Category: News Briefs

Schiedmayer, a German manufacturer of musical instruments, will celebrate its 200th year in business in Stuttgart with a special celebration at Stuttgart’s Hochschule für Musik on June 28. The company—which describes itself as the only maker of the celesta, the musical instrument invented in Paris by Victor Mustel—was established in 1809 in Stuttgart by Johann Lorenz Schiedmayer, grandson of Balthasar Schiedmayer, who built his first clavichord in 1735 in Erlangen, Germany. The celebration will feature performances of winning works chosen by this year’s Schiedmayer composition contest for works written for celesta. This year’s winning composers—who among them received a total sum of 10,000 euros—are Maximilian Gruth (for his Hypnosis for Celesta and Piano), Martin Kapeller (Hommàge à Schreker for Celesta-Harp-Harmonium and Violin), Shingo Matsuura (Time of Dewdrops for Celesta Solo), and Valery Volonov (7 Haikus for Celesta Solo). The celebration will also feature performances on historical Schiedmayer instruments played by Preethi de Silva and Thomas Wellen. In addition to celestas, the company manufactures keyboard-glockenspiels and a glockenspiel for pipe organs.

Posted June 2, 2009 

“Make Music New York”—a one-day festival set for June 21, the first day of summer—has announced plans for free musical events to take place throughout the city in a variety of musical genres from punk and jazz to hip-hop and opera, from 11 a.m. to 12 midnight. This is the third year for the festival. Institutions hosting or presenting concerts this year include the Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Hall, Central Park SummerStage, Jazz Gallery, Jazzmobile, Queens Museum of Art, Symphony Space, and the Times Square Alliance. New this year is Mass Appeal, which brings together hundreds of musicians to play pieces for single types of instruments: accordions, acoustic guitars, bagpipes, cellos, circuit benders, clarinets, flutes, French horns, glockenspiels, harmonicas, megaphones, pianos, samba drummers, saxophones, trombones, ukuleles, veenas, violins, and waterphones. Mass Appeal will meet for an evening jam session at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, led by David Amram; musicians will improvise a call-and-response based on a “musical handshake” written by singer/harpist Elissa Weiss. Mass Appeal will also include a performance of Henry Brant’s Orbits, which involves 80 trombones, organ, and sopranino performing on the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum, conducted by Neely Bruce. At Fort Green Park in Brooklyn, American Opera Projects will present “The Voice of Brooklyn” with composers Michael Rose, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Jennifer Griffith, with opera companies Rhymes With Opera and Opera On Tap.

Posted June 2, 2009 

In the Friday (5/29) edition of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program, Elizabeth Blair profiles the DC Youth Orchestra in Washington, D.C. “There are hundreds of youth orchestras around the U.S., but this one has found a way to be affordable, competitive and diverse—in every sense of the word.” Executive Director Ava Spece is interviewed about the program, “for which nearly 600 students gather every Saturday to take classes and practice with one of 12 different performing ensembles.” The segment explains that 85 percent of DCYO’s members, aged 4 to 19, come from minority groups, and that musicians from more affluent suburbs play alongside those receiving financial aid. “Most of the kids are from D.C., and for them, tuition comes to about $15 a week—for up to about seven hours of instruction. The DC Youth Orchestra attracts kids who want to be pushed. … Among the DCYO’s alums is Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboist for the Grammy-winning quintet Imani Winds. ‘It was the first place where I was around my peers who really also wanted to be classical musicians,’ Spellman-Diaz says.”

Posted June 1, 2009

Photo courtesy of DC Youth Orchestra

In Sunday’s (5/31) New York Times, Dan Wakin reports from Ramallah about the “rising tide of interest in Western classical music in the last several years here in the Palestinian territories, but especially the West Bank. … A small effort to teach violin at a refugee camp in Jenin, north of Ramallah, was banned in March when camp authorities heard that the students had played for Holocaust survivors in Israel, saying the concert ‘served enemy interests.’ … In another incident, a music school in Jenin was heavily damaged by arson.” Wakin notes that “Across the border in Israel, which has a mother lode of classical music talent, there is little awareness that Palestinians are pursuing the same artistic tradition … ‘We cannot perceive them as people who have their own cultural lives,’ said Noam Ben-Zaev, a music critic for the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz.” Wakin spotlights sixteen-year-old Dalia Moukarker, a flute student sponsored by the Barenboim-Said Foundation, and cites positive developments in the area. These include Sounding Jerusalem, an annual chamber music festival taking place for the fourth time this spring, and efforts by Palestinian authorities to reopen a music school in Gaza that was damaged in the 22-day war with Israel early this year.

Posted June 1, 2009

In Sunday’s (5/31) The Washington Post, Anne Midgette interviews conductor JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Virginia Symphony. Falletta recently led the National Symphony Orchestra’s Kennedy Center Spring Gala celebrating women in the arts. To Midgette’s question of whether the issue of being a woman conductor is still timely, Falletta says, “It hasn’t gone away. People are still asking those questions. You’d think by now they would be so used to a woman conducting they wouldn’t talk about it. People are less skeptical than they were 15 years ago. In the last five years things have changed. [I see] many young women conducting, [but] not all in visible positions.” Falletta praises the League of American Orchestras’ initiative supporting women conductors, explaining, “Being a conductor is a very lonely thing. We rarely have a chance to talk to any of our colleagues face to face. There’s something very good about being able to call someone, ask questions they’ve been wondering about.” Falletta also discusses programming of contemporary music by women: “If I had been asked 15 years ago where we would be now, I think I would have said far ahead of where we are.”

Posted June 1, 2009 

In the Sunday (5/31) New York Times, Robin Pogrebin outlines details of the Cultural Data Project, a program offered by the Pennsylvania-based Pew Charitable Trusts. “On Monday the Pew Charitable Trusts is to bring a program to New York that provides cultural organizations with full-time on-call free technical assistance. The program, the Cultural Data Project, has been operating in Pennsylvania since 2004 and moved into other states, including Illinois, last month. It is intended to help arts groups professionally present themselves to supporters, to help their staffs and boards make informed decisions and to allow for peer comparison. The groups annually enter their management, programming and financial information, creating a statewide database; organizations also get access to accounting experts and technical assistance, analytical tools and reports. The project is also intended to help streamline grant applications. Pew was advised by a coalition of underwriters and arts advocacy groups, including New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and Time Warner.” The Cultural Data Project was profiled in the January-February issue of Symphony magazine and can be viewed here.

Posted June 1, 2009 

In an Associated Press article posted from Vienna, George Jahn writes about the relative paucity of events marking the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death, on May 31, 1809: “Mostly Mozart. Hardly Haydn. Joseph Haydn died 200 years ago Sunday, and Austria has been officially marking the occasion with hundreds of concerts, exhibitions and other events dedicated to the music and memory of one of the country’s greatest sons. There is no doubt that Haydn was a giant. … But Haydn has it hard in a country that also gave birth to Amadeus. … ‘Everything is Mozart here,’ said Ibrahim Erneten, who peddles concert tickets to tourists thronging the Austrian capital’s upscale Graben pedestrian zone abutting the opera house. ‘The tourists don’t know about Haydn.’… And—despite his relative obscurity now compared at least to Mozart—he was BIG in his time. Mozart died impoverished and with his musical legacy unsecured. Haydn, in contrast, dined at the table of Esterhazy—one of Europe’s most powerful princes—and members of the British royal family bowed to him during his London sojourns.”

Posted June 1, 2009

“Musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra Association jointly announced yesterday (5/28) an agreement on a 4.8 percent pay cut to help the famous organization through these tough economic times,” writes Christine Olley in today’s (5/29) Philadelphia Daily News.” The modification to the musicians’ contract, which will be effective from September 1, 2009, to August 31, 2010, was agreed to by Musicians Union Local 77, with Joseph Parente, president. The 107 members of the orchestra ratified the modifications yesterday. The article explains, “The total package will result in savings of over $4 million to August 2011. The deal also includes agreements waiving compensation for overtime and extra concerts or rehearsals, the pension-funding obligations will be reduced and payments for appearances, recordings and television broadcasts will be eliminated. … ‘It was remarkable,’ said Frank P. Slattery, orchestra executive director, who was part of the effort to ask the musicians for the money-saving move. Slattery added that orchestras in other cities are facing the same difficulties… ‘I don’t know of any group of musicians that have helped their organization as much as Philadelphia,’ Slattery said. ‘It was extraordinary.’”

Posted May 29, 2009

In a two-part piece exploring the notion of “the amateur” in classical music, posted Tuesday and Wednesday (5/26-27) on her Washington Post blog, Post classical-music critic Anne Midgette writes, “I’ve always been interested in the role so-called amateurs have played in classical music. There was nothing condescending in the idea of an ‘amateur’ in late 18th-century Vienna. Amateurs were simply people who loved music. … I think most of us who love music are sorry that the general experience of it has evolved (or devolved) from active to passive. Where once the audience bought piano arrangements and played chamber music at home, fans now are simply listeners, whether in the concert hall or at home on CD.” In part two she writes, “So where does my support of amateurism—in the sense of loving music—leave me as a critic, whose job appears to be less about loving music than tearing it down? Or, more simply: what does it mean for a critic to love music? This is something that is often misunderstood about my job. Loving music, to a critic, cannot simply mean bestowing praise. … I’m not saying that critics should set out not to like music; indeed, I am always rooting for the performer and the show when I sit down. … I think simply being nice about performances represents amateurism in the worst, pejorative sense. A professional critic manifests amateurism in the sense I’d like it to have—a deep love of music—through engagement.”

Posted May 29, 2009

In Friday’s (5/59) Montréal Gazette (Canada), Arthur Kaptainis writes, “The long-awaited Montreal Symphony Orchestra concert hall took on a new hue of reality Thursday as Premier Jean Charest and other dignitaries unveiled drawings of the sleek window-clad structure.” Charest said that the new hall “confirms the value of music to our culture,” and MSO Music Director Kent Nagano stated that it “will function as a lighthouse and beacon, and shine out to the rest of the world.” The article continues: “Both the facade of the hall on the plaza of Place des Arts and much of the long wall along St. Urbain St. … are composed of rectangular see-through glass panels. While the interior of the hall will be isolated visually and acoustically, the lobby areas, especially when illuminated at night, will be visible from the outside. ‘Transparency is immensely helpful in getting the public interested,’ [architect Jack] Diamond said. … Michel Languedoc, from Aedifica, a Montreal architectural firm also involved in the design, stressed the ‘democratic’ spirit of the glass shell and the need to combat the supposed elitist image of symphonic music.” The building is slated to open in 2011.

Posted May 29, 2009