[Eliot Curtis] found himself a little too close to 1960’s counterculture while restoring a vintage modular synthesizer — he began tripping out on acid. The instrument in question is a Buchla Model 100. The Buchla is a modular synth. Instead of a keyboard, it used capacitance-sensitive touch plates. This particular model 100 was purchased by California State University East Bay Campus. The synth was popular for a while, but eventually fell into disuse, and was stored in a classroom closet.
During the restoration, [Curtis] found residue and crystals stuck under one of the knobs of the Control Voltage Processing Module. Was it flux, conformal coating, or something else? [Eliot] hit the board with contact cleaner and wiped it down. Within 45 minutes, he was feeling a strange tingling. It was the beginning of a nine-hour LSD trip. Three independent tests on the module came back positive for LSD.
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This might be the weirdest thing you are going to see all week:
Yes, it's nine tap-dancing noses from Shostakovich's absurdist opera The Nose staged by, ahem, the Royal Opera.
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I've been reading up on the music of Central Java and it is remarkable how very different from Western music it is. The gamelan is a very sophisticated orchestra of many kinds of tuned metallophones, tuned gongs, drums, bowed lute and voices. Nothing it plays can be notated in staff notation. For one thing, the scales used, the five-note slendro and seven-note pelog, not only vary from gamelan to gamelan, but they have nothing in common with our twelve note chromatic scale. The concepts of tempo and meter are also wildly different from ours. This is a performance of Ladrang Asamaradana:
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How are musicians handling widespread unemployment: OPERA STAR: I WON’T CLAIM BENEFITS. I’D RATHER STACK SHELVES.
The international coloratura soprano Laura Aikin has just signed off for the last time as a shel-stacker at a Rewe store in Berlin.I never even thought of applying for unemployment benefits because I thought that only permanent employees would get that. There is no such thing in America, nor in Italy. I never got any help from the state there. I thought the idea that Germany would do something like this was crazy….
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As concerts recommence in Europe, we see how social distancing works in a concert hall. In Dresden: WELCOME TO OUR DISTANCED CONCERT HALL.
There will be two concerts on Thursday to compensate for the small audience of 480 in an 1800-seat hall. The programme is Haydn symphony #99 and a Beethoven String quartet with Quatuor Ébène. The original plan was to play a Beethoven symphony but the stage is not big enough to have all the players it requires at a safe distance.
The seats covered in white have to be kept empty:
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Still at Slipped Disc is this controversial post from a black opera singer: AFRICAN SINGER ALLEGES RACISM AT GLIMMERGLASS. There are a host of comments worth looking at as well.
Completing the summer with the festival was a soul-crushing task knowing full well the double standard between the internal lack of anti-racist structures and the external performance of surface-level diversity. I felt like my Black body was being used on stage in a painful charade of tokenism. I felt undignified. I felt dehumanized.I’m sharing my story ahead of the Glimmerglass Festival’s town hall discussion on June 18 so that company leadership can see a firsthand account of the systemic harm they have inflicted through the lack of restorative justice (why does the YAP director still have his job?), lack of diversity in leadership, gaslighting, tokenism, and White liberalist “we’re not racist” rhetoric that fails to see its own shortcomings.
And a sample comment:
I really can’t take much more of this woke oneupsmanship. I’m being sincere in this comment, and I’m not trying to get a rise out of anyone. I’m in my late twenties now, but some part of me will always be that idealistic little boy who believed that the musical profession was a true meritocracy, and music itself a sublime haven from the politics and noise of the world. Now, the politicization of the industry is a foregone conclusion. Sometimes it feels as though the music itself is an afterthought. It’s become all about politics, wokeness, business, and self-promotion. Conservatories churn out joyless audition-winning robots who then go on to plaster themselves all over social media, either promoting themselves or getting up on their soapboxes and pontificating about political matters. Groupthink and herd mentality abound.
I think it is fair to say that this is not a comfortable environment for making music.
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Something from the BBC about "drill music" which I have never heard of before. Why drill music is being used to teach philosophy.
It's been a couple of years since large sections of the media first started panicking about drill music, questioning if the genre's often violent lyrics were contributing to knife crime in London - sometimes claiming outright that they were.For the youth workers helping young people navigate daily life, it was never that black and white.Instead Ciaran Thapar saw drill as an opportunity to meet young people on their own terms."How can we use this undeniably organically popular type of music, and our understanding of that music, as a way of connecting with young people who otherwise are being lost to the system right now at unprecedented rates?"Those conversations led to RoadWorks, an organisation that uses the artists worrying the media - and in some cases censored by the courts - to teach social sciences.
And here is a clip of UK drill music:
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Here is a refreshingly different take: San Antonio Symphony Music Director Sebastian Lang-Lessing shares how orchestra can survive the coronavirus.
I’m an optimist, and I think a lot of things will clear up, and we will hit the reset button, but we need to reevaluate things. And this is where, I think, the arts industry comes into play.I’m very convinced that people after this are more hungry for intellectual and artistic inspiration than before. So the wrong approach, I think, is to do a populist approach to the arts industry and just play happy tunes that everybody wants to hear and nothing profound. I think that would be the wrong approach. I think it should be the extreme opposite. I think now we can challenge our audience more than before. That’s my gut feeling. And I’m not alone with that.
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We need some good music to end with today. First, of course, the Symphony No. 99 by Joseph Haydn. This is the Orchestra of the 18th Century, conducted by Frans Brüggen.
And here are nine percussionists, plus conductor, with the percussion interlude from Shostakovich's opera The Nose:
That should keep you amused for a bit!
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