Sensational festival music, from your cellphone

"THE roar of the crowd! The thumping bass! The... tinny vocals? Open-air music festivals aren't exactly renowned for their balanced sound quality, but that could soon change, thanks to an audio-enhancing app for cellphones."

For the full story, please see New Scientist.

Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note

"Humanity’s musical treasures — Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like — come to life in performance. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

Vienna Philharmonic must answer for exclusion

"The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which arrives in Berkeley this week for a three-concert series that marks its first Bay Area visit in more than 20 years, is by common agreement one of the finest orchestras in the world. It's composed of some of the leading instrumentalists of Europe, their individual musical voices fused into a seamless communal sound that is steeped in a century and a half of tradition."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/18/PKRN1HLNV2.DTL#ixzz1EhxnUC5T

Faculty to consider setting up library donation fund

"Recent budget cuts have reduced the number of journals, research papers, essays and publications available, dropping the University of Washington’s libraries out of the top 15 percent of the Association of Research Libraries’ rankings for the first time since 1932 last year."

For the full story, please see The Daily.

Yo-Yo Ma Receives Medal of Freedom

"Yo-Yo Ma, cellist extraordinaire and Musical America’s 2009 Musician of the Year, was awarded the Medal of Freedom earlier this week."

For the full story, please see Musical America.

Is Anna Nicole Smith worthy of an opera?

"Put your ear up to the magnificent walls of the Royal Opera House and you might expect to hear the strains of Verdi or Wagner.

But in the past few weeks, if you listened closely, there was an entirely different chorus drifting from the doors: the scritch-scritch of lawyers’ red pens and the grunting of classically trained singers learning to pole dance. Strain even harder and you might have heard the distinctive stylings of former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones."

For the full story, please see The Globe.

Paolo and Thomas' Sessions at Cornish

Pacific Northwest Viols presents a masterclass with viola da gamba virtuoso Paolo Pandolfo at Cornish College of the Arts on Monday, March 7 at 6 pm. Three talented players from Seattle and Vancouver will play for Paolo. Auditors: All Students (including UW) and Cornish faculty free, community attendees $15 at the door.
For more information,visit http://www.cornish.edu/music_series_10/event/master_class_with_paolo_pandolfo/

Early Music Guild with Cornish College present a seminar/masterclass by master lutenist and theorbo player Thomas Boysen at Cornish College at noon on March 7. Free and open to the public. For more information, visit
http://www.cornish.edu/music_series_10/event/thomas_boysen/

8-Track Tapes Belong In A Museum

"Today — when you can literally take your music anywhere — it's hard to imagine a time when that wasn't possible. So, if you're old enough, cast your mind back 40 years or so. Remember 8-track tapes? In the 1960s and early '70s, they were the way that millions of Americans took their music with them. Now, a museum devoted to the obsolete format is open in Dallas, Texas."

For the full story, please see NPR.org.

3-D Comes to Met Opera, but Without Those Undignified Glasses

"Purveyors of entertainment, in the ever-urgent quest to grab audiences’ attention, have used 3-D imagery in movies and, more recently, television. Now it is coming to live theater."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

Master of Queen's Music Protests Muzak

"Kudos to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, who is an active member of Pipedown, a campaign in the U.K. to eliminate, or at least turn down, Muzak in public spaces."

For the full story, please see Musical America.

Musical stash waiting to be found finally uncovered at Fort Lewis

"Construction crews discovered a treasure trove of military music recordings while renovating a fitness center at Madigan Army Hospital this week."

For the full story, please see King 5.

UW piano prof to perform a bundle of Brahms

"For almost two decades, Craig Sheppard has been professor of piano at the University of Washington School of Music. One fine benefit of his presence here is that you get to hear some dynamite keyboard concerts for a bargain."

For the full story, please see the Seattle Times.

Music Treasures Consortium

The Music Treasures Consortium proudly announces a new Web site giving access to some of the world’s most valued music manuscript and print materials, available at

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/treasures/treasures-home.html.

The site is the creation of several renowned music libraries and archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. The consortium members include the British Library, the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University, the Juilliard School Lila Acheson Wallace Library, the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the New York Public Library. The site is hosted by the Library of Congress on its Performing Arts Encyclopedia (www.loc.gov/performingarts ). The aim of the site is to further music scholarship and research by providing access in one place to digital images of primary sources for performance and study of music.



The items digitized include manuscript scores and first and early editions of a work. Seminal composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Georges Bizet, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, among others, are represented on the site through their original handwritten manuscripts and first editions. The online items range from the 16th century to the 20th century in this initial launch. Researchers can search or browse materials, access bibliographic information about each item, and view digital images of the treasure via each custodial archive’s Web site. The site will continue to grow as consortium members add more items.

Juan Pampin’s meditations ‘On Space’ part of Les Percussions de Strasbourg concert

"The audience will be literally surrounded when Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Europe’s leading percussion ensemble, performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 19, in Meany Theater. And it isn’t just sound that will surround them. The audience will be seated on stage, with the six performers arrayed around them."

For the full story, please see http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/juan-pampin2019s-mediations-2018on-space2019-part-of-les-percussions-de-strasbourg-concert.

Mahler Said What to Whom?

"AT the height of the civil rights movement, two black musicians, a double bassist and a cellist, accused the New York Philharmonic of racial discrimination. It was July 1969, and soon the case, which had been brought before the New York City Commission on Human Rights, was making headlines. The National Urban League called on the orchestra to put affirmative action in place."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

What Can You Find in the New York Philharmonic’s Archives?

"The New York Philharmonic’s digital archive, which went live on Thursday, contains a wealth of documents from 1943 to 1970, some of which are featured in this article. The information is vast, so we invite readers inclined to do some digging to share their discoveries here."

For the full story, please see the New York Times.

In with the old, out with the new

"Reed Juenger makes up half of the electronic music duo Beat Connection, which has gained notoriety across the Internet, eventually leading to a record deal. Invested in music and multimedia art, Juenger became a Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) major."

For the full story, please see The UW Daily.

Cairo Opera House Shuttered

"The Cairo Opera House, est. 1988, is among the places that have been shut down by government decree. Home base to the Cairo Symphony, the Cairo Opera Ballet and the Cairo Opera, it has been closed since Saturday, according to a WQXR report."

For the full story, please see Musical America.

EMI Taken Over by Citigroup

"Citigroup Inc. has taken over debt-strapped EMI Group Ltd., closing a disastrous purchase of the music label by Guy Hands, founder of British private equity firm Terra Firma."

For the full story, please see Musical America.

A battle-driven tune

"The UW Wind Ensemble played a familiar tune at their concert yesterday, but it wasn’t one most people expected to leave the screen.

Set to the theme song from “Halo,” accompanied by clips of scenes from the video game, the ensemble put on a performance to provide a sneak preview of some of its work as well as to show the performance level of a college band."

For the full story, please see the UW Daily.