In August 2023, the orchestral conductor Rebecca Bryant Novak began a doctor of musical arts degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Bryant Novak, who had spent time working as a conductor after getting her master’s, decided to go back to school to build a strong professional portfolio. She “felt like […]
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Grokipedia Is A Terrible Way To Learn About Music
One week ago, Elon Musk took a break from his busy schedule of defunding pediatric cancer research and paying other people to play video games for him to launch Grokipedia, an LLM-generated and LLM-edited online encyclopedia explicitly designed as a competitor to Wikipedia. Musk’s rationale for launching this tool is based on his perception that […]
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A House of Mud and Hope
The rain poured through the mud-brick walls of her father’s house in Duk County, Nyarweng Community of South Sudan, soaking the earthen floor where Nyibol Thon held her newborn daughter. As water dripped from the thatched roof onto her makeshift bed, she began to sing. “From that pain, I composed a song and named her […]
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“A Call To Action, Disguised As A Symphony”
At the Barbican Centre in early May, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO), the City of London Choir and London Voices premiered a 49-minute piece titled “Lim Cosmic Rhapsody.” Their recording of the piece, which featured pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, had just been released on Decca Classics, and the performance marked the first outing for score, published […]
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The Struggle Bus
The walls of Berlin’s Schiller Theater have seen their fair share of artistic leaders. The theater opened in 1907 and was rebuilt in 1951, after World War II, under Boleslaw Barlog. He stayed well into the 1970s, fashioning the Schiller Theater into one of West Berlin’s leading venues. In 1975, Hans Lietzau took over from […]
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On Track
On the Sunday before Christmas, a friend invited me to church in Llano, Texas. Music poured from a classic Allen electronic organ, the go-to of small congregations everywhere. Unexpectedly tasty registration, flawless playing—how did this tiny town come by such a good organist? But the bench was empty. Invisible hands finished the intro and the […]
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Human Values
Like the rest of the world, the classical music community also spent most of this week reacting to the news of another Trump presidency. All this week, we’ve been fielding responses from musicians in America, asking for their immediate reaction. Here is a selection of them. Seth Parker Woods, cellist “The work truly begins now. […]
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Is Cleveland Institute of Music Still a Good Environment for Students?
On October 1, less than a week after faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) voted in favor of unionizing with the American Federation of Musicians, CIM board chair Susan Rothmann announced in an all-faculty email that CIM’s faculty senate would be replaced by a temporary governing body, effective next month. CIM’s faculty senate […]
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Conductor Carlos Kalmar Sues the Deeply Divided Cleveland Institute of Music
After a Title IX investigation into his conduct became public last year, conductor Carlos Kalmar is suing the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he served as director of orchestral studies before “enter[ing] into a leave of absence” in September, for between $5 and $260 million in damages. The federal suit was filed in the Northern […]
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Inside the Crisis at the Cleveland Institute of Music
On September 13, the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra met at Kulas Hall for its first rehearsal of the academic year. But the orchestra didn’t play. Instead, a group of student musicians, dressed in blue, sat silently without their instruments. Many seats were empty. The dozen or so string players who brought their instruments warmed […]