Indeed, composer and performer Molly Joyce says, that idea may be offputting to potential new audiences, and new performers. “Although she eschewed pyrotechnics in her own music long before she publicly identified as disabled, … Joyce has found many alternatives to virtuosity since embarking on exploring disability aesthetics as an artistic pursuit. For her, vulnerability is the new virtuosity.” – New Music Box
Category: music
Does Classical Music Have A ‘God Status’ Problem At Conservatories?
The answer, students say, is absolutely yes – and the #MeToo movement hasn’t yet begun to filter through many conservatory halls. “Over the past year, The Atlantic talked to more than four dozen young musicians about their experiences with classical-music education and sexual misconduct. Their accounts reveal a culture built on hierarchy, critique, and reputation, and show how such a culture can facilitate abuse.” – The Atlantic
The Grim ‘Secular Funeral’ Music Of Brexit
So this is how Great Britain’s time in the EU ends, not with a bang, but … “Edward Gregson, the British composer charged by Radio 4’s PM programme with the tricky task of composing a piece to mark the UK’s departure from the union, uses Beethoven’s theme as the basis for his ‘Notes Between Friends,’ a brief, melancholic duet for piano and cello (played by the composer and Peter Dixon, principal cello of the BBC Philharmonic). Gregson insists he has been even-handed in his treatment – the brief called on him to give ‘a middle-of-the-road view’ of Brexit, ‘not too joyful, not too sad’ – but in reality this is about as far from an ode to joy as it is possible to imagine.” – The Guardian (UK)
How Schoenberg Evolved Away From Tonality
Schoenberg and beauty are words that rarely occupy the same sentence. Arguably the most influential composer of all time, his fame derived from his abolition of tonality—the harmonic system of the previous centuries, in which melodies and harmonies relate to the tonic (the home) of a given key. While detractors still demonise him for having destroyed music, the largely self-taught Schoenberg saw his work as a logical evolution of tradition. Frustrated that tonality seemed exhausted and had reached its limits (in other words, what did classical music have to say after Wagner?), Schoenberg felt that he must transcend its constraints. – Standpoint
It’s Beethoven’s 250th Birthday. Is There ANYTHING New To Say About Him?
How did Beethoven’s work — its harmonies, its rhetoric, its formal ideas — become such an exclusive model for what classical music should sound like? What are we going to do to give other models, both past and present, their due? How do we get past our Beethoven addiction? – San Francisco Chronicle
Racially-Tinged Strife At America’s Largest All-Jazz Radio Station
At WBGO in Newark, NJ, accusations that a largely white and elitist station leadership had lost touch with, and stopped paying respect to, the largely nonwhite people of its city led to rancor among the staff and, this week, the resignation of station CEO Amy Niles. But the roots of the station’s difficulties lie in the changing media landscape and in the tension between openness to WBGO’s local community and serving a listener and membership base that’s almost entirely outside Newark. – The New York Times
Citing Coronavirus Epidemic, Boston Symphony Cancels Asia Tour
“When officials with the Shanghai Oriental Art Center informed BSO that they were canceling the concert and other events because of the outbreak, BSO followed up with their presenting partners in Seoul, Taipei and Hong Kong, and ultimately decided to shelve the tour, the orchestra’s statement said.” – Boston Classical Review
This Is “Science”? Researchers Claim Rachmaninov Was The Most Original Composer In 200 Years
The scientists set out to quantify the creativity of 19 of the most prominent composers of recent centuries, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. An analysis of their chord sequences found that none matched the originality of Rachmaninov. – The Times
A 37-Year-Old Standard For Digitizing Music Is About To Change
Though MIDI has done an exceptional job of digitizing music for the last 37 years, it hasn’t been perfect. MIDI quantizes music, meaning it forces music components into a particular value. In MIDI 1.0, all data was in 7-bit values. That means musical qualities were quantized on a scale of 0 to 127. Features like volume, pitch, and how much of the sound should come out of the right or left speaker are all measured on this scale, with 128 possible points. This is not a lot of resolution. – Quartz
Sydney Opera House Closes Its Concert Hall To Fix The Problems It’s Had Since It Opened
“The ambition of the Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s design, his walkout mid-project, and Peter Hall’s subsequent takeover in 1966 resulted in compromises that have bedevilled the building ever since. Now, as part of a five-year program in which the Opera House has been progressively upgrading its core infrastructure, construction is about to begin on a $150m revamp of its largest performance space, the 2,500-seat concert hall, designed to remedy the shortcomings born of the project’s messy origins.” – The Guardian