The Sufi vocalist Amjad Sabri, one of the foremost singers in Pakistan, was shot down today on the streets of Karachi.
The Taliban boasted they did it, denouncing his music as blasphemous.
How can music blaspheme?
How?
Bhar Do Jholi Meri Ya MUHAMMAD – Amjad Sabri… by islaamonline
From historian Joseph Horowitz’s summary of his address to the League of American Orchestras:
Our orchestras are facing a perfect storm moving at high velocity. How fast can they adapt? The most adaptive orchestra I know is the South Dakota Symphony. Its music director, Delta David Gier, began his tenure by initiating a Lakota Music Project linking to nine Indian reservations; most recently, he took Dvorak’s New World Symphony to Native American audiences in remote Sisseton. With its enterprising nine-member “core,” the South Dakota Symphony is positioned to maximize personal interaction with Sioux Falls residents and institutions.
The Detroit Symphony, energized by a crippling strike, is another orchestra making strides toward showing the culture of the community. That Detroit is the host orchestra for the League’s 2017 conference, next June, is auspicious. The League’s sense of urgency will likely be sustained. Will the conference again identify a single focused goal? How about expanding the role of individual musicians in every facet of orchestral life?
In most places, we fear, his proposal will go unheeded. Too many boards have too much to lose if they let musicians out of their seats.
Read the full article here.
press release:
At the annual Encaenia ceremony held today, Arvo Pärt received an honorary degree in Music from Oxford University.
At a ceremony held at the Sheldonian Theatre the University of Oxford conferred honorary degrees on nine distinguished figures from the fields of theology, law, economics, architecture, film, science, engineering and music. The honorary doctorates of Letters were awarded to the economist Paul Krugman, the film director Pedro Almodóvar and the architect Kazuyo Sejima. The honorary doctorate in Divinity was awarded to the philosopher and theologian Tomáš Halík; the honorary doctorate in Civil Law was awarded to a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Lord Johathan Mance, and honorary doctorates in Science were awarded to the neurobiologist Cornelia Bargmann, the physicist Mildred Dresselhaus and Sir Jonathan Ive, the Chief Design Officer of Apple Inc.
Kim Gaynor, the festival’s managing director for the past 11 years, is leaving next week to become head of Vancouver Opera.
Her replacement was announced today.
She is Laurence Marchand, head of production at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris for the past 17 years.
Martin Engstrom, the founder, stays on as executive director.
The violinist, in Jerusalem to receive the Genesis Prize, has told AP of his shock at the candidate’s mocking gesture at a disabled newspaperman.
“Horrible, horrible, horrible … That was a mindless kind of decision,’ said Perlman. ‘It was terrible. You don’t do that … it’s so outrageous.’
Read more here.
After singing at the Orlando vigil two days ago, the chorus have rush-released a two-track single, all proceeds to the Orlando victims and Galop (an anti LGBT-hate crime charity).
Watch those diverse faces in the choir.
About London Gay Men’s Chorus www.lgmc.org.uk
In 1991, nine friends came together to sing a few Christmas carols at Angel Underground Station
hoping to raise a few pounds for the Terrence Higgins Trust. London was in the midst of the AIDS crisis
and the men, who belonged to a social group called London Friend sang together to find a place of
support, of friendship and of brotherhood. Little did they know what they had kickstarted.
Fastforward 25 years later, and this once small band of singers now calls itself the London Gay Men’s
Chorus. Boasting over 200 members, the LGMC is the largest gay choir in Europe and regularly plays
to sellout crowds at Southbank Centre, Cadogan Hall and the Roundhouse. Over the years, the chorus
has been lucky enough to have worked with a diverse range of artists including pop stars Mark Ronson
and Elton John, soprano Lesley Garrett, country legend Dolly Parton, musical theatre star Hannah
Waddingham, actor Simon Callow and comedienne Sandi Toksvig. The LGMC has also appeared on
Children In Need, Comic Relief, The One Show, The Graham Norton Show and Top of the Pops.
Richard Mantle, general director of Opera North says:
‘I think you can certainly see over the last 40 years the real value of being part of an enormous talent pool which is Europe… This natural exchange of ideas, of people, of talent that has gone on over 30 or 40 years has really strengthened and enriched our cultural sector to an extent that possibly wouldn’t have been there in the past. So many young artists, singers musicians, directors, designers, all sorts of things, have exported their talents into Europe, they often go and work there and they come back. Art does transcend borders and my concern is that I don’t want to see us become more isolationist again because I think there is a great richness and diversity in freedom of movement.’
Yeah, but he’s a specialist and Brexit voters don’t listen to experts, right?
Leeds, by the way, is bidding to be Europe’s culture capital in 2023. Forget that, if Brexit wins.
The official Dallas Symphony explanation for paying Jaap Van Zweden more than five million dollars in salary for 2013/14 is this:
The Music Director’s salary for 2013 was $1,788,997, with the bulk of the remainder being a signing bonus for a long-term contract extension executed in 2013… The long-term contract extension now goes through the 20/21 season and includes three years as conductor laureate. The bonus amount was funded entirely by a restricted gift given exclusively for this one-time occurrence. The bottom line operating budget of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was not affected at all.
Are they out of their Texan minds?
There is no known precedent in orchestral history for paying a conductor a sweetener to stay put. He wants to go? Let him go. There are plenty more sticks on the shelf.
What Dallas did is way out of line with industry practice. It has also inflated Van Zweden’s value into some kind of South Sea Bubble, forcing the New York Philharmonic to pay over the odds for a conductor who was not their first choice – or anybody else’s, except Dallas.
Van Man and his IMG agent have proved themselves ace negotiators.
He’s also drawing down a hefty salary in Hong Kong, where he has just renewed.
So much for his fidelity to Dallas.
The new list of maestro earnings from Drew McManus reveals the following pay scale.
1 Jaap Van Zweden, Dallas, $5m (see here)
2 Riccardo Muti, Chicago Symphony $2,309,837
3 Christoph Eschenbach, NSO, $2,274,151
4 Michael Tilson Thomas, San Franc Symphony, $2,105,920
5 Alan Gilbert, NY, $1,751,570
6 Gustavo Dudamel, LA Phil, $1,661,493
7 David Robertson, St Louis Symphony $1,043,313
No other maestro crosses the million mark.
Full list here.
The annual survey of conductor salaries compiled by Drew McManus on Adaptistration is about to blow the socks off the music industry. Drew’s pay list for 2013/14, which goes live in the next hour, will reveal that compensation at the Dallas Symphony that year went way off the scale.
The music director Jaap Van Zweden, little known at the time beyond Dallas, was paid $5,110,538.
That’s five million bucks in plain English, paid via his company, Bajada Productions LLC.
There are more details on Adaptistration.
Five million is miles off the grid.
It is almost double the squeeze that Christoph Eschenbach puts on the National Symphony and it beats by a clear two million the $3,291,791 paid to Lorin Maazel in his final year as music director at the New York Philharmonic, which was the previous all-time high.
It is also more than three times what Jaap Van Zweden was paid the year before.
And it’s not just Dallas that has questions to answer.
There will be demands to know what the New York Phil is planning to pay Van Zweden, 55, when he becomes its music director in 2018. Is this unremarkable Dutchman worth more than any conductor alive or dead?
All the other million-earners here.
More signs of nervous crackdown in Russia.
A cellist, Semyon Lashkin, was sitting on a street bench practising a few summer riffs with a couple of pals when police seized him and his cello and swept them off to the cells.
Semyon has been charged with organising a public rally (Art. 20.2.2, p. Ako 1) and could be hit with a hefty fine.
He was released after midnight but his cello has been kept as evidence.
Semyon, 27, has gone on Facebook to protest his arrest.
There is video showing the street was empty at the time.
Please share this information widely to help Semyon regain his cello and his clean police record.
