founding in 2005, become one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles. - The New York Times
Ideally, music festivals serve two purposes. They engage audiences by focusing on some topic in concentrated fashion and they generate interest in a given organization by presenting something out of the ordinary. But when they do neither, they mostly make observers wonder what went wrong—even when much went right. - The Wall Street Journal
