Category: music

That likely condemns a lot of venues to closure. “‘It’s shocking that they don’t just stay until they figure it out,’ says Audrey Fix Schaefer of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA).” Small music venues and theatres are truly at dire risk. – Variety

“All concerts will be broadcast live via the Royal Albert Hall website and on BBC Radio 3, but there will be no live audience. The fortnight of live performances comes after two months of archive Proms broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Four. They will take place from Friday 28 August to Saturday 12 September for the Last Night of the Proms.” – BBC Music Magazine

“Singing in a room for an extended period of time, in close contact with lots of people and no ventilation — that’s a recipe for disaster,” says Shelly Miller, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Along with Jelena Srebric at the University of Maryland, Miller is leading a six-month research project looking at singers’ and other musicians’ transmission of aerosol particles. – NPR

Joana Mallwitz: “I’m still amazed about all the situations where it’s still possible to be ‘the first woman ever.’ … I’ve conducted Mozart operas my whole life at major houses, and I wasn’t asked to conduct at Salzburg just because I’m a woman. That’s not how it works.” – The New York Times

“The Senate of the City of Berlin has announced a decision to allow choral singing in closed spaces to resume, under very strict and precise regulation.” (Very strict and precise, in fact.) – OperaWire

“Some days, I think this glut of time is an offering. More often, however, it’s a force-feeding. To have ideas, you need constraints, which for us were the auditions, rehearsals and performances dribbled across our calendars. Now that those boundaries have evaporated, I have begun to realize how much I depended on them and how much my relationship with music was predicated on feeling present with others, both in the audience and onstage. If a sonata falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?” – Washington Post

One solution that all five instrumentalists opposed was changing the orchestral world’s blind audition process in which candidates try out behind curtains or screens. In a July article in the New York Times, music critic Anthony Tommasini argued that such an approach was no longer tenable and that orchestras had to take more “proactive steps” to hiring. – Chicago Sun-Times

More than halfway through Denver’s bizarre, unprecedented Summer of No Music, an increasing amount of people — artists and fans alike — are wondering: Without live music, who are we? – Denver Post

Arthur Kaptainis: “[He] managed to forge an entente with an orchestra still reeling from the public resignation of Charles Dutoit and a provincial government that took culture more seriously than most. Not to mention a public that was quite prepared to be mesmerized by his mix of Japanese ancestry, Californian upbringing and European credentials. … As the right conductor at the right time, Nagano was in a much better position than most music directors to do whatever he wanted … [including] programming that few other North American orchestras would hazard.” (Not to mention opening a brand-new concert hall.) – La Scena Musicale (Montreal)

Music has been around as long as there have been people. Longer if you count music made by animals. It’s safe to say that music will be a part of this world as long as there is life. So what happens when new technology encounters an eternal constant for humans? – 3 Quarks Daily