Blog archives

Where is music headed in the next twenty or fifty years? The beautiful thing is… no one knows. Just when you think an instrument (or the orchestra) may have lost its relevance to a mass audience, you’ll be surprised by where composers take it next. This post is adapted from an essay...
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Professor Mark Clague, co-moderator of our live events in San Francisco, recently gave one of his classes at the University of Michigan an unusual assignment. In the spirit of John Cage, the students were asked to create a work that used silence, chance, found instruments, graphic scores (or any...
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In our modern world, the creative artist is seen as the “genius” behind a great work of art. But it wasn’t always like this, as author Elizabeth Gilbert explains in this talk. After the phenomenal (and “freakish” as she puts it) success of her book Eat, Pray, Love, she...
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As The Bay Citizen puts it, “For nearly a decade, composer Mason Bates has been hailed as one of the young saviors of classical music.” He works with two major American orchestras in a formal capacity–as Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony and as Project San Francisco...
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No conversation about music—about any art form, for that matter—gets very far these days without addressing the impact, potential and pitfalls of technology. From high- definition broadcasts of live performances, to an audience tuned in to Facebook, Twitter and other social media,...
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