Classical Music

My husband loves to listen to TED talks while he’s puttering in the kitchen, and he recently sent me a link to Ben Zander’s TED talk from 2008, about the transformative power of classical music. (Ben Zander has been the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic since 1979, and is a noted public speaker on leadership […]

File this one under the category of “fascinating music school history.” According to Vincent Lenti’s 2004 book, “For the Enrichment of Community Life: George Eastman and the Founding of the Eastman School of Music,” the famed Finnish composer Jean Sibelius very nearly became a faculty member of the Eastman School to teach music theory and […]

Joseph (Joey) Silverstein passed away suddenly yesterday of an apparent heart attack at the age of 83. A student of Efrem Zimbalist, William Primrose, Josef Gingold and Mischa Mischakof, Mr Silverstein was a former prize winner at the Queen Elisabeth and Walter W Naumburg International Violin Competitions. He served as Concertmaster of the Boston Symphony for […]

John Williams is one of the most important and influential composers writing new music for orchestras today. In fact, the most exciting and anticipated new music for orchestra this year is John Williams’ new score to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Yet, despite his incontestably successful forty-year career writing new music for orchestra and his […]

Over the last few decades, many American schools of music have embraced the repertoire and missions of new music ensembles. Boundaries are broken, venues explored, students challenged, and new sounds ring out. What a change from the 1980s, when musicologist Susan McClary argued that “both popular and postmodern musics are marked as the enemy, and […]

Whatever airline horror story you have about lost or mishandled luggage, I’m pretty sure Robert Black can top it. Robert, as many of you around here know, is a brilliant, nationally recognized double bass player and teacher. He is perhaps best known for being a founding member of the avant-garde music ensemble, the Bang on a […]

Facebook brought me the news this morning that George Cleve died yesterday. I knew he’d had health issues for a long time, but this hit me like a brick anyway. I first worked for George in 1974 upon my return from studying at a rather strange school in Switzerland known as the Institute for Advanced […]

Monday morning at 9 AM, three members of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra sat before microphones and tried to explain to their community why the HSO is in such trouble. I was one of those three. And none of us were truly able to explain why we are where we are. The radio program was courtesy of […]

As a touring percussion quartet, devoting an entire concert to new works for our group sometimes seems like a luxury. The logistical pressures of unfamiliar venue layouts, small stage sizes, and traveling with instruments, combined with the musical demands of presenters and unfamiliar audiences, means that we often stick with what we know while we […]

This past Sunday, the Boston Globe ran a front-page article about their new Music Director, Lativian conductor Andris Nelsons, whose contract has recently been extended through 2022. Globe critic Jeremy Eichler is obviously entranced by Nelsons’ body language; the online article includes a gallery of photographs of “Nelsons in Motion.” Watching him at an afternoon […]