Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the streets.  Or, making playlists.   Or something.   Some friends who just got themselves a screened-in porch for their  house up in Willow asked me to come up with an iPod playlist for sitting around at dusk smoking cigars and sipping brandy.  Mostly pop-stuff  but offbeat.   I decided to go  all-female..well, okay, there is one boy-girl duet…because I like girl singers.  But, I digress, I had so much fun putting the list together that I thought we ought to have a little playlist contest here.  Any genre is

If you read S21 regularly (and why wouldn’t you) you probably know that my all-time favorite composer Leoš Janáček had one of the greatest third acts in the history of musical composition.  Most of  his extraordinary late-life production was inspired by a certain sly and aloof–but nonetheless foxy–married lady half his age named Kamila Stösslová.  One of the works that she inspired is the opera The Cunning Little Vixen which, as fate would have it, the New York Philharmonic is doing a fully-staged production of on June 22-25.   The Vixen is being sung by the stunning and incredibly talented Isabel

David Robertson will lead the New York Philharmonic in Shostakovich‘s Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff‘s The Isle of the Dead, and Schoenberg‘s Erwartung, with the commodious soprano  Deborah Voigt as soloist, on Thursday, June 9, 2011, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, June 10, at 8:00  p.m., and Saturday, June 11, at 8:00 p.m.  You can win a pair of tickets for the June 10 performance;  Just name all the one singer, one act operas you can think of.  The person, or maybe persons, with the most wins the tickets.  You are on the honor system not to Google.

As a boy, Joe Polisi dreamed of being a major league baseball player.  Alas, not everyone grows up to be Derek Jeter so Joe “settled” for becoming Dr. Joseph William Polisi, president of The Juilliard School since September 1984, bringing to that position his previous experience as a college administrator, a writer in the fields of music, public policy and the arts, and an accomplished bassoonist.  And, Wednesday, he made it into the Hall of Fame–not the one in Cooperstown, but the The American Classical Music Hall of Fame, a national institution, based in Cincinnati, the biggest little town in America

Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue. The second of these chats is today (Thursday) at noon with composer Steven Stucky, whose evening-long concert drama August 4, 1964 will be performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on May 11 as

Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue. The first of these chats is today (Monday) at noon with composer Melinda Wagner.  This is Melinda’s conversation starter: “Composers do not work in a vacuum. Every kind of music we hear, old or new, ‘serious’, ‘popular’, colloquial

There’s something happening here.  What it is has become a bit clearer (to me, at least) with the simultaneous arrival on my desk of new CDs by Todd Reynolds, the Kronos Quartet, the Now Ensemble and Build. Listened to back to back, ther family kinship is easily recognized. They have lots of cousins out there in the marketplace already and each month brings new examples.  So, what’s happening here?  Is it a new…sound? Impulse? Musical category? Dare we call it a “movement?” But, wait, let’s back up for a moment.  There hasn’t been a major new music movement since minimalism