- Kittens make awful composing friends
- But are humans really any better? results vary
- Will composers ever be free from sheet music’s tyranny?
- Meet The Revenant composer Ryuichi Sakamoto
- Opening Ceremony’s fashion-forward composer tshirts
- Philip Glass & David Bowie discuss their Low Symphony collabo
Category: Uncategorized
Think about how you get to know a composer’s music. It might be by playing it yourself. You may hear it on the radio, or on a mixtape a friend made you. Maybe you downloaded gigs of albums off a torrent. (Ahem.)
HAYDN107 offers another way. Dr. Walter Reichert organized a site housing all of Haydn’s symphonies (107ish), and not only can you read about each one, but you can listen to them. In fact, Reichert and his minions arranged for three separate recordings from Antal Doráti, Christopher Hogwood or Adam Fischer, if you have a feeling about such things.
A while back a CDA reader recommended I read Blair Tindall’s book Mozart in the Jungle for a look at the seedier side of classical music. I never got around to it, unfortunately. The book was turned into an Amazon TV series, nabbed Bernadette Peters & Gael García Bernal to star, and turned into a hit for Amazon TV.
But wait — the show’s won a couple Golden Globes, and classical stars like Lang Lang & Gustavo Dudamel have made MitJ cameos? Okay, I’m paying attention. Should I be watching this?
Pianist Zsolt Bognár’s Living the Classical Life is a web series featuring creative minds from the world of classical music. Zsolt has sat down with the likes of Joshua Bell, Matthew Aucoin and Isabel Leonard for one-on-one conversations about music, practice habits, upcoming projects, influential teachers, and more. The episodes are wide-ranging. The show is a gem.
Today marks the 354th day of 2015, and what a year it’s been.
There’s been too much chaos and controlled fury to assess what we went through. We survived, we had fun, let’s never talk about it again. You’re forgiven for not keeping tabs on great classical releases this year amidst the madness. That job is reserved for nerd critics and classical music fanboys and girls.
What follows are ten 2015 releases I’ll keep listening to in the coming year. They’re all aces, and they’re in alphabetical order.
Sometimes the FOMO hits you like a ton of bricks. So, here are hot links you missed in the CDA mailer this week:
One-woman pop-music phenom Taylor Swift gave $50,000 to the Seattle Symphony last week, which is remarkable because no sane person donates to orchestras anymore.
Sure, the “official” reason was that Swift simply “appreciated” the Seattle Symphony’s work with John Luther Adams and his tour de force piece Become Ocean. Assuming Swift was telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe she is) this “donation” signals something big. When your orchestra is willing to play, record, and promote good new music — to cultivate a reputation as the go-to outfit for experiments like this — then you’ll reap handsome rewards, although not always monetarily.
On a recent trip in Napoli I came across the one-time home of Giachino Rossini. We missed the sign on Via Toledo the first couple times because it’s right next to an extremely popular fried-food joint. The swarms of people were not there for an operatic legend.
Sometimes your Instagram feed can seem like an endless parade of food photos, braggadocious vacation updates, and tired memes. You need a change, a healthy classical music infusion.
Below you’ll find ten great classical music Instagram accounts. Choose your favorites, click the links to judge suitability, and follow if you’re feeling them.
The city of Berlin offers city dwellers an amazing proposition: an off-peak, all-access, year-long pass to nineteen art museums and research centers for a modest 25 euros. Since buying the pass in October I’ve been on a quest to visit as many sites as possible. Firmly resolved: it will get done.
Most recently I went to the Alte Nationalgalerie. The Alte Nationalgalerie was completed in 1876 and renovated in 2001. It’s home to works by Rodin, Pissarro, and others you’d expect. Even better, it boasts a sturdy collection of German painters from the past three centuries.
The Alte Nationalgalerie also houses paintings and sculptures of interest to classical music buffs. I snapped a few photos for posterity, which you can see below.
Classical Dark Arts 