Category: music

Conductor Kazushi Ono and the players of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra spent two days at the Bunka Kaikan concert hall in mid-June with researchers from a university and medical school in the Japanese capital. They experimented with various seating schemes, measuring aerosol spray from the musicians’ faces and working out how to balance hearing each other with keeping each other safe. Ono writes about the results. – Maestro Arts

Amy Helm: “It’s interesting as a musician to go to so many different places and play for so many different people and have such a direct connection with them. That’s not something you get in a room of a hundred people or several thousand people. It’s nice. And it’s right on time. And then you get a little window into what they’re dealing with.: – NPR

A three-day “herd immunity” music festival scheduled to take place in Ringle, Wisconsin, in mid-July is taking this energy to the, uh, extreme. With the exception of drive-in concerts and performances streamed online, live music events have largely been cancelled for the foreseeable future. Health experts have warned concerts could be “superspreaders” of COVID-19 and predicted they wouldn’t be feasible till 2021. – Mic

They’ve been trying for years to bar Trump from using “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as his walk-off music at rallies – and their efforts have always been in vain. Until now, perhaps. “The group sent out a statement saying it is enlisting BMI, the performing rights organization that oversees public use of the song, in their quest to keep the track from being used for politically partisan purposes. And the band says there’ll be a lawsuit if the president continues using the song without a license.” – Variety

The band names are a symbol – just a symbol, perhaps, but a strong one. However: “The question is not, “‘hould bands whose names have ties to slavery change them?’ The question is: Are we committed to looking our awful history in the eyes, admitting that it led us to a place in which Black people in America are still systematically mistreated, and doing everything we can to fix that?” – Vice

And can brainwaves explain it? There’s a place at “the frontiers of biotechnology and experimental music” trying to figure it all out. – Aeon

Aluna Francis: “We not only need to give credit to the artists that created the genre, we also need to establish a long-term plan to secure a healthy future for dance music that is culturally and racially inclusive.” – Pitchfork

There’s truly no way to perform the craft of being an orchestra conductor right now. So they, like most of us, are doing other things: “For conductors with steady work before the pandemic — globe-trotting and rarely home — the aftermath of cancellations has amounted to a surprise sabbatical. They have learned new languages, picked up old instruments, and composed. And they have begun to reimagine performances for the coming year.” – The New York Times

Larry Morton: “I thought that digital would completely replace things like physical phone books and all that. Certainly digital is a huge part of the business, and it’s growing quickly. But there’s something unique about that physical touch between musicians and their music books. There’s something about that relationship. if you’re learning a difficult piece and you’re really scrutinizing that score… you know we have nearly all of it available digitally. People still want to touch that page.” – MakingMusic

The Catalyst Fund, a three-year, $2.1 million program launched in 2019 by the national support organization, is designed to help its members identify, confront and ultimately correct what Jesse Rosen, the League’s president and chief executive officer, called built-in “systems of inequity.” – Chicago Sun-Times