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Abu Bratsche, Musings of a lead viola operatortheafmobserver.typepad.com/abu_bratsche/ |
Such a versatile instrument
Musicians to the ice floes, please (cross-posted from the Polyphonic blog) If one single factor underlies the turmoil at the New Hampshire Music Festival in the minds of the musicians and the external support group SOON, it appears to ...
When the excellent becomes the enemy of everything (cross-posted from the Polyphonic blog) While doing some research on the New Hampshire Music Festival situation, I came across a blog post by Henry Fogel that I found both interesting on its merits an...
A Coup-de-Festival (cross-posted from the Polyphonic blog) A friend of mine alerted me last week to a recent series of events at the New Hampshire Music Festival. I've been trying to make sense of what I've read in news...
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Arts Journal MusicMusic News From Around the Net |
Aspen Music Festival Cuts Season "This summer's season will run eight weeks instead of nine -- July 1 through Aug. 22 -- and that trim inevitably means a reduction in the overall number of concerts, master classes and other offerings...
Is There Any Such Thing As The Definitive Performance? "Most experienced listeners know that thinking in terms of definitive performances is as meaningless for new music as it is for any other kind."...
Metropolitan Opera Brings Back Its Former General Manager "New York's Metropolitan Opera is bringing back Joseph Volpe, who left three years ago after 16 years as the company's general manager, to lead contract talks with some of its major unions."...
What's The Point Of Music? "Unwilling to believe that music was altogether useless, Darwin concluded that it may have made man's ancestors more successful at mating. Yet if that were so, you might expect one gender to be musica...
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Slipped DiscNorman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds |
So who took an axe to your piano? A friend who is writing a play about a parent who resents his child's musical talent wonders if there is any known instance of an adult actually destroying an instrument because he or she cannot bear ...
Promises, promises... and a prospect of Bliss Three publishers in London and New York are working day and night to supply me with audited figures of their most performed 21st century works in response to yesterday's post. Or so they swe...
Barenboim jumps down and bows out In the final act of his London Beethoven-Schoenberg cycle, Daniel Barenboim took applause on stage with the orchestra for his Strauss polka encore and then bounded downstairs to the Clore Ba...
Last composer standing - who is really the most performed? Three months ago I kicked off a public conversation here as to which living composers are most likely to last the test of time. You can read the results here. The discussion, which spread into severa...
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The Artful ManagerAndrew Taylor on the Business of Arts & Culture |
My Maine events I'll be in Waterville, Maine, most of next week, in residency (kinda) at Colby College, discussing issues of art, audience, and business with students, faculty, and cultural leaders. Should be an inte...
The cumulative value of stories Social anthropologist and ''chief culture officer'' Grant McCracken has some great thoughts bubbling in his recent blog posts. He's wondering out loud about finding ways to capture and share the narra...
A useful question about nonprofit status I'm pleased to notice a new blogger among the ArtsJournal crew, James Undercofler, who recently joined the faculty at Drexel University's Arts Administration program after an illustrious career in sym...
Rumination on ''expressive life'' I'll be blogging elsewhere on ArtsJournal this week, as part of the ''Expressive Life'' week-long blog discussion convened by Bill Ivey and featuring a ragtag bunch of big thinkers. Since his work as ...
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The Rest is NoiseAlex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker |
Noise everywhere The phrase "The rest is noise" keeps showing up in unexpected places. Earlier I noted the opening of the club The Rest Is Noise in Brixton, London: The Armed Forces, a Nashville-based gutter-pop band,...
Happy New Year
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SANDOWGreg Sandow on the future of classical music |
Dismaying On Saturday afternoon I went to see the Met's streaming Simon Boccanegra in a multiplex in Rockaway, NJ. The audience was old -- dismayingly old. I know I've written quite a bit about the aging audien...
Solutions III Here's another success story, about new ways to promote what otherwise was a standard (though evidently quite wonderful) classical performance. This was a semi-staged production of Gluck's opera Arm...
Solutions II I love the reactions to my "Solutions" post. Just as I'd hoped -- people posting comments, telling us about their own solutions, their own new ways of presenting classical music. In Britain, the Nethe...
Solutions I think it's time to emphasize solutions on my blog. I've made so many criticisms of the classical music world -- justified criticisms, I don't hesitate to say. And I love the theoretical discussions ...
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From the Orchestra Librarykschnack.wordpress.com/ |
Z!#&?esk?%#luh??@a^($h?!! Sincere apologies to Czech musicians and citizens, and Mr. Smetana of course, for defacing the lovely name of the 4th movement of M?last, but we are just ready to be so DONE with this project. Really...
Mein Vaterland, Mein Gott! I had a library nightmare over the holidays, and I don’t mean that figuratively. You know those performance anxiety nightmares players can have over a particular piece that’s difficult or...
I Lost December Well, I didn’t plan to take a 4-week break from writing the blog, but December got the best of me. This is probably not unusual for people in our business; in my case, I just seem to have taken...
Always the Last One Out It’s just the way things are. The orchestra librarian is always the last one out of the building. Although the percussionists and stage hands might try to dispute this claim, they don’t s...