Category: music

Say what you want about the millions of digital songs stored in the cloud and awaiting your Spotify spin. Strolling through the rows of shelving units, each packed with cylinder recordings, overwhelms the imagination. – Los Angeles Times

Preserving early recordings — and the lumbering machines that play them — has been an obsession for a small group of Southern California collectors, who have been stealthily wrangling from the wild the essential sounds of the early American acoustic recording era. – Los Angeles Times

“It’s a psychological phenomenon: When you’ve been chosen for something, you feel flattered. And if you don’t have other options, you think, This is my big chance.“ – Van

The orchestra and its players worked out a contract in April, when the pandemic was still new. Management says it then kept the musicians on full salary through the summer but, with no ticket revenue coming in, can no longer pay anything and so canceled the agreement entirely. The musicians union says it offered numerous times to make further changes — even suggesting a switch from salaries to per-service fees until a full concert schedule resumes — but that all such offers were rejected. – KOAA (Pueblo/Colorado Springs)

In what is the orchestra’s first trip abroad since March and possibly the first overseas tour by any European orchestra since the pandemic began, the Philharmoniker, 100-odd-strong, are performing in four Japanese cities under Valery Gergiev’s baton, traveling in their own segregated buses and train cars. – Kyodo News (Japan)

“It’s a new normal for these concerts, and yet another uncanny valley of the post-Covid world: a social experience where we can’t socialise; a show where dancing, hugging and head-banging are essentially illegal. Sweaty dance floors and beer queues are out, replaced by parlour-style seating and severely reduced capacities, often resulting in artists performing multiple shows a night. Dinner and a show has, against all odds, become the norm again.” – The Guardian

LA’s Pacific Opera Project’s unconventional, often playful productions have included a bilingual “Madama Butterfly” performed in the Aratani Theatre in L.A.’s Little Tokyo; a “Magic Flute” that took its cue from 1990s video games; and at the outdoor Ford Theatres, a version of Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio” staged as an episode of “Star Trek.” Still, the company has done nothing quite like what it is attempting in the parking lot of Camarillo United Methodist Church in Ventura County, about an hour’s drive northwest of downtown L.A. – Los Angeles Times

Zach Finkelstein, a professional data analyst as well as a lyric tenor, spoke with 15 applicants to young artists’ programs and looked at YouTube Analytics figures for their privately uploaded videos. “The data suggests that some companies rejected those singers without viewing any of their video auditions. YouTube reports also indicate that the average company isn’t considering more than a short section of those singers’ arias — the views registered by the platform last, for most, roughly a minute, less than half of one aria.” – The Middleclass Artist

“The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association announced a $4.4 million operating deficit for the fiscal year 2020 at its annual meeting, held online Nov. 10. That period – which ran from July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020 – included the pandemic, which forced the cancellation of all CSOA-presented concerts since March 12.” – Yahoo! (Chicago Tribune)

Zachary Woolfe: “I wanted to try, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic largely closed down live performing arts worldwide, to review a concert taken in the way I have most music since March: while running in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, ducking into the bodega for milk, walking [the dog], living life.” Did it work? “Well, sort of.” – The New York Times