Friday Miscellanea

Not getting much blogging in this week: hey, I'm on vacation! But I will share a few tidbits with you. First of all, two kinds of music ripe for a restraining order can be found in a post titled "Please, For The Love of God, Stop Hitting It Joe"

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If you are into music quizzes, you might have a go at the Guardian's 2014 year in music quiz.

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This is kind of nice. Only in New York, where you can't turn around with out bumping into an artist of some sort:

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Here's confirmation of my theory that the problem with classical music isn't classical music at all, it is that audiences are just getting dumber. In 1973 the serious musician Pierre Boulez won a Grammy for a recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, a serious piece of music. The story is over at Slipped Disc. Of course, that wouldn't happen today, would it?

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I was talking to my sister the other day (whom I am visiting at the moment). She was complaining about being ignorant about music, even though she had watched some movies and read some books about composers. I said, don't bother! Even if accurate, books and movies about composers' lives are rarely (or almost never) interesting because composers don't really live in our world, they live in the music world. A composer's life tells you nothing about his music. Just listen to the music instead. Here is a review by Anne Midgette in the Washington Post about the new Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle where she explains some reasons not to watch it. Music-making is rarely depicted with any accuracy in the media these days.

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I don't have a lot for you this week. We will return to our regular blogging after the holidays. In the meantime, the obvious musical choice for today is Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra, with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Pierre Boulez: