Category: music

How To Bring L.A. Back From Disease, Dissension, And Unrest? Build Concert Halls, Says Mark Swed

“On the surface, that no doubt sounds idiotic — economically, socially and in just about every other way,” writes the L.A. Times classical music critic. “It’s not. It is the simplest, surest, most affordable means of turning this town around. Better still, we’re already nearly there. So please, bear with me.” – Los Angeles Times

What Pandemic? Vinyl Record Sales Up 17 Percent

“The biggest issue [in the vinyl industry] is the broken supply chain,” said the Vinyl Alliance, a trade industry group in April 2020. Increasing shipping costs, a lack of live concerts at which to sell merchandise, and a slow down in new vinyl requests from musicians had record production and sales declining. But the demand for vinyl records was too strong to keep the industry down. Manufacturing quickly got back to normal, and, in the US, 2020 unit sales are up over 17% from 2019. The appeal of the record, with its tangibility, beauty and history, just keeps on growing. – Quartz

Alex Ross: The Entire History Of Film Music Is Saturated With Wagner

“Cinema’s integration of image, word, and music promised a fulfillment of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art,’ which Wagner propagated at one stage of his career. His informal system of assigning leitmotifs to characters and themes became a defining trait of film scores. And Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s gallery of mythic archetypes: his gods, heroes, sorcerers, and questers.” – The New Yorker

Isaac Stern Was Really Famous. So Why Has His Star Faded?

A century after his birth, Stern is no longer nearly so well remembered as Bernstein, whose posthumous celebrity remains undiminished. By contrast, Stern is essentially unknown to Americans under the age of 60, very few of whom listen to classical music. Moreover, he is increasingly known to older music lovers less for his playing than for his ancillary activities, among them his coaching and encouragement of such protégés as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Yo-Yo Ma; his groundbreaking 1979 visit to Communist China, where he played with Chinese musicians who had had no contact with their Western counterparts since the Cultural Revolution; and, above all, the pivotal role that he played in saving Carnegie Hall from the wrecker’s ball in 1960. – Commentary

How I Learned To Be A Kinder Critic

Josh Kosman: “If you’d asked me at the time, I could have unreeled a fairly high-minded manifesto about the central importance of honesty in criticism. None of it would have been wrong, exactly, but it also wouldn’t have been the whole truth. The rest of it — the part I left unacknowledged, even to myself — was that this philosophy was expressly designed to let me off the hook for whatever harm my writing might cause.” – San Francisco Chronicle

The Grim Silence Of The Present Makes For An Eerie Vacation

The NYT‘s classical music critic isn’t truly enjoying his time off because there hasn’t been very much time on. “The shutdowns have been devastating for American classical music, given its dependence on patronage — which has been eroding of late — and the lack of meaningful government support, which still props up institutions in Europe. It’s depressing to read all the social media posts by accomplished freelance artists who have been without work for months and can have a bleak view of the future.” – The New York Times

Germany Stages Three (Sort Of) Fake Concerts In One Day To Find Out More About Risks Of Coronavirus Spread

The idea was to figure out what could make for a safe return to live music, using healthy volunteers who had tested negative before the concerts. “The first of Saturday’s three concerts aimed to simulate an event before the pandemic, with no safety measures in place. The second involved greater hygiene and some social distancing, while the third involved half the numbers and each person standing 1.5m apart.” – BBC