Most Popular Posts of the Year: May and June

In May I was on holiday in Spain for a month so that dominated my posts. The most popular post in May was my review of all the concerts I saw in the month:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2017/05/quick-evalutation.html

Lots of wonderful music in mostly wonderful performances. The second most popular post was about my visit to Bologna to see a recital by superb pianist Grigory Sokolov:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2017/05/all-roads-lead-to-bologna.html

I was back home in June and this was the month I started my long, long series of posts on Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring. But none of those posts came at the top in popularity. The number one post that month was, oddly enough, a rather technical one on meter in music titled Metric Textures:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2017/06/metric-textures.html

I suppose this is what is usually called "polymeter" but I like my term better. The second most popular post was "Classical, Smassical" which was about some of the economics of the business:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2017/06/classical-smassical.html

Bottom line is the economics for classical music are horrible. Not only is it very, very expensive to mount high-quality productions of classical music, but:

The history of sharks out to cheat musicians is long and dishonorable. Today it’s Silicon Valley’s ability to redirect profits from the creators and producers to the likes of Apple, Amazon and Spotify. Equally troubling is the power of technology in the form of virtual reality, holograms and things we may not yet know about, to suck the life out of live music making.

That's from a story in the LA Times quoted in the post.

About now we need a transcendental envoi to remind us why classical music is worth all the trouble. This is tenor Nigel Rogers who figured out how to do those tricky 17th century vocal ornaments after the tradition had completely disappeared for hundreds of years. He is singing the big piece from L'Orfeo by Monteverdi, "Possente Spirto."