February 2012
20 posts
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Museum as Node →
I long for the day when all of my colleagues in the orchestra business understand what Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and so many other forward-thinking institutions and individuals have already figured out about culture in the internet-age:
Museums have options. One, they can stay off the web, hoarding their treasures offline and doing what they’ve always done. Two, they can dabble...
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“Don’t play the butter notes.”
– Herbie Hancock recalling advice given to him by Miles Davis:
I felt like I was getting in a rut, and I was playing the same thing over and over again, and he noticed that. So he suggested that I not play the butter notes … I started eliminating certain notes from my chords – some of the notes that...
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WatchForget the flash mobs, this project promoting Esa-Pekka Salonen’s residency in Dortmund, Germany is a truly next-level effort to take ‘music out of the concert hall and put it right on the street’:
Twelve tireless musicians played for 24 hours in a row 21,600 bars and 86,400 individual notes from a custom-composed score on a stage in the heart of Dortmund.
Effective, too –...
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Tuba Thefts Plague California Schools →
‘Strictly a tuba raid.’
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“That’s how you should do it, orchestras!”
– Composer and pianist Timo Andres, reporting on his experience with the WCFSO last week. We are of course happy to oblige – not to mention proud to demonstrate once again that a regional orchestra can indeed illuminate the way forward for its larger, copiously-funded metropolitan brethren.
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Anonymous asked: What was the encore piece that Tim A played last night?
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“The architecture of the copyright law that is now being forced upon the Internet...”
– I agree with just about everything Lawrence Lessig says, especially on this topic.
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WatchMozart performed his twenty-sixth piano concerto twice in 1789-90 and as was his custom [especially in piano works conceived for himself] he improvised extensively, particularly in the left hand. Now composer and pianist Timo Andres inherits Mozart’s mantle, but with a twenty-first century twist. As Timo explains his re-imagining of K537 fills in the many incomplete sections of...
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January 2012
27 posts
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“Downloaders are making a moral calculation and coming to the conclusion that the...”
– Brad Burnham’s astute take on digital media was originally intended as an entry into the SOPA debate but is now even more relevant in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown.
I’ve never been shy about extolling the widespread benefits [for everyone but a narrow group of rights holders]...
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WatchBALLET 360, featuring dancers from Canada’s National Ballet School, is one installment in a fascinating series by Ryan Enn Hughes:
‘The 360 Project’ is an exploration into the crossroads of photography and motion pictures. It is a study of peak dance movements, captured simultaneously by 48 cameras aligned in a circle.
Prepare to be spellbound.
[via culturite]
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Kickstarter: Recording of Four Symphonic Works by... →
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...
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“Prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up.”
– 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...
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Orchestrollercoaster
I shared this on Twitter and Facebook a few weeks ago and got a nice response. At the time I wasn’t aware that the version I linked to [and others elsewhere] had been cropped. So here it is again in the original wide aspect – a delightful and dizzying meeting of music and motion:
The music is from the 4th movement of Ferdinand Ries’ Second Symphony, and was animated for the Zurich...
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The next SOPA →
I fear Marco Arment may be right about SOPA and its ilk. I know he’s right about the big studios and the MPAA.
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Supreme Court Upholds Law That Pulled Foreign... →
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...
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“We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases...”
– The White House, responding to a petition on the woefully misguided SOPA bill up for vote in Congress this week.
[via barackobama]
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“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the...”
– For those of us who work in the orchestra business it is neither easy nor popular to share John Cage’s point of view, but doing so is the only way we’ll shape a viable future for our art form.
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Aida will gather dust in the archives →
From an 1872 letter sent to Giuseppe Verdi by Prospero Bertani, a patron of early performances of Aida:
The opera contains absolutely nothing thrilling or electrifying, and if it were not for the magnificent scenery, the audience would not sit through it to the end. It will fill the theatre a few more times and then gather dust in the archives. Now, my dear Signor Verdi, you can imagine my...
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Bang on a Can 25th Anniversary download →
The intrepid new music collective is offering its double album Big Beautiful Dark and Scary for download in exchange for a memory of your encounter with BOAC’s work or just a statement of interest.
[via @alexrossmusic]
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Why 2012 will be year of the artist-entrepreneur →
I hope so – it’s certainly about time.
[via claytoncubitt]
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“German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamman, held that music was given...”
– At the onset of another year of regularly measured time Charles Rosen reminds us of the much more varied and elastic sense of time inherent in music. This is the technical element of conducting I ponder most as I develop interpretations, and an aspect of the art form which fascinates me endlessly.
...
December 2011
17 posts
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Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater →
The entertainment biz story of 2011 has to be comedian Louis C.K.’s self-released video special, whose success so clearly demonstrates the validity of a radically open and direct approach to the distribution of artistic content. The simple fact is that the major label-driven profiteering which has contorted and demeaned the culture industry for decades is increasingly being forced to make...
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