For real:
Mr. Manahan’s unavailability, Mr. Steel said, illuminated another matter for him, that “given the size of the company now, it doesn’t make sense for us to have a music director.”
I know people who have played in the City Opera, and I took a class during my Masters under one of their current principals, so I have been hesitant in saying this, but the City Opera is no longer a real opera company any more. This is depressing to think about, because what it looks like from where I am sitting is that this total collapse has occurred more from horrible management rather than the combined bad luck of a dying audience and the impact of a Lesser Depression.
Here’s some tragic-comic commentary from a conductor’s point of view, it seems to me that it’s getting hard to keep crying about the state of the arts in this country, all one can do is laugh.
After seeing both this and its inspiration in the past year, I thought I’d just save all its subsequent knockoffs some trouble and make a more generalized flowchart for song form. So internet, now you can save your time instead of trying to flowchart all of Meatloaf’s I Would Do Anything For Love.
From ESPN:
Even the Mavericks’ eventual victory seemed to me a grim thing hammered out of Teutonic ambition on a dark mountainside. As unsmiling as anything from Wagner, this was the championship Ring Cycle, with Dirk Nowitzki gripped in the irons of Fate, hollow-eyed and mad with fever, hauling Wotan and Brünnhilde and Dwyane Wade up and down the court for eternity.
One of the great Finals series in memory, it made plenty of people happy — but seemed itself to be made entirely of ambitions born from unhappiness.
LeBron James was only a footnote in that larger epic. A cautionary aside. A stage direction. The vampire press will get that wrong, too.
Haha.
For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease.
Ok, ok. He wasn’t talking about Beethoven.
I’ll be in Japan for 2.5 weeks. Even though I haven’t posted in like a month anyways, I wouldn’t expect anything soon. I am trying to write an essay about some current movements in contemporary classical that I believe to be a little craven. More on that later though, for now, enjoy this picture.
From Reflections on Schoenberg:
Everything in art is uncertain and it is this very uncertainty, this very open-endedness, which is the real spur to invention and the creation of order, clarity, and inevitability. The mistake would be to believe, and continue to believe, that a prescriptive approach can remove the uncertainty of composing or that, given the security of preconceived abstract order, invention, clarity and musical inevitability will automatically follow.
Nice. As I am constantly being taught from multiple sources, process and intellectual rigor in music are worthless unless the music means something.
From The Philly Inquirer:
The board of the 111-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra voted Saturday in favor of a Chapter 11 reorganization. The claim was expected to be filed this weekend in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and the orchestra was expected to list assets at several times liabilities – an equation unusual for businesses seeking bankruptcy protection, according to several experts.
The move makes Philadelphia’s the first major U.S. orchestra to file for bankruptcy, say industry groups and veteran observers.
I haven’t done much research into this, but it has been largely my impression that western Classical Music has always been primarily supported by wealthy patrons, The Church, or The State save for brief moments in history. If this is true, we, as a people, need to decide whether we care enough about the art to support it, or whether we as classical musicians are going to find a way to build a new model of industry.
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