Indiana University Jacobs School of Music has announced the death of Edmund Battersby, professor of piano since 1995.

He died on Friday at his home in Bloomington, Ind., at the age of 66. No cause has been given.

A native of Detroit, Battersby had an extensive career as a recital and recording artist.

The death has been announced of the composer David Baker who, though primarily a jazz musician, received commissions from Janos Starker, the New York Philharmonic, Josef Gingold, the Beaux Arts Trio and many other classical individuals and ensembles.

Baker, who was 84, founded the jazz studies department at Indiana University in 1968 and was its chair until 2013.

He co-founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and served as its conductor and musical and artistic director from 1990 to 2012.

There was panic at La Scala Friday night when, minutes before the curtain rose on I due Foscari, the conductor Michele Mariotti came down with a high fever and flu symptoms.

What to do?

The tenor Francesco Meli remembered that there was a young guy from Milan who had assisted in a Foscari he had sung with Antonio Pappano at Covent Garden. Someone found a phone number for Michele Gamba.

The audience was told the performance would start 15 minutes late.

Michele Gamba, 32, jumped into a taxi and raced for La Scala.

First reports say the performance was outstanding.

Michele’s c.v.: Michele Gamba was a member of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme 2012–14 and was Jette Parker Associate Conductor for the 2014/15 Season. He made his Royal Opera House conducting debut with Bastien und Bastienne in Meet the Young Artists Week 2012 and subsequently conducted Berio’s Folk Songs in Meet the Young Artists Week 2013, two lunchtime concerts with Southbank Sinfonia and excerpts from Eugene Onegin and Così fan tutte (Act I) in the JPYAP summer performances. He also acted as assistant conductor on La Fille du régiment and joined The Royal Opera’s music staff for Siegfried, Götterdämmerung,La bohème, Eugene Onegin, Written on Skin, Simon Boccanegra, La rondine, Les Vêpres siciliennes, Parsifal, Carmen, La traviata, Tosca, Dialogues des Carmélites and Ariadne auf Naxos, Anna Nicole, I due Foscari, Tristan und Isolde, Andrea Chénier, Król Roger and Guillaume Tell.

Slipped Disc exclusive: A masterclass by the great chamber musician at Bienen School of Music.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here (includes Mozart and Messiaen).

It turns out that Luca Buratto, 22, winner of the Honens piano competition, belongs to a family that fled Italy over Mussolini’s racial laws.

His great-grandfather found refuge in Brazil but lost his promising career as a composer.

Stephen Cera has the story here.

Anyone alive in the 1960s will remember William Schuman, a power in the land of American music.

President of Juilliard and the Lincoln Center, he won two Pulitzer prizes and a National medal for the Arts for his abundant orchestral music, which included ten symphonies.

Not a note of his gets played nowadays. Chicago psychotherapist Gerald Stein wonders why.

In his day (1910-1992), only Aaron Copland was a more prominent living American composer in the classical world. Moreover, as president of the Juilliard School and then of the emerging Lincoln Center, no one had a greater influence on serious music in the middle portion of the last century. Schuman also wrote 10 symphonies among other works, and won the first Pulitzer Prize ever given for musical composition. His Symphony #3 is arguably the greatest such piece written by an American.

Read on here.

Still perplexed? Read Bruce Duffie’s interview with Schuman here.

Early on I said to myself,“You can do anything else that you want to do, but you have to find between six hundred hours and a thousand hours to be alone in a room.”  That’s a sine qua nonof the conditions for composing, as far as I’m concerned.  So I used to keep a little diary of time.  I’d go to the school maybe at 8:30 in the morning, having worked for an hour first, so I’d put down one hour.  Or, if I went at 11:23, I’d put down two hours and twenty-three minutes.  By the end of the week I’d add up the hours and the minutes that I actually worked, and by the summer time I would usually have about three hundred hours chalked up.  Then, of course, in the summer time I had more time to work.  I rarely reached a thousand, but it was never less than six hundred.  It sounds like a very cold way of going about it, but it was the only practical way that I could devise of assuring myself the time; the reason being that everything else you do is so much easier than writing music.