orchestra21

Jerry was the orchestra director at my high school in California and one of the coolest teachers I’ve ever had. Now that he is retired and happily free of the mania we upstart musicians brought upon him he’s getting around to recording several of his symphonic works.

One of the pieces slated for taping, American Journey, was among the first things I ever conducted and offered me a formative experience in preparing a contemporary score alongside its composer. As a result I have insider knowledge of just how much this project could use your support – that early performance commenced with the orchestra falling apart and most definitely did not leave Jerry with much of a reference recording!

[Ancillary lessons: Successful conducting careers can emerge from inauspicious beginnings, and composers – especially if they are your mentors – may be willing to talk to you even after you butcher their work onstage.]

GPOYW Seeing the world [and its four-legged inhabitants] through his eyes EDITION

If you haven’t already grabbed Big Beautiful Dark and Scary from Bang on a Can’s 25th anniversary website not to worry – it is still available for free download. Absolutely worth it for the fun listening, if not to add to the wonderful commentary stream occasioned by the album’s offering. So far the highlight for me is new work from Dirty Projectors music director [and fellow Yale grad] David Longstreth – three tight, beat-driven tunes including this head nodder, Instructional Video.

Real talk from Charles Ives, parting with the Pulitzer Prize money he was awarded for the Third Symphony in 1947; half went to Lou Harrison, who had only recently conducted the premiere of the piece. The fact that Ives could afford the bravado hardly diminishes his trademark badassery.

[via wwnorton]

I fear Marco Arment may be right about SOPA and its ilk. I know he’s right about the big studios and the MPAA.

Busted! Composer Bernard Hermann caught snoozing by Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Psycho.

[via oldhollywood]

Odds are Prokofiev’s picaresque Peter and the Wolf was one of your memorable early experiences of live ensemble music. Shockingly, your kids may not enjoy that same opportunity after yesterday’s disastrous ruling in a case involving international orchestral music and other foreign works removed from the public domain:

In 1994 Congress changed U.S. copyright law to conform with an international copyright agreement. The new law reapplied copyright to millions of works that had long been free for anyone to use without permission.

Mr. Golan had argued that taking works back out of the public domain would hinder creativity by making artists more cautious about remixing or otherwise using works, fearing their status could change in the future in a way that required payment to copyright holders. More broadly, academics have expressed concern that upholding the 1994 law would make it much more difficult to write books or assemble course readings without having to deal with a host of legal hurdles – or just prohibitively expensive fees – to avoid violating copyrights.

The decision – in which intellectual property rights holders won big over orchestras, performing arts organizations, creatives and scholars – likely means that a generation’s worth of cultural treasures will become less accessible to the broader public.

And we pay taxes for this? First Congress through legislation and now the Supreme Court in this ruling: Keeping us safe, apparently, from the likes of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.