Lara Downes: “Two weeks of dates cancelled, and then before we knew it, two months. Every single concert, opera, festival, club date–our calendars were wiped clean. When it happened, some of us were out on the road, and we made our way home in confusion and panic. Some of us were getting ready to head out on tour, and we cancelled flights, unpacked suitcases. We were all stunned. It was surreal and impossible.” – I Care if you Listen
Tag: 04.06.20
Rehearsals Move Online – To Practice And For Community
“Physical distancing is the antithesis of what a community chorus is all about. We rehearse for four months before our performances twice a year. The community we form as we breathe, learn the music, and sing together is a vital component of who we are. Who are we in times of physical isolation?” – San Francisco Classical Voice
Do Musicians Need A Federal Works Progress Program To Survive?
Musicians have lost the battle to monetize recordings. With the internet awash in cheap streaming and free videos, our income now comes from live performance alone. Even if livestreams end up being only a short stopgap, offering them up for free on a large scale sets a dangerous precedent. Forced to be pioneers in this nuanced, digital field, we need to set the standard now—past performance footage is different than creating totally new content, for example. How do we assign value in an array of contexts? – Middle Class Artist
Online Music Streaming Is Up 32 Percent
The two leading platforms are Spotify with 35 percent and Apple Music, with 19 percent. Amazon Music is third with 15 percent of market share. Paid subscriptions represented 80 percent of total revenue, with advertising and brand partnerships rounding out the remaining 20 percent. – Ludwig Van
Violinist Commissions Composers For Online Fragments
Jennifer Koh got to work on Alone Together, an online performance series for which she hyper-compressed her usual process of discovering composers by asking 21 of them with some level of financial security (be it from salary or grants) to donate a new work between 30 seconds and one minute long, as well as to nominate 21 freelance composers for new commissions funded by Arco. – Washington Post
Judge Throws Out Musicians’ Lawsuit Over 2008 Fire That Destroyed Master Recordings
Representatives of those artists or their estates sued Universal in June, arguing that the company had been negligent in protecting their tapes and that the company had a duty to share with artists any income it received from an insurance settlement over the fire. – The New York Times
The Greatest Scam In Canadian Art History
“[It’s] the greatest art scam in Canadian history,” says art dealer Don Robinson, who suffered a stroke because of the stress he endured in his campaign against a market awash with forgeries. “The more you dive into a pool of garbage, the more you get to know the garbage within it,” says Ritchie Sinclair, Norval Morrisseau’s former assistant and another key figure in exposing the scandal. – The Art Newspaper
NY Museums, Collectors Worry About Art Security
Know What Else Coronavirus Has Infected? Our Everyday Language
Karen Russell: “Today, we are witnessing the shotgun weddings of words into some strange unions, neologisms sped into existence by this virus (‘quarantunes,’ ‘quarantini’), epidemiological vocabulary hitched together by Twitter hashtags. It seems like there is a parallel language contagion occurring. ‘Self-isolation,’ ‘social distancing,’ ‘abundance of caution’ — pairs of words I’d never seen together in a sentence back in January have become ubiquitous.” – The New Yorker
Ben Brantley And Jesse Green Size Up The Off-Broadway Season (Since It’s Now Over)
Ben : “In many of these productions, time seemed to be torn off its hinges, and the solid floor of what we think of as ‘normal life’ to have cracked open. Who knew how apt a preface such works would provide for the rudderless world we now inhabit?”
Jesse: “‘Rudderless’ is exactly how a lot of these terrific plays (and a handful of musicals) wanted us to feel politically, existentially and even spiritually — I mean with actual ghosts.” – The New York Times