"The world is watching. 30% of the members of the MET Orchestra can no longer sustain a living in New York City due to being faced with no salary from the Metropolitan Opera since April 1, 2020. This number will likely climb higher as the crisis continues." - Gramilano
Behind the new movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday stands a lot of history - and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks: "Jimmy Fletcher is literally, actually an agent for the United States and she falls in love with him. To me, this is all about how we love this country and it dismisses us, and how for Black people,...
"We can make music online and everything, but it's not the same as being onstage together." But there are benefits - like practicing in Golden Gate Park, having extra time with kids at home, and filming themselves running in from gardening to perform the William Tell Overture, or performing in a gorilla mask, for an online audience. - KTVU...
"It was not the 'alien' music that disturbed the Japanese audience" at the Tokyo premiere in 1914 (there had been a Western music school in the city since 1890), "but the threat to traditional hierarchies between men and women. Later, in the 1930s, feminist writers such as Ichiko Kamichika and Akiko Yosano criticised the opera for promoting a 'victim'...
The Bach Cantatas Website, founded 20 years ago by Aryeh Oron, includes texts from Bach's sacred works in multiple languages, discographies, history and analysis of each piece, and many other resources. It gets 15,000-20,000 hits a day and is used even by the likes of John Eliot Gardiner and Masaaki Suzuki, two of the world's leading Bach conductors. -...
Roland Valliere described the Concert Companion as similar to audio guides in art museums. “I was trying to do for symphony orchestras what audio guides have done for museums: enhance and enrich the experience in real-time,” he was quoted as saying. But audio guides do not have a time sequencing pressure associated with them like music does and they...
Created by Canadian-based Massive Technologies, the AI pianist is trained to listen to musical compositions and recreate them with virtual hands—and the results are pretty good. - Vice
As the pandemic and the consequent furlough of Met employees drag on, and as negotiations over a new contract have broken down (the old contract expired at a very bad time), the backstage workers' union IATSE Local One has launched a campaign urging donors not to give the Met money until the furloughs end. The union is even lobbying...
Some might say tackling Richard Wagner’s four-part Ring Cycle during a pandemic is folly. English National Opera, announcing the plan on Wednesday, believes the opposite and wants to return to live performance with a bang. - The Guardian
The move adds a billion more potential customers to the market for the audio streaming giant, which will now be available in 178 countries and will support more than 60 languages. - Variety
Joaquín Orellana, one of Guatemala's leading composers, calls his creations útiles sonoros ("sound tools"), and many of them are de-and-reconstructed versions of his country's national instrument, the marimba. "The ingenuity of Orellana's inventions," writes Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, "often hovers between playfulness and cruelty." - The New York Times
During the pandemic, Darrah’s affinity for film allowed him to pivot to digital content with ease. Over the last six months, the director has worked with LA Opera, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Opera Philadelphia, Boston Lyric Opera and others to produce visually compelling screen experiences hailed by the New Yorker as “arresting” and by the Boston Globe as “ambitious...
Somewhere, in an attic or a music library or maybe hiding in plain sight, are pieces by non-white-male composers that, with the right kind of attention, will open our ears to genius. - Philadelphia Inquirer
The pandemic has wrecked an already vulnerable jazz industry by forcing live music shows to halt. Musicians and club owners have turned to online fundraisers for survival, and point to the music's connection to civil rights as a need to keep its legacy alive. - Axios
The Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles is the largest Black-majority orchestra in the country. But it doesn't want to be alone. The ICYO founder's mantra "is that there needs to be an inner city youth orchestra in every city where there's an NFL team." - NPR
