Category: Link

Philip Rothman at Scoring Notes:

Today Avid released Sibelius 2018.4, announcing it at their Avid Connect event in Las Vegas, Nevada. This update, the second of the year and using the new year-dot-month version number introduced with 2018.1, is another broad release with many new features and some longstanding requests addressed. Areas of improvement include multi-edits for text, a new note spacing rule affecting multiple voices and other cases, deleting and adding bars at the beginning of the score, smarter ties, and many more other enhancements.

Avid also announced a new naming strategy in their product lines so that each line has the same three tiers: a very basic free entry-level version denoted by the “First” suffix; a consumer or student level with no suffix; and a pro-level version called “Ultimate”.

This new update sounds great, but the new name, “Sibelius Ultimate” is really, really dumb. The introductory product assuming the name of the former professional product is also going to be really, really confusing. I’m no marketing pro, but this seems like a change that will cause a lot of problems for no apparent benefit.

Even ignoring the fact that the name “Sibelius” has identified a different product for thirty years, “Ultimate” looks very dated to me.

Philip de Oliveira, writing for Cleveland Scene:

The vaunted centennial season turns out to be a disappointing continuation of the status quo. Of the nearly 40 composers represented, every last one is a white man. Only four of those white men are still alive. Of those four, only one is American-born. Last season, all but one composer (composer-in-residence Anthony Cheung) were white, only four had a pulse, and a lone concerto by Augusta Read Thomas kept the Cleveland Orchestra off of the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy’s list of top orchestras that didn’t include a single female composer in the 2016-17 season. The Cleveland Orchestra is far from alone in this regard. An analysis by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra found female composers accounted for just 1.3 percent of all music performed by 85 American orchestras. How much longer will “America’s best orchestra,” as Cleveland was recently dubbed by The New York Times, set a worse example than its peers?

Scathing and earned. Programming like this needs to be dunked on loudly and often.

Philip de Oliveira: “After 100 years, the Cleveland Orchestra Continues to Ignore Women, Minorities and Living Composers”

It’s not you, Adobe. It’s me.

…

My day-to-day responsibilities have shifted over the last couple of years, and I’m not getting the value out of the Adobe applications that I used to. It’s not that the Creative Cloud apps have gotten worse. To the contrary, they’re better than they’ve ever been: more powerful and easier to use for beginners and design dilettantes like me. And recently, I’ve started a journey to find alternatives to each of the Adobe applications I use on a regular basis. If, like me, you feel you might not be getting the full value out of your Adobe subscriptions, you might be pleasantly surprised to discover some of the tools that may serve your needs just as well, for a fee that is a little easier to justify.

Continue reading at ArtsHacker

 If virtuosic perfection at least were achieved, one could—in a forgetful moment—be satisfied with that. But one cannot even claim this, since the leisurely attitude of the majority of classical players toward rhythmic accuracy is simply appalling, and would seem so to more people were it not so widespread as to be generally accepted. There is no question in my mind that the classical world can learn much about timing, rhythmic accuracy, and subtlety from jazz musicians, as jazz musicians can in dynamics, structure, and contrast from the classical musicians.

Gunther Schuller, “The Third Stream”, 13 May 1961 in The Saturday Review of Literature, as collected in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller

What kind of music were you playing on the jobs?

Blues. I’d play the blues all night long, just playing the blues.

You were playing for adults, then?

Yes. These were blues clubs, little holes in the wall-

Is that what they wanted?

Oh, yes. That’s all they would listen to.

The reason I’m questioning you so closely is I think that in many places during the fifties popular songs were more common than the blues.

Well, all these places wanted was the blues. A lot of the popular songs were blues, however.

Do you think that perhaps a different kind of music was more common in St. Louis among blacks than in other places? I mean, would this demand for the blues have come about because St. Louis was southern and somewhat “country” and, therefore, closer to genuine folk music?

I don’t know. But I do know that all you would hear in those clubs was the blues.

Eileen Southern interviewing composer Olly Wilson in 1977.

I don’t remember exactly how, but I recently discovered Wilson’s music and have been trying to learn more about him. The more of his music I hear, the more I wish it had been covered in my education. Oh well, no time like the present.

Southern, Eileen, and Olly Wilson. “Olly Wilson: The Education of a Composer.” The Black Perspective in Music 5, no. 1 (1977): 90-103. doi:10.2307/1214361. JSTOR permalink

One of the things I love doing over school breaks is catching up on my well-intentioned Instapaper queue. I really like some of Aaron Gervais’s thoughts on audience building in this article I just caught up on from last year. In it, he addresses some of the failed attempts at audience building, and how we can and should be doing it better.

He describes some of the trendy classical-music-as-night-club events, and why they might appear to succeed, but fail in the goal of audience development because they are showcasing a type of experience that is in many ways fundamentally different than the thing we’re trying to build the audience for.

On a mashup of DJ sets and classical music:

Once the bouncer explained to [a group of nightclub attendees] what was happening, they left abruptly. People come to nightclubs to dance, so when these clubbers saw that the context of the nightclub was going to be taken over by some kind of classical music thing, their reaction was, “Let’s go somewhere else.” … There were obviously attendees who were there because they were regulars, but more than half the room of what looked like 200-300 people were clearly there either for Mason or one of the ensembles who were playing. … The end result didn’t feel like audiences coming together, it felt more like classical music colonizing another genre’s space.

Gervais makes some really interesting points about what communities are, and how we can use our understanding of communities to build one (or several) of our own. Crucially, communities are fundamentally exclusive. That isn’t to say that they’re snobby, just that they don’t include everyone, and that’s ok.

 Often in new music we are afraid to ask our audiences to push themselves. That’s a mistake. People like meaningful experiences that they have to work for. The trick is convincing them to expend the effort in the first place. To get there, we start with the advice above: build communities, then guide people into greater depth using MAYA [most advanced yet acceptable] techniques.

We have to assume that our audience is there to focus on what we’re presenting with an open and curious mind.

If you have any interest in presenting concerts and building an audience for what you do, this is a great read.

Aaron Gervais: This Is Why Your Audience Building Fails