NewsTrust - Music - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Letter: ‘Classical Music Is Dying’

Mon, 27 May 2013 09:35:19 -0700

New York Times - May. 27 (Opinion) - A former chief executive of the Orchestra Nova San Diego responds to a Critic’s Notebook article.

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Billy Joel on Not Working and Not Giving Up Drinking

Fri, 24 May 2013 11:07:00 -0700

New York Times - By Interview by ANDREW GOLDMAN - May. 24 - Christian Oth for The New York Times Billy Joel in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with his pug, Sabrina. Billy Joel hasn’t put out an album of new songs in decades, but the last few years have brought about a burnishing of his musical legacy. Most recently, he stole

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Decades Later, Beatles Hits Continue to Draw Fans

Fri, 13 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

NewsHour - By Tim Riley - May. 13 (Interview) -

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All We Are Saying: Three Weeks With John Lennon

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Scott Simon, David Sheff - Oct. 09 (Interview) - In August 1980, writer David Sheff flew to New York for a big assignment: an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the magazine Playboy. Every day for three weeks, Sheff, often with his tape recorder running, talked with the couple in their Central Park West apartment, on the street, in coffee shops and in recording studios. The Playboy interview hit the newsstands on Dec. 6. Two days later, Lennon was shot dead on the street in front of his apartment. Sheff's interviews with Lennon and Ono were collected in his book All We Are Saying. The book is being re-released as an e-book. Most of the audio from the conversations has never been broadcast, but Sheff shared several clips with NPR's Scott Simon. He describes his interview with the rock legend as a surreal experience. "I had been trying to get to him for a long time," Sheff says. "And one day, I got a phone call from somebody, and he asked me when I was born and where I was born. Three or four days later, I got a call. Someone said Yoko Ono wanted to meet me in New York." Sheff met with Ono at her New York studio. The next morning, he was having coffee with Lennon, whom Sheff remembers as gracious and thoughtful. They talked of family and philosophy, and of the love of his life.

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Time to say goodbye to the octave at Boston's Bohlen-Pierce musical symposium

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Stephen Pritchard - Mar. 14 - Music?s traditional structure is turned on its head at an event celebrating the Bohlen-Pierce tuning system There are going to be some rather queasy-looking music lovers in Boston tonight. They?ll be entering a surreal world where apparently conventional instruments will play compositions beyond the merely modern. It will be as though they have walked into a room and found all their friends speaking a totally new language. That language has the deeply unsexy title of the Bohlen-Pierce tuning system, which is succinctly described in a fascinating Boston Globe piece by science writer Carolyn Y Johnson. Music?s traditional system, she writes, is based on an interval, the octave, in which the high note is double the frequency of the low note. ...

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Cutting arts funding a bad investment

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Miami Herald - By Lorenzo Lebrija - Sep. 06 (Opinion) - Tough work began this week. When Miami-Dade County commissioners met for the first budget hearing Thursday, they needed to find a way to bridge a budget gap of more than $400 million. It won't be easy, and every expense should be evaluated. Among the cuts proposed by Mayor Carlos Alvarez in his budget is a slashing of $11 million to the arts in Miami-Dade. The argument being that when compared with basic social services, the arts just don't measure up. Of course they don't -- this is akin to comparing a grand piano to a house cat.

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The Taliban and music

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Dawn - By Zubeida Mustafa - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - In her latest book, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong describes music as ‘the limit of reason.’ She finds it inseparable from religious expression when religion is at ‘its best.’ We do not get the best demonstration of this connection in the Taliban brand of Islam. The faith practised by the Sufis, however, shows an intrinsic link between the two.

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Thread of pain ran through Jackson’s career

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Jake Coyle - Jun. 28 (Entertainment) - -- It was the last day of shooting for a Pepsi commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1984, and the only hiccup had been an argument between Michael Jackson and an ad executive over whether the young superstar would take off his sunglasses.

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The voices of resistance still singing

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Amy Goodman - Jan. 02 (Opinion) - As these icons are laid to rest, their voices continue to inspire millions. Barack Obama will soon take the reins of the most powerful nation on Earth, promising change. But it will now take the actions of those millions, heeding these echoes of the past and transforming them into their own voices, to effect real change.

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Classical Music That Dared To Be Different

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Anthony Tommasini - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - JACK QUARTET AT LE POISSON ROUGE Le Poisson Rouge, a new nightclub on Bleecker Street that presents rock, jazz and ethnic and classical music, really is a kind of big, comfy black box. On the site of the old Village Gate, it is the latest addition to a roster of alternative clubs fostering enthusiasm for new music without regard to categories.

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Radiohead Figures Out How To Sell 99-cent Song for $4.95 to 2,250 People

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Portfolio - By Kevin Maney - May. 03 (Opinion) - The contest certainly is another interesting experiment by Radiohead in how to sell music in the Internet Age. The band posted five "stems" of the song on iTunes -- one each for bass, drum, guitar, keyboards and voice. Each cost 99 cents. Buy all five and mix them together using music software like Garageband or Cakewalk, and you hear the actual track as Radiohead intended it. Total cost $4.95. But of course, the appeal is that you can then take those stems, add your own effects, other instruments, voices, whatever, mix them all together, and create an entirely new version of the song.

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Composing for the Pope: A Church Music Primer

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - Apr. 20 (Interview) - With its prestige, wealth and power, the papacy, almost from the beginning, has been a major patron of music. The huge body of unaccompanied sacred melody known as Gregorian chant was, after all, named in honor of Pope (and later saint) Gregory I. He was born around 540 and ruled as pope from 590 until his death in 604. But the golden age of papal musical patronage, says music historian Robert Greenberg, arrived in the 1400s, with the construction of the Sistine Chapel and the creation of the Sistine Chapel Choir. [10 min 44 sec]

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What happens in the brain of an improvising jazz musician?

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

ScienceBlogs.com - By Ed Yong - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - The scans imply that there is a very consistent pattern of brain activity linked to creativity, a pattern of heightened senses and self-expression with a lack of conscious control. And the very similar results from the Scale and Jazz scans suggest that this has nothing to do with the complexity of the music and everything to do with the creativity of the performers. -- Limb and Braun also tantalisingly suggest that a similar prefrontal shut-down could also be linked to other states of altered consciousness including meditation, hypnosis and most intriguingly, dreaming.

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Spinning Into Oblivion

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 06:27:04 -0700

New York Times - By Tony Sachs, Sal Nunziato - Apr. 05 (Opinion) - CDs and downloads could have coexisted peacefully and profitably. The current state of affairs is largely the result of shortsightedness and boneheadedness by the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America, who managed to achieve the opposite of everything they wanted in trying to keep the music business prospering. The association is like a gardener who tried to rid his lawn of weeds and wound up killing the trees instead.

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Riot breaks over Spring

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 08:49:24 -0700

NPR - By Scott Simon, Marin Alsop - Mar. 24 (Interview) - The alien harmonies and jagged rhythms of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring signalled the birth of modern music in 1913. Conductor Marin Alsop says the rambunctious score still sounds fresh today.

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The Courage of Others' Convictions

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:57:53 -0800

New York Times - Feb. 13 (Editorial) - The music industry awarded an armload of Grammys to the Dixie Chicks on Sunday night, in what was celebrated as a blow for freedom of speech as much as tunefulness. The endorsement was about three years too late. The awards -- including for the trio's fittingly titled album "Taking the Long Way" and the song "Not Ready to Make Nice" -- ended a desolate period in which their music was boycotted and banned by country music stations, their CDs were burned and smashed, and group members' lives were threatened.

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Why whine when you can wail?

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 10:02:22 -0800

NPR - By Linda Wertheimer - Jan. 06 (Entertainment) - A movement launched in Finland is catching on elsewhere: choirs setting people's complaints to music. Complaint choirs have also formed in Germany, England and Russia. More are in the works.

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