Category: music

João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim were just two of many Brazilian musicians who considered pianist-singer-composer Johnny Alf a genius and his “Rapaz de Bem” the first bossa nova song. So why isn’t he as famous as they are? Racism was certainly a factor, but not the only one. – The New York Times

Since April, more than 20 members of the opera’s costume crew have been toiling away sewing face coverings which the opera is donating to firefighters, social service agencies and front line medical staff. – NBC San Francisco

Miraculously, the enormous instrument suffered no structural damage from the April 15, 2019 fire at the medieval Paris cathedral. But the 8,000 pipes, five keyboards, and intricate mechanisms were covered and filled with toxic lead dust from the destroyed roof and spire. Disassembly will take until the end of this year and the cleaning will take more than three years; after the organ is all back together, it will take six months to tune and voice it. – Yahoo! (AP)

The CEO ― whose net worth is estimated at over $4 billion ― argued in an interview with Music Ally published Thursday that there was a “narrative fallacy” around claims that Spotify’s royalties were too low, saying: “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” – HuffPost

And, in the U.S., it may be just getting started. A cellist in Pasadena who performs weekly with his wife, a pianist, says, “We thought with so much suffering, and so much anxiety, this is something very small that we can try to do to help.” – Los Angeles Times

Why? Perhaps this: “While Ulysses Kay shared stages with the greats of his day, his daughter said over time his compositions haven’t been performed as widely and are often programmed for cultural anniversaries or events including Black History Month.” – WBUR

At the Moravian Music Foundation, librarian David Blum “was doing a routine cataloging of material that the foundation has owned for years, [when] he noticed the plate number of the printing was 1809, his first clue that he was onto a first edition. He thought that would be great — but unlikely.” And yet. – Winston-Salem Journal

It seems like the entire edifice is teetering. If you can’t pay musicians, you can’t get live music. Culture, while a major economic sector, will likely be one of the last to restart after the shutdown. – Van

For a group of scholars, scientists and musicians, Hagia Sophia’s rededication as a Muslim place of worship threatens to cloak a less tangible treasure: its sound. Bissera Pentcheva, an art historian at Stanford University and an expert in the burgeoning field of acoustic archaeology, has spent the past decade studying the building’s extravagantly reverberant acoustics to reconstruct the sonic world of Byzantine cathedral music. – The New York Times