One chapter in Virgil Thomson’s 1939 book, The State of Music, is titled “How Composers Eat, or Who Does What to Whom and Who Gets Paid.” Thomson identified the subsequent means both clearly and derisively: “A surprisingly large number of composers are men of private fortune… the number of those who have married their money […]
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Holistic Improvisation
I work in the niche realm of historical performance, but videos from the 2020 Bovicelli Competition are the nichest thing I have seen in a long time. This year’s competition, officially titled the “International Singers’ Competition on the Diminution Practices of the 16th and 17th Centuries,” was hosted by the Schloss Weißenbrunn Foundation in Germany […]
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Facemasks, Plastic Shields, Infrared Thermometers
Asia is the future of classical music, goes the tired cliché repeated by such luminaries as Simon Rattle. As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes in places like Taiwan and the Republic of Korea, however, that banality becomes quite literally true. East Asian orchestras, supported by competent governments and resilient public healthy systems, are beginning to play […]
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Leigh Mesh is associate principal bass at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. His wife Nancy Wu is associate concertmaster. They’ve been playing in the orchestra for a combined 58 years, and have both been making do without their regular incomes since March 31. On June 1, in the New York Times, the Met announced its earliest […]
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Live, From New York
As I write this the first weekend in May, the rate of new COVID-19 cases here in New York City, where some 20 percent of the population has caught the virus, has remained level for a week. Far from the recent peaks of infection and death, the numbers are nowhere near what’s needed to return […]
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Can Met Musicians Survive The Furlough?
On March 19, as the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly in New York City, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it was suspending paychecks indefinitely for its orchestra, chorus, and stagehands, effective March 31. One month later, the members of its renowned orchestra are staring into the financial abyss. Just two days after the furlough was announced, […]
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The Perpetual Investigation
Six months ago, we reported on years of sexual harassment allegations at the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music against composition professor Dan Welcher. The allegations spanned a period of almost 20 years. They ranged from sexual comments to non-consensual touching, from intimate questions about students’ sexual lives to an unwanted kiss […]
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Electronic Intimacy
On 8 p.m. Thursday, March 12, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and musicians—mezzo-soprano Kady Evanshyn, violinist Rebecca Fischer, oboist Alecia Lawyer, and the ensemble Baroklyn—were to take the stage at Miller Theatre and play music by J.S. Bach: “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” for piano solo; the Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor, BWV 1060; […]
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Sounds From Nowhere
On September 15, 2001, the flutist Klaus Holsten was in the German village of Klein Jasedow, a short drive from the coast of the Baltic Sea, when a truck accidentally unloaded the herbicide Brasan onto 5,000 lemon balm plants. The organic herbs were growing in a garden belonging to Holsten; his wife Beata Seemann, a […]
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The Rehearsing Musician
There is an army behind every production of, say, “La Traviata”: armorers and fight directors for the action; lighting technicians giving Violetta’s last breaths a ghostly frisson; wig-makers and costumiers who make the Paris demimonde glitter. An even less visible figure, whose contribution and responsibility is huge, though you will seldom see them at the […]