The American Musicological Society today received a $251,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its Music of the United States of America series.
The project is based at University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance with matching funds from the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance through donations to its American Music Institute / UM Gershwin Initiative and by the Society for American Music.
Various readers have asked why we have not reported the tale of the American Airlines pilot who threw a cello student and her instrument off his flight.
Simple, really.
When an airline changes its rules to prejudice musicians, or when rules are misapplied, we will always follow the story.
This incident appears to have been a one-off summer flareup between an pilot and a passenger. Just because it went virak on social media doesn’t make it an issue of principle.
AA calls is a ‘miscommunication’. If there are further ramifications, we’ll let you know.
Warner Music, which offloaded 75% of its Spotify shares after the streaming firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange in April, has now got rid of the rest.
Total profit: $504 million.
Any of this going back into music?
TO KREMERATA BALTICA FRIENDS AND PARTNERS
Dear Friends,and Dear Partners,
let me share with you the official message in English related to August 1st news.
On July 31st, Kristijonas Kucinskas, who was for years my PA and, as well, did run the Kremerata Baltica Management (KBM), informed me about his decision to terminate his & KBM partnership with KB and me, starting from August 1st, without any warning notice.
On August 1st we informed all KB members of such unilateral decision because of which we started to setup a new orchestra office team.
I am glad to share with you the positive aura and the commitment to the project by many Kremerata Baltica members. A sudden end of collaboration turns now into a new positive starting point.
During these days we have already defined a first set up of the new office that will manage KB activities. Zaneta Bidviene +37065222787 is the contact person of our new office. She will coordinate the office activities. Zaneta has got a long experience with KB, first as our loyal librarian, and, during the years, she got as well many managerial experiences. Dainius Peseckas, our long time experienced musician and tour manager will coordinate all the logistics and travels. I will assist them whenever it will be necessary.
Ingrida Zemzare, ingrida.zemzare@gmail.com, who has been from 1997 the Manager Director of KB Riga office, will continue to play such a role. She will sign KB contracts.
Let me ask you to address all your requests about Kremerata Baltica – it’s tours, activities and planning – to the following new mailbox: magicteam@kremeratabaltica.eu
Zaneta Bidviene
Looking forward to continuing to bring together with you exciting projects into the music world. Most of them are already designed and can be offered for the next years and seasons.
We have always cherished our previous discussions and collaborations and I would be very happy to continue on this very positive trend.
Let’s keep searching for music!
Yours sincerely.
Gidon Kremer
The outgoing chief of the nearby New Haven Symphony, William Boughton, has agreed to conduct the Yale Symphony in the coming season.
Its music director, Toshiyuki Shimada, ‘will be on leave during that time’.
Dallas Opera, the leader in training women conductors, has chosen six more candidates for this winter’s intitute.
They are:
Sonia Ben-Santamaria (France)
· Priscila Bomfim (Brazil)
· Sarah Penicka-Smith (Australia)
· Audrey Saint-Gil (France/USA)
· Maria Sensi Sellner (USA)
· Emily Senturia (USA)
‘Lunch with the FT’ is a soft feature in which the Financial Times gently grills a public persona, often served up by the PR machine, on their sweeter human side.
Not this week.
In a no-holds-barred conversation, the FT editor Lionel Barber subjects Ian Taylor, chairman of the Royal Opera House, to a forensic interrogation of his business activities in the oil industry and elsewhere. It’s a brilliant, knowing, revealing piece of journalism, a model of its kind.
Ian Taylor is one of Britain’s wealthiest businessmen, chairman of the Royal Opera House, and a generous donor to the arts and the governing Conservative party. He rubs shoulders with cabinet ministers, boasts a fabulous private art collection, and spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to stop Brexit and Scottish independence. His choice for lunch is a quintessentially English establishment: the five-star Goring Hotel, close to Buckingham Palace.
Yet Taylor is not exactly Mr Conventional. He runs a company you’ve probably never heard of: Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader. He has done business with some of the least savoury regimes in the world, from Castro’s Cuba to Saddam’s Iraq, via Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia. If he is indeed an English gentleman, he fits the tradition of the Elizabethan buccaneer, albeit without the knighthoods bestowed on Drake, Grenville and Raleigh — a sore point, of which more later….
Read on here.
And don’t miss this correction.
If only the FT would apply the same rigour to its limp arts interviews.
The long-troubled piano manufacturer, presently in the hands of a hedge fund, is being smartened up for sale to a state-owned Chinese company, Poly Group Corp., according to Bloomberg.
The price could be as much as a billion US dollars, twice what the company was last sold for in 2013.
Steinway has Lang Lang as its brand leader.
That should clinch it.
Report here.
The Met will stage National Council auditions for new singers in Mexico for the first time, in the second week of November.
Any Mexican singer aged 20 to 30 can apply. Winners of the auditions in San Miguel will go through to regional finals in New Orleans, and, if selected, to the semi-finals and finals in New York. There are major cash prizes at every stage.
So much for Trump’s wall.
