Bell has announced the extension of his tenure as music director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF) through to August 2028. He began the role in 2011, after first working with Neville Marriner and the ASMF in 1986 as a 19-year-old soloist. - The Strad
A flop year remains valuable for the feedback it gives us. Remove the noise of a once-in-a-lifetime, Beychella-esque headline performance and you can take stock of the tradition as a whole. - The Guardian
In the wake of last week's Vulture/New York magazine article reporting details of an alleged drugging/rape while the orchestra was performing in Vail in 2010, Philharmonic management has confirmed that principal oboe Liang Wang and associate principal trumpet Matthew Muckey will remain offstage for the time being. - The New York Times
GenAI can benefit musicians as well as the general public. Songwriters are no longer limited to the instruments they can play or a recording process they know, and beginners can more easily learn a new instrument with natural language processing and through conversational prompts. - ZDNet
The audio streaming company is developing tools that would allow subscribers to speed up, mash up and otherwise edit songs from their favorite artists, according to people familiar with the discussions. - The Wall Street Journal
Even now, "some employees, particularly female employees, continue to feel unsafe. A current member of the orchestra told me about an incident this past February in which her male colleagues spoke negatively about Asian women performing with the orchestra." - Vulture (MSN)
"What might a young music director mean to an orchestra and to a city when an amazing crop of international and, for the first time, diverse young maestros and maestras is upon us? The implications go far beyond that." - Los Angeles Times
“Here it’s looked on with great suspicion. That drives me nuts, I have to tell you. England is a haven for culture whether it is pop culture or classical culture, literary culture, theatrical culture, this is one of the great addresses and yet we’re embarrassed by it.” - The Guardian
On April 30, Kosman will flip his critic’s notebook closed for the final time, retiring from the newspaper at a crucial juncture for classical music in the Bay Area. - San Francisco Chronicle
The five-concert tour to Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai, led by outgoing music director Jaap van Zweden and running from June 27 to July 3, will be the first visit by a full U.S. orchestra to the People's Republic since 2019. - AP
Where barely one million new vinyl albums were sold in the United States in 2006, that figure has grown every year since, soaring to just over 49 million units in 2023. - The Conversation
The saint is worshiped alongside the divine, and in many faiths, the line between the two is blurred. In the world of classical music, we effectively worship the Great Dead Composers as saints, the ones who transmit perfection into the musical world. - Van
It seems clearer that creatives using AI tools as a part of their own processes is considered more acceptable than administrators using AI to create or embellish creative work. - Opera America Magazine
Cultural memory—for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act—risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception? - The American Scholar
