This is the Seattle Symphony letting its hair down at the weekend with conductor Ludovic Morlot and rapper, Sir Mix-A-Lot.

More than half a million people have viewed this video in two days. No other orchestra has anything half as viral.

However – you knew there was a however coming – this performance is a about men’s commodification of women’s bodies. It is lewd, rude, sexist and demeaning. If you don’t think so on first hearing, imagine he is singing about you or one of your loved ones.

None of the players in the orchestra smiles at the DJ’s lines or even looks up when he mentions them. UPDATE: Though we gather that the concert was attended by conference members of the League of American Orchestra, some of whom danced on stage (do shout if you recognise any of them).

This is not, in our view, something a symphony orchestra ought to be doing. Let Sir Mix peddle his rap somewhere else. Let Seattle promote itself on art rather than sell its orchestra to a sexist rant.

A quasi-musical memento of the comedian, who has died, aged 56.

Rik was the embodiment of English self-mockery and class-based self-deprecation.

May he rest in smiles.

Just in from our crime correspondent: Stagehands at Chicago’s Lyric Opera were taking a breather outdoors one day when they caught sight of a man being pummelled by another twice his size. Without pausing to discuss risk and rights, four scene shifters leaped into the fray, saved the victim and pursued the attacker until he was nabbed by police.

Next time the Lyric puts on a fight scene, it should look backstage for verismo coaching.

Full story here.

Rudolph Tang reports from Beijing:

A Buddhist temple has formed the first music academy in China teaching western musical instruments and western classical music.

The inauguration of Mount Tiantai Buddhism Music Academy took place on May 6th in Mount Tiantai, a sacred place in Zhejiang province with strong Buddhism tradition that can be traced back 1,400 years ago. Also inaugurated was the 3rd Tiantai Zen-ism Music Festival where an ensemble of string players made its debut on stage. All members of the ensemble are monks and nuns of the Mount Tiantai Temple.

Among those attending were the vice president of Central Conservatory of Music, famed vocalists, violinists and composers, and string professors who helped with the training. All together about 40 monks and nuns played the music of Mozart and Bach overlooked by the giant statue of Buddhas.

It all started when Rev Wuyue, the Buddhist abbot of the Temple and a former violinist graduating from the Wuhan Conservatory of Music before taking the tonsure, visited a cathedral and had his first experience to church music when a priest began to lead the chorister. Wuyue was enormously touched. He was convinced that music should also be the device that carries the teachings of Buddha.

Back in China, he became the first to teach Buddhism by means of music. Now in his 70s, Wuyue believed in music bringing serenity. So he decided to form a first ever Zen band and introduced western musical instruments to Buddhist music. After all, Buddhism was introduced to China from India.

So a band was formed as early as 2008. They took the name of Guangxian Ensemble two years later. Most of its members were born in the 1980s and 1990s and received no musical training. In April 2013, Liang Da’nan, leader of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra and a professor at the Central Conservatory of Music, visited the Temple and began to train the monks and nuns in Beethoven, Bach and Tchaikovsky. They love him and call him Papa Liang.

One of the members is Xiaotong. She was born in 1989. After graduation from high school, she visited the Temple for pleasure but stayed there for good. She began to study violin in 2010, barely able to read a score. Now she is one of the best nun violinists, desired by other temples eager to have their own string ensemble. According to Rev Mr Wuyue, it is his dream to have a Temple orchestra.

A grafitti artist has got to work on the Mason & Hamlin concert grand that was washed up some days ago near the Brooklyn Bridge.

At this rate, it might yet end up in a museum… even at the Met

h/t: Brian Wise

No disrespect to the world army of pluckers, but this is the science of sound. And it tells us that violins are less playable than guitars.

Fact. Read here.

h/t: Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi

Does the name Rebecca Clarke pluck a string?

Thought not.

She was an English viola player who struggled, against family and social prejudice, to be a composer.

In 1919 she wrote a sonata for her instrument.

It’s good. So good, so thoughtful, so engaging, that on a new recording it overwhelms a concurrent work by Paul Hindemith, at the time Germany’s fastest rising composer. Clarke went on to share a competition prize with Ernest Bloch, only to be disqualified for her sex.

The Clarke sonata is my album of the week on sinfinimusic.com. Click here to read.

The conductor, 84, has been out of action with an unnamed illness for over two months. Today he cancelled the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo at the end of July, ‘on the strong advice of doctors’. John Nelson and Yutaka Sado will stand in.

We wish Lorin a full and fast recovery.

It is one of the most endearing stories of the early classical period, the notion that Joseph Haydn, aged nine, was among the six choirboys paid to adorn the Viennese exequies for the priestly Venetian composer, Antonio Vivaldi, on July 28, 1741.

It has been repeated in dozen of books. H C Robbis Landon, the Hayden biographer, considered it an ‘almost certain’ fact. It has been bothering our friend Michael Lorenz for many years. Lorenz is a musical mythbuster.

He traces the story to ‘a mistranslation of a mistranslation’ of the archaic German word Kuttenbuben.

Sad to say, he blows Haydn out of the picture. Read here, in fascinating detail.

picture: Vivaldi by Ghezzi/Lebrecht Music&Arts

Not the East River, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

This is Coquet Island, a bird sanctuary off the northeast coast of England, where puffins come to nest. Apparently, the jolly birds like to make music. So ornithologists have furnished them with an electronic keyboard, drums, triangle and bell and are waiting to collect enough sounds for a full CD.

Kyle Gann reports the death of the American composer Elodie Lauten, of cancer, aged 63. ‘She was as broke as any musician I’ve known,’ he writes, ‘and yet she had more big projects on the front burner than most composers in far more cushy circumstances. I can’t help but think that, on some level, she worked herself to death.’

Here’s her distinctive, engaging, imaginatively wired sound.

Sent abroad to lie for his country, Dmitri Shostakpvich is closely guarded by the odious Tikhon Khrennikov, who keeps one hand on the great man’s arm. Two behind the minder, to the right, is Aaron Copland (also with a minder’s arm looped through his).

But who are all these other attentive men?

 Picture courtesy of the DSCH Shostakovich Journal, via social media.