| Posted: 22-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | |  |
| | Choir is pop music's next frontier | | | Source: La Stampa |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists |  | | | |
| | The mystique - no, the mystery - of Serge Gainsbourg | | Both his voice and his looks ("like a drowsy turtle") were unprepossessing; he played piano and guitar, though not very well; he could be difficult and boorish and he drank way too much. Yet Serge Gainsbourg became one of France's biggest stars - and biggest Lotharios. | | Source: The Independent |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Hey ladies: being a woman musician today | | Hundreds of women working as musicians today were interviewed to tell what it's like right now: the good, the bad and the same as it ever was. | | Source: NPR |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | China's pop queen Faye Wong plans comeback | | The almost effortlessly cool Faye Wong has sold millions of albums and won fans across Asia, with songs ranging from the heart-rending early hit "Easily Hurt Woman" to the ersatz, Buddhist-inspired trip-hop of her 2000 album "Fable." The entertainment pages of Chinese internet portals were dominated last week by pictures of Wong at a brief Beijing news conference to announce her return, many simply carrying the headline "The Diva Is Back." | | Source: Reuters |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Expanding the boundaries of a West African instrument | | There were no Western instruments onstage when the Malian griot Bassekou Kouyate and his band performed at SummerStage in Central Park (NY). | | Source: The New York Times |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | |  | | |
| | Composer of sounds for electric cars? | | | Source: Cyberpresse |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | 'Nuits d'Afrique' keeps on making mistakes | | | Source: Cyberpresse |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Orchestrated plea for peace, lest we forget the price of war | | The War Requiem was Benjamin Britten's pacifist tribute to those killed in war, particularly the two 20th-century wars that decimated Europe. Juxtaposing the Latin text of the traditional Requiem Mass with the poetry of World War I poet Wilfred Owen, it neither glorifies nor condemns those who took part in hostilities, nor does it seek salvation through religion. | | Source: The Australian |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Russian rap inspires a movement | | Resistance movements often have a soundtrack. In the Soviet Union during the last decades of communist rule, dissidents listened to the Beatles and admired guitar-strumming bards like Vladimir Vysotsky, whose bitter lyrics contrasted sharply with the cheeriness of official propaganda. Nowadays, dissenters in Vladimir Putin's Russia have found a new source of musical inspiration: a homegrown version of Tupac Shakur and Public Enemy. | | Source: The Wall Street Journal |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Way out West | | Formed in 2001 to celebrate the cultural diversity of Melbourne's western suburbs, the sextet incorporates Vietnamese instruments and West African rhythms into a contemporary jazz setting. | | Source: The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | South African music festival lineup strikes a note of discord | | Organising a music festival is an act of curation, conscious or not. Ideally, acts are selected to represent the best of a genre, however defined. They are combined to complement one another. Overall structure provides context and allows listeners some active choices. Just as pathways, display cases and explanatory texts help us to better understand and appreciate museum exhibits, so should the frames of sequencing or staging help us do the same for festival music. | | Source: Mail & Guardian online |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Yet another attempt to honour musicians in Zimbabwe | | The issue of music awards has proved to be a complicated puzzle in Zimbabwe over the years. First it was the Tatenda Siyabonga Music Awards (Tsama) then Zimbabwe Music Awards (Zima) but consistency seemed to elude both efforts to honour outstanding musicians. There were also one-off Gramma Awards and the proposed People's Choice Music Awards that suffered a stillbirth… Now there is a new player on the field in the form of Progressive Music Awards (Proma) | | Source: The Standard |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Festival of 1000 stars in Ethopia | | In the Ethiopian City of Arba Minch, the capital of the southern province of Gamo-Gofa, a unique music festival is held annually. In the course of three days, the audience can feast their eyes and ears on a wide variety of cultures and styles. Dozens of peoples from the region present their dances and, especially, their music. | | Source: Africa News |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | That was me - the musical life of Anthony Burgess | | The author of A Clockwork Orange may have been better known as a novelist, but Anthony Burgess was also a prolific composer whose music is only now being explored. Paul Phillips discusses the work of an artist who wrote novels in sonata form. | | Source: Journal of Music |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Iraqi traditional music revisited in a war era | | As Iraq makes daily news coverage for the rapidly progressing political events many are concerned about the preservation of traditional Iraqi arts. Among them is the uniquely Iraqi music genre called Maqam Baghdadi, a style of singing distinguished from the rest of the Arab World in the performance, composition, and instrumentation. | | Source: Al Jadid |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the artform and artists | | | | |
| | Julien Weiss discusses traditional and contemporary Arab music | | In 1976, a 23-year-oldFrench classical guitarist listened to a record of classical Arab music, fell in love with it, and dedicated the rest of his life to studying this art. Born and raised in Paris, Julien Weiss, of Swiss and Alsatian heritage, has become one of the few accomplished qanun players in the world, having studied with masters from throughout the Arab world.
| | Source: Al Jadid |
| Posted: 22-07-2010 | Music the industry | | | | |
| | Music industry dilemma: evolution or revolution? | | | Source: La Stampa |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music the industry | | | | |
| | French nuns seek chart run after record deal | | Benedictine nuns from a secluded convent in southern France have had their prayers answered after beating 70 other religious orders to a deal with Universal Music with the hope of creating a chart-topping album. | | Source: Reuters |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the industry | | | | |
| | Total discord in the music industry in Kenya | | After a month-long training programme in the UK and Switzerland, music producer George “Jojo” Ouma Onyango of Jojo Productions is back with both good and bad news for players in the music industry in Kenya. | | Source: Daily Nation |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the industry | | | | |
| | If music be the food of love, rock on! | | The impact of music in influencing the consumer. When it comes to the music one should use in advertising, one has to be a little more objective. If you want your radio spot or your TV commercial to be given more musical impact, you must learn to put aside your personal preferences and consider what will work best with your target audience. Unfortunately many marketers do not understand their target audience well enough to be able to form a clear opinion on this. | | Source: Botswana Gazette |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music the industry | | | | |
| | Meagre royalties -- musicians fear victimisation in Zimbabwe | | Most local musicians could be living in fear of the unknown following revelations that they have refused to present their complaints against record labels in writing to the Competition and Tariffs Commission.
Musicians have always complained that they are getting raw deals at their record stables prompting the commission to open a probe into the operations of Gramma Records and its sister companies, Ngaavongwe Records and Zimbabwe Music Corporation early this year. | | Source: The Standard |
| Posted: 26-07-2010 | Policy, Research and Politics | | |  | |
| | Snip on musical tradition | | | Source: El Pais |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Policy, Research and Politics | | | | |
| | The Elvis of cultural theory | | In the midst of a crisis of capitalism, the Western underground is rediscovering communism. Its star is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who mixes Marxism with pop culture and psychoanalysis. His appearances offer stand-up comedy for a radical leftist avant-garde. There are Zizek T-shirts and Zizek records, and there is a Zizek club and an international Zizek journal. One could say that he's reinvented the profession. Some would say he's defiled the profession. | | Source: Der Spiegel International |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Policy, Research and Politics | | | | |
| | Are musicians losing the incentive to create? | | The last decade’s drop in music sales is correlated to a drop in the number of professional musicians in the U.S., according to some number crunching by the RIAA, possibly meaning that musicians are motivated by expected earnings from recorded music. | | Source: Billboard |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Policy, Research and Politics | | | | |
| | Points of culture: what Brazil can teach Britain about art | | Twenty years ago, it seemed as if Brazil couldn't stop dreaming about its future. Now the future has arrived; Brazil is an economic and political world leader with a seat at the globe's most influential table. In 2003, the Brazilian government created an initiative called Points of Culture: thousands of community and arts projects of all sizes and types that would work to strengthen people's involvement in the life of their neighbourhoods and the larger society. | | Source: The Guardian |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Policy, Research and Politics | | | | |
| | European cost-cutters target culture | | The financial crisis and the need to escape crippling levels of public debt has prompted severe cutbacks in the arts throughout Europe.Cost-cutting politicians see culture as a soft target: somehow an unemployed singer does not have the same electoral impact as an unemployed car worker. As a result the knife is slicing to the very quick of European identity. | | Source: The Australian |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Policy, Research and Politics | | | | |
| | The Fatwa endorsing music | | Saudi Sheikh Adel al-Kalbani, who is well-known for his Quranic recitation, provoked a storm of controversy in Saudi Arabia recently, after he stated that he was convinced by the juristic argument that singing accompanied by musical instruments was not prohibited in Islam, and that it would only be prohibited if this music was obscene or immoral. | | Source: Al Arabiya news channel |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music education | | | | |
| | What the USA can really gain from El Sistema | | I have never seen Symphony Hall erupt the way it did that night in 2007, with Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra onstage. It was not the precision and polish of the group’s Bartok or Beethoven that set off the crowd, but the sheer expressive potency and exuberant physicality of the performance. My guess is that the music meant more to those in the audience that night because, at its core, it meant more to these players, some of whom had risen up beyond violent streets and poverty. | | Source: Boston Globe |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music education | | | | |
| | Counterpoint : the chief classical music critic of The New York Times explains an important musical technique | | There is a whole language of technical jargon to describe music. Though these words and concepts are very handy to musicians, they tend to mystify non-musicians. Even people who go to concerts all the time, upon being confronted with terms like chromatic harmony, passacaglia and sonata form may have no real idea what they mean. | | Source: The New York Times |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Music education | | | | |
| | Jazz and classical meet to learn and improvise | | Improvisation, a fundamental quality of jazz, is by nature a risky business. The act usually involves a confrontation between two perspectives — that of a composer and that of a performer or performers — with the goal of achieving a combination informed and enriched by both perspectives. | | Source: The New York Times |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music education | | | | |
| | Orchestrating racial harmony in the French banlieues | | Taught to play instruments in just six months, children from the banlieues are set for a prestigious Paris debut. | | Source: The Independent |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Music education | | | | |
| | Thousands of musicians head to China for world music conference | | Over 7,000 music education professionals and performing groups from over 90 countries will gather in Beijing next month for the upcoming International Society of Music Education (ISME) World Conference 2010. | | Source: Global Times |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Technologies and media | | | | |
| | Introducing FanRank: The world's first automated fan list segmentation engine | | The FanRank algorithm automatically tracks all the interactions your fans have with your communications, using the FanBridge Fan Relationship Management platform, and then automatically places fans on your list into one of three Fan Segments (Super Fans, Casual Fans, At-Risk Fans) based on these interactions. | | Source: ASCAP |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | Technologies and media | | | | |
| | Rapidshare in German court victory | | Online locker service Rapidshare will not have to use a word filter to combat file-sharing, a German court has ruled. | | Source: Billboard |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Technologies and media | | | | |
| | Skype rehearsals and new works: Maestro cues Symphony to evolve | | Known for his commitment to music education, Michael Tilson Thomas has expanded the symphony's educational program to include new initiatives like the multimedia project "Keeping Score," which tries to make classical music more accessible by providing the back stories behind the music and the musicians performing it. | | Source: The Wall Street Journal |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | Technologies and media | | | | |
| | Arcade Fire enlists Terry Gilliam to direct concert webcast | | Terry Gilliam will direct the live webcast of Arcade Fire's concert at New York City's Madison Square Garden. The Arcade Fire show kicks off "Unstaged," a new online concert series being launched by American Express and streamed on YouTube. | | Source: Billboard |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | The Pointy End | | | | |
| | Ex-top diplomat Condoleezza Rice opts for Mozart concerto | | Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice abandoned international affairs for a Mozart piano concerto, teaming up with Soul legend Aretha Franklin to perform at a charity concert. | | Source: Yahoo! Music |
| Posted: 26-07-2010 | The Pointy End | | | | |
| | Kings of Leon forced off stage by incontinent pigeons | | Band abandon gig after pigeons let their true feelings be known from the rafters of a US concert venue. 'It landed near my mouth' says drummer. | | Source: The Guardian |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | The Pointy End | | | | |
| | Jazz things to do before you die | | Lee Mergner, editor-in-chief of JazzTimes, has issued an interesting column: a jazz bucket list. Cheekily, it's phlegmatically subtitled "Forty jazz-related things to do before you die (or Keith Jarrett kills you)." | | Source: NPR |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | The Pointy End | | | | |
| | President Wyclef? Ex-Fugee mulling Haiti campaign | | Singer Wyclef Jean is considering a run for president of Haiti but has not decided whether to seek a five-year term as leader of the quake-ravaged nation, the musician's family said. | | Source: Yahoo! Music |
| Posted: 27-07-2010 | The Pointy End | | | | |
| | How to make newborn guitars look artfully ancient | | Not everybody wants a shiny new guitar these days. A few connoisseurs want one that looks like it’s taken more abuse than Keith Richards.
| | Source: Wired |
| Posted: 28-07-2010 | The Pointy End | | | | |
| | Clap along with the Proms (and in the middle of the Proms) | | People are beginning to clap between movements, so perhaps change is afoot in our concert halls. Bravo! | | Source: The Guardian |
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