The pit orchestra "will disappear along with the show. It holds 27 full-time musicians, 11 of whom have been with Phantom since it opened in the late 1980s." Those musicians have built comfortable lives, which are about to be upended. - The New York Times
"I worry about how moods are being targeted in music by a company’s algorithms. But I know he loves this music, albeit in a very different way to me. I wonder why I spend so much time worrying." - The Observer (UK)
"Just in case you're only feeling partially exercised at the evening's pending legit controversies and fashion disasters, let me give you one more reason to sharpen your hashtags. I'm here to argue the obvious: The Academy is getting its best song category all wrong." - NPR
"At first, the Minnesota Opera planned to adapt The Song Poet as a youth opera—part of a program then called Project Opera. But in 2020, that changed with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and a racial justice uprising that challenged representation in the arts." - Sahan Journal
"Shortly after becoming music director of the L.A. Phil and not long before her death in 1964, Mehta visited Alma Mahler, the composer’s widow and a composer in her own right. 'I didn’t know her well, but I speak Viennese, ... so we got along very well.'" - Los Angeles Times
One composer "felt at home in this genre, somewhere between abstract contemporary opera and sound art, but like many composers she had to reconcile her interests with the financial pressures of a traditional career." - The New York Times
Algorithms are not neutral: they train us as much as we train them. Using them to promote local music or Canadian music may inspire a wider variety of music heard on streaming services. - The Conversation
To combat the councils decisions, four MSPs wrote to the Scottish government, asking them to intervene and save the music programmes. Over the weekend, the government confirmed it would cover the extra funding needed to keep Big Noise projects running in each area. - ClassicFM
Classical fans have long complained about how poorly iTunes and Apple Music fit the genre. So, in 2021, Apple purchased Primephonic — which designed its database especially for classical — and closed it, saying they'd integrate it with Apple's software and relaunch it. The result, Apple Music Classical, arrives March 28. - Ars Technica
While technology is making composing more accessible to more artists, there's another important shift going on: scoring Indigenous stories with Indigenous music — rather than a cliché of rattles and drums. - CBC
"The company said it pays out nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music back to the industry. ... These rights holders include record labels, publishers, independent distributors, performance rights organizations and collecting societies ... (but) rarely the artist or songwriter." - Variety
"(He) has canceled a piano recital at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo due to the effects of a serious neurological condition. … Barenboim was diagnosed last year with the condition, which forced him to step down in January as music director at the Berlin State Opera after three decades." - AP
The BBC, as the biggest commissioner of music and one of the biggest employers of musicians in the country, has a vital part to play in the British cultural landscape and a duty to future proof what we deliver for the public. - BBC
Fiction or not, the sort of backstage backstabbing depicted in “Tár” is, alas, very real. We conductors do not generally like our colleagues, and we delight in denigrating one another — that is, until one of us dies. - The New York Times
The BBC Singers, the UK's only full-time professional vocal ensemble, will cease operations this summer, and the Corporation is offering voluntary buyouts to reduce headcount by a fifth in the BBC Symphony in London, the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, and the BBC Concert Orchestra. - The Guardian
