Category: music

Dan Lewis: “My vision is to ensure opportunities to learn, perform and create music are available to all young people. Ideally, this would be happening in every school, but that isn’t the case, especially in low-income and historically marginalized communities.” – The New York Times

“The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra announced Tuesday that it has been promised pivotal gifts totaling $7.25 million that officials say will allow the beleaguered organization to pay its outstanding bills, balance its budget this season for the first time in a decade — and start implementing a plan to stabilize its finances.” – The Baltimore Sun

At age 28, Gustavo Dudamel started his appointment as the L.A. Phil’s music director in 2009, his original five-year term quickly extended through the 2018-19 season and later through mid-2022. With that last extension, he gained the additional title of artistic director. – Los Angeles Times

Though he was born into genuine if provincial affluence, with second-tier European royalty filling out the family’s dance card on vacation, he chose to become a working stiff. Reversing the usual American ascent from labor to leisure makes for a more strenuous, and more moving, story. The labor produced a new kind of American lyric, and language. – The New Yorker

Here’s a detailed look at a project by the Museo del Violino in the Italian city of Cremona (the Stradivari family’s hometown and to this day a center of instrument-making) to digitally record and preserve the sound of every note, as bowed and plucked in various ways, that can be made by a violin and cello by Stradivari, a second violin by Guarneri, and a viola by Amati. – Popular Science

Plaintiffs in copycat cases are largely targeting megahit songs because they’ve seen where the money is, and the increasing frequency of those court battles in headlines is causing an avalanche effect of further infringement lawsuits. – Rolling Stone

Streaming changed the way we listened to music, and music changed in response to the way we listened. Songs got shorter, genres bled into one another, and language barriers dissolved. – BBC

Ben Cadwallader has been executive director of Vermont Symphony since 2015. In 2016, he was one of nine arts administrators selected by the League of American Orchestras for its Emerging Leaders Program. An oboe player, he graduated from the Mannes College of Music at the New School in New York. – Los Angeles Times

A lot of time I don’t know what I want to play. So I just start playing, and try to make it right, and make it join to some other kind of feeling in the music. Like, I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into—maybe something beautiful. – The New Yorker

“Before you get mad at me for saying that anything Beethoven wrote has problems, you should know that Beethoven himself was unhappy with the opera. He drastically rewrote it several times over the course of many years, each time tasking a new librettist to fix what the last had written. When the opera originally premiered in 1805 it even had a different name – Leonore, or the Triumph of Conjugal Love. Beethoven ended up writing four Leonore overtures; every time he rewrote the opera he wrote a new one.” – The Guardian