"Benoit Fader Keita never intended to make electro music. But after a sell-out first show in Dakar last month, the singer believes the genre could be key to saving his beloved language from extinction." - The Guardian (UK)
By 1922, the powerful cante jondo ("deep song") of tradition had been cutesified into the cante chico heard in cafés — and a group of Andalucians led by Manuel de Falla wanted to save it. They organized a competition, the Concurso de Cante Jondo, that's remembered today as Spain's Woodstock. - BBC
Yes, it's videogame music. "When we hear this music outside gameplay, it can prove unusually moving. The first time I caught the London Video Game Orchestra in concert," one writer says, it felt like a hymn: "nostalgic and weirdly rapturous." - BBC
In December, 300 students and teachers from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music who had escaped the Taliban government arrived in Lisbon. After half a year, they're relieved to be safe and determined to preserve their music, but struggling to adjust and worried about their families. - PRI's The World
After the pandemic shutdown in March 2020, musicians agreed to a 25% salary cut, with pay rising to 90% of previous levels by the end of next season. But the orchestra is in better financial shape than hoped, so full compensation will be restored starting in September. - The New York Times
Sure, that's down from the last full season, which was 2018-19. (Think about that.) What's more, tourists, who used to account for up to half of sales, aren't back in their usual numbers, especially from abroad. Nevertheless, the Met got through the season without missing a single performance, despite Omicron. - AP
"It's long, flat and electrified, with strings stretched over frets along a wooden body. Beneath them are black and white markers corresponding to the notes on a piano. ... A note sounds only when a string touches a fret, and that's done with any number of fingers." - MSN (The Washington Post)
"With an unlikely fusion of loose, stream-of-consciousness forms and old-school contrapuntal technique, he constructed monoliths of sound, then obscured them. ... I felt I'd found a mentor who related to music the way I wanted to: with curiosity, open-mindedness and little regard for historical period or genre." - The New York Times
"Amid a labor battle, a pandemic that surged again and again, and a war, it was as if the real drama was in simply getting the doors open. Once that was achieved, what followed ... was like icing on the cake." - The New York Times
"Legions of Stranger Things viewers have been recently indoctrinated into a secular belief system that has already transformed millions of lives. The text that led them there? Kate Bush’s 1985 song 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God).'" But there's more. - Los Angeles Times
"Success for me isn’t that we can sell out 92 percent of the house, it’s that we can sell out a run of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. That’s success in an audience. Our audience is loyal. They come back. They are stimulated and entertained at the same time." - Van Magazine
Merryl Goldberg hand-encoded names, addresses, and other details of the Phantom Orchestra, a group of Jewish refuseniks and Christian activists trying to help Jews and others escape the USSR, in composition notebooks - hidden from the prying eyes of Soviet officials. - Wired
The largest donation in MPR's history, the anonymous gift, to be placed in a separate endowment, will be divided between new media technology and enhanced content. MPR produces and distributes such programs as Performance Today, SymphonyCast, and Pipedreams to public radio stations across the US. - Inside Radio
The young Finn won't have the full job title until 2027, though he'll be "artistic partner" of the orchestra — widely considered one of the world's best — starting this August. The RCO post has been empty since Daniele Gatti was fired in 2018 over charges of sexual misconduct. - Gramophone
