The civil case against Montana State University for employing a music professor and conductor who was accused of rape has been postponed for a fourth time with both sides accusing each other of failing to disclose evidence.
Shuichi Komiyama, 47 at the time of the alleged offence in 2011, was music professor and conductor at MSU Symphony Orchestra when one of his students, aged 22, complained that he had unwanted sex with her. Komiyama, a popular conductor who had taken the orchestra on a tour of Asia, was suspended and banned from the campus. He resigned later that year.
The plaintiff claims that the university was negligent when it hired Shuichi Komiyama in 2006, having failed to discover that he had a prior felony conviction in California, where he was convicted for an affair with a high school girl. Details here.
This happened last week at the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C.
The composer is Ben Folds. The orchestra joins in.
Watch.
It’s an engaging idea. Let’s try it now with Lachenmann.
The Swiss maestro, 80, was tonight named Honorary Conductor for Life of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, where he has been principal conductor and artistic director since 2009.
The bestowal of titles like ’emeritus’ and ‘honorary’ is a prelude to retirement.
James Williams, Managing Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, said tonight: ‘The Orchestra is incredibly fortunate to work with Charles Dutoit and as we plan for our future, we are delighted that this musical partnership will continue beyond 2019 retaining Charles as a key figure within the RPO’s artistic leadership team. Charles has created a strong artistic foundation upon which we shall continue to build as we undertake a search for his successor.’
The search is now officially on.
photo: clive boursnell/rpo
From Alīna Vižine, a violinist in the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester:
Two years ago I started my studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. I often need to travel from Latvia to Denmark. I did my research and figured out that Norwegian Air is the best airline for me and my violin.
Since it is a low cost airline, the flights are always quite full and I appreciate how the airport staff always offers free check-in for hand luggage before boarding. In this case I explain that I can’t have my violin checked in and ask is it okay if I bring it with me. It has never been a problem for me in these two years. Until today. This morning I had a flight from Copenhagen to Riga (D83320) and I was travelling with my friend, a violist, Zane Šturme .
This flight was more than an unpleasant experience. Both of us know that Norwegian Air has rules about traveling with music instruments. On their website it is written that you ARE ALLOWED to bring violins and violas as your hand luggage and it will be treated as hand luggage. It also clearly states that the instruments can be slightly bigger than your standard hand luggage. That is exactly what we both said to a staff member from the Copenhagen Airport just before boarding, when he said that we’re not allowed to take our instruments with us. We tried to explain him why it is not okay to check in our instruments, we asked if it is possible to pay for extra seats, we even asked if it is possible to hold our instruments (without the case) in our hands for the whole flight, just so the instrument itself doesn’t go into the checked luggage compartment. There was just a dry answer that our cases are too big, the flight is fully booked, we can’t hold our instruments for safety reasons and the captain said that there is no space on the aircraft. I was surprised that there was such an issue.
After reading all of their rules it just made no sense to me. When I asked if it is possible to talk to someone from Norwegian Air, he just rudely said that he is in charge, there is no one to contact other than him and we have only two options: check in our instruments or we can’t board the aircraft. Since we both are students, we just can’t afford to not take this flight, so we had no other chance than to just give our instruments away. I have to say thank you to another staff member (not the ignorant man) that talked to the captain and made it possible to put our instruments separately from the luggage, strapped, in a compartment with heating (where they usually transport pets). We asked if there is a possibility to have a fragile tag put on them, and the rude man said, that Norwegian Air doesn’t have this option. That was the most stressful flight I ever had in my life and I’m more than sure that my friend felt the same. We talked to the cabin crew during the flight and the captain informed the staff in the Riga Airport that our instruments cannot be thrown around like suitcases, so we got them back right after leaving the aircraft and thankfully everything was okay with them. In the end a member of the flight crew told us that we should buy seats for the next time. For the twentieth time that day I was trying to explain that the facts that they all are mentioning and the rules on their website are not matching at all. He even tried to convince me that the size of our cases are too big, which they are not. In the end he sort of gave up and just said in a very annoyed voice, that our instruments will be treated like any other hand luggage, and if it has to be checked in, it will be checked in.
Now, the thing that confuses me the most is how personal and unfair this whole situation ended up being. I’ve personally never seen an airline with such detailed and easy to understand rules about traveling with instruments as Norwegian Air, yet the people working in the airport and for the company just can’t seem to follow them. When I was talking to the flight attendants, they were surprised when I told them that violins and violas are allowed on board as hand luggage. I don’t understand the meaning of these rules if they’re not taken into consideration and if staff doesn’t even know them. Okay, they treat the instruments as hand luggage and the flight was full. Instead we offered to pay for seats, but the rude staff member just lied to us that the flight is fully booked and apparently the captain said that there is no space. There were plenty of empty seats in the airplane. Both me and my friend felt horrible when we saw the empty seats, because there was definitely enough space to strap in a violin and a viola. The fact, that I was constantly repeating their own rules about music instruments on board and the staff members were just trying to prove me wrong, made me feel like a fool. In this case I don’t have that much against Norwegian Air, it is more about how stubborn, impolite and non-understanding some people can be. It almost felt like a personal decision of that one man to make our trip home horrible. Shouldn’t there already be one clear rule about flying with music instruments?
Is it that hard to make sure that the staff knows these rules? Why do I and many other musicians have to go through so much stress after doing all the research to make sure, that our insanely big, dangerous violins and violas would be allowed on the aircraft? Why does it have to be so nerve wracking and complicated?
I know that this is a typical rant of a stressed out musician after having a horrible flight, but I really wish that we all had a bigger influence and power to change something about this. I feel like I’ve signed every single online petition about this topic and I do see some changes in airlines, but do we really have to worry about staff members now too? Do people really not understand what our instruments mean to us? No matter how annoying and stressful these situations can be, I’d never want to be on the other side of this conflict. The cluelessness and ignorance of those people is terrifying to me.
The Mexican tenor, now singing less and less, has been named artistic director of the Salzburg Mozart Week.
He starts work on July 1, 2017 and ‘combines his international activities as the Mozarteum’s Mozart Ambassador with the planning and realization of the Mozart Week in an ideal fashion’.
The first Mozart Week entirely programmed by Villazón takes place in 2019. He has a six-year contract.
advertised:
The Department of Music at Stanford University is inviting applications for the position of tenure-track composer at the rank of Assistant Professor. The envisaged starting date is September 1, 2018.
We are searching for a creative and innovative composer who will show every promise of attaining professional distinction. The successful candidate must have a commitment to highquality undergraduate and graduate instruction, and ability or potential in teaching and mentoring a diverse student body that includes women, minorities, and others from underrepresented backgrounds.
Candidates should have an interest and expertise in one or more additional areas of performance and/or research, including, but not limited to, theory within or beyond the traditions of Western art music, music performance, and computer music. The successful responsibilities will involve courses primarily in composition and analysis, at both undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as the supervision of individual composition research. Courses may also be taught in the candidate’s additional areas of expertise.
Letters of application, together with a curriculum vitae, list of should be received on or before October 1, 2017. You may apply here.
Additional supporting materials will be requested at a later date. Please do NOT send scores or recordings at this stage of the search.
Stanford University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty. It welcomes nominations of, and applications from, women, members of minority groups, protected veterans and individuals with disabilities, as well as others who would bring additional dimensions to the university’s research, teaching, and clinical missions.
This may sound like political correctness taken a pedal too far.
The Chopin Competition is held every five years. The last was in 2015.
Now, for political reasons (see below), an extra competition has been announced for next year – with a twist.
The Fryderyk Chopin Institute owns a number of instruments that Chopin once played – mostly Erards and Pleyels, with a solitary English Broadwood. It will put them to use for the first time as competition instrument in 2018 in an event arranged to celebrate the centenary of Poland’s independence.
A one-off? No, they want to make this competition a regular occurrence.
The death of the Canadian soprano Ann Watt, aged 101, calls to mind a memoir by her son, Carl, in which he describes the scene in post-War London where Ann met and married his father, the Australian violinist, Patrick Clancy Halling:
His chamber career included eight years with the Hirsch quartet, led by Dublin- born violinist Leonard Hirsch, and the formation of his own Quartet Pro Musica in 1955, which resulted in an extraordinary event taking place in the Recital Room of the Royal Festival Hall in 1958.
On the 2nd of November of that year, the Quartet convened to take part in a reading of TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets” by four giants of the arts, namely, Shakespearean scholar George Rylands, and actresses Maxine Audley and Jill Balcon, and Balcon’s husband, poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis, interspersed with a rendition of Bartok’s Sixth Quartet. (By this time, Lewis’ and Balcon’s son, future Hollywood superstar Daniel Day Lewis, would have been a little over a year and half old.) He also played with the Virtuoso Ensemble, whose distinctions are believed to have included first UK performances of works by major British 20th Century composers, Elizabeth Lutyens, Humphrey Searle, Peter Racine Fricker and Mátyás Seiber.
Now who today would dare – would dare even to dream – of putting on such inspirational concerts?
BBC Music Day has put up a blue plaque on the Tanworth house where the iconic singer-songwriter Nick Drake lived and, at 26, tragically died.
Haplessly, the BBC got his birth date wrong – two years wrong.
Drake was born in 1948.
Orgel Nieuws reports the death of Wim Van Beek, organist of the Martini church in Groningen from 1956 until his retirement last year. He also served for several years at the Grote Kerk in The Hague.
Three preferred names have emerged in the Czech Philharmonic’s urgent search for a music director to replace the late Jiří Bělohlávek.
Top of the pile are Jaap Van Zweden, Marin Alsop and Fabio Luisi (pictured), according to local press reports. There is some confusion about the role of Semyon Bychkov who, in the week of Bělohlávek’s death was due to be named principal guest conductor, and feelers have also been put out to the British conductor, John Eliot Gardiner.
Also mentioned are local favourites Jakub Hrusa, now with the Bamberg Symphony, and Tomáš Netopil.
The Czech position is prestigious, poorly paid and often parlous.
We have been notified of the death on June 16 of the wonderful Hungarian cellist Ferenç Mihaly, a widely admired artist of Hungarian origin.
A player in the Vienna Octet, he served for 30 years (1958-88) as principal cello in Cologne’s’ Gürzenich orchestra, which is preparing an epitaph for next month’s concert booklet.
