… and still I share it. Shame on me! But still, this is just … well … too darn bizarre not to put on the blog. I guess. Maybe. (I might change my mind later on. We’ll see.)
A fancy Williamsburg canine salon sets itself apart from the pack by dimming the lights and putting on classical music before massaging your dog’s rectum.
RTWT (if you dare)
Reasons to Date Someone in the Arts
I won’t paste all their reasons here so you’ll have to click the link, but some things are true, some sort of true, and some things are sort of laughable. At least for me. Maybe you’ll all say, “Well of COURSE!”
But I could use a laugh so that’s all that matters. Right?
I just read this online:
How do I fix my oboe?
There are five keys on my oboe that when I press them down they don’t come back up. I don’t think the pads are sticking, I think it is a problem with the screws. This oboe hasn’t been played in a while so I think it is in pretty sorry shape. I can’t afford to pay to fix it and the school (I am renting the oboe through my band teacher) doesn’t have any money left, plus it is the end of the school year. Is there any way I can fix the oboe myself?
How does one even begin to answer this? Odds are it’s a rotten school instrument. Odds are there are multiple things that are wrong with it. And the student is renting the instrument? Sigh.
When I started to get back into teaching in a serious way some years ago I had a lot of students come in with horrendous instruments. I dealt with them as best I could. I no longer do that. If they refuse to get an instrument that works I turn them away. It’s just too much of a struggle. One way to try and convince parents about instruments is to show them how their child sounds on my instrument or, if the student isn’t yet capable of really playing yet, I play on his or her wreck of an oboe. Parents either will hear that their child sounds better on my instrument, or they’ll hear me sound pretty darn rotten (okay, so maybe I make a point of not trying to sound good!) on theirs. That can help.
Maybe “Gospel According to the Other Mary” will be controversial. Not that I neccesarily want it to, but sometimes I wish classical music would get heat with its new creations, even the petty aspects that can come with that. At least it would show that art music is relevant to greater society.
Can you imagine the response to a film like this? Well, at least we can be reasonable sure this will be excellent. It is, after all, John Adams.
I read it here.
Um … I guess the writer doesn’t know about the reactions to the opera Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams. And gee, I do believe Stravinsky got a wee bit of a reaction at one point. Or am I misunderstanding what he is writing? (Happens all the time!)
So what others can we list in the classical world that got “heat” …?
“When I came back to America I was trying to get jobs with bigger orchestras, but they were not interested. One orchestra told me they like my conducting and the board thought I had great ideas, but they didn’t know how to market me,” said Johnson.
“When I asked him for clarity, the guy on the search committee basically said, ‘You just don’t look like what our audience would expect a conductor to look like.’ That’s when I founded my own orchestra.”
She’s a woman. She’s African American. So an audience can’t handle those things? Or maybe just the guy on the search committee?
Well, okay … she even says that audiences expect something else. (There are a number of videos you can watch from this same place if you go here.)
So Jeri Lynne Johnson formed her own orchestra, the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra. Kudos to her!
I read it here.
My elder daughter is an oboist. She is definitely talented, and for years had slid by on her innate abilities. The man who taught her in undergraduate school is a wonderful person and a great teacher. He sat her down one day and leveled with her. Scott went to undergraduate school at the Cleveland Conservatory, and the oboe studio was taught at that time by a famous player and teacher. Scott said he was clearly the least talented player in his class. He is also the only one who is working as a professional oboist. The reason? “I got to the end of my talent very early on, and I discovered I would have to substitute hard work for the lack of it.” In other words, he learned from a relatively early age to apply himself and to be the first one in and the last one out of the practice room.
How far did hard work take him? He is a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony oboe section. Which contains three people.
I read it here.
A New Zealand Symphony Orchestra violinist has learnt a painful lesson about checking his phone while navigating steps.
However, the nasty tumble heralded a nice surprise this morning.
David Gilling – assistant sub-principal second violin in the orchestra – fell down a flight of steps at Civic Square, rupturing the tendons in both legs which connect the quadriceps to the knee caps.
At 11am today, a portion of the orchestra’s brass section turned up at his Kelburn house to lift his spirits with a surprise performance.
Confession: I was texting or checking a Giants score or something one day on my way from the hall to the car a few years back and yes, I nearly did a face plant. The sidewalk was uneven and of course I wasn’t looking and I tripped. Fortunately I caught myself before going all the way down but it was a close call. Since then I’ve rarely texted while walking. I really should stop doing it all together. Maybe publicly writing this will get me to be a better girl. I sure don’t need to break any bones!
I just read this headline:
Local quartet keeps classical music relevant with pop mixes
With only seven celebrities left, the pressure is growing on “Dancing With The Stars.” Monday night’s theme is classical music.
“It’ll be very prim and proper and old fashioned. It’s going to be good,” said Peta Murgatroyd.
… because the kind of music I play — and the kind of person I am — is prim and proper.
Sigh.
I read it here. (And no, I’ve never watched Dancing with the Stars. I’ve seen the end of the show when I turn on the tube to watch the show that follows (Castle) though. I see the “stars” and I can’t figure out who they are!)
KARL WALLINGER: Yeah, well here we are, the aneurysm and all that stuff. I don’t mind talking about that. Its something that actually happened so I might as well talk about it. I played a wind instrument since I was a kid and I always told myself that the aneurysm had nothing to do with smoking but something to do with my having played a wind instrument … though, I might be deluding myself a bit there, who knows. I played the oboe for years up till my late teens, until I did my exams and all that kind of stuff. I was an oboist really as far as my education was concerned. That’s a really high-pressure instrument and a lot of people that play those kinds of instruments have hemorrhages and this sort of thing…
STEREOGUM: Really?
KARL WALLINGER: Yeah, quite a few trumpet players and oboists have had an eruption or some sort of brain explosion. Its a really high pressure thing, I think that probably weakened it…
I read it here.
I’ve been playing oboe since something like 1968 or so. I’ve played professionally since 1975. I’ve never known anyone who’s had a hemorrhage from playing oboe.
(Anyone know the name Karl Wallinger? I sure didn’t.)
Very interesting story:
Every Thursday night, after Northeast Indiana Public Radio has shut down for the day, after the lights are out and the employees have gone home, after the hustle has calmed and the bustle has quieted, Joshua Stephenson arrives.
Joshua is a volunteer host at the radio station, and he records his classical music show – “Josh’s Corner,” which airs at 6 p.m. Saturdays – with his mother, Annette. He is 16 years old, and he started to listen to classical music when he was 6. As a child, large rooms with a lot of noise affected him more than other people. Loud sounds and crowds would cause Joshua to hold his ears, as if he were in pain, says his father, Scott Stephenson.
Sound sensitivity is a common symptom of autism, and Joshua, of Convoy, Ohio, has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism that affects his ability to communicate and interact socially. To treat this sensitivity, Joshua’s parents turned to audio therapy: Using Bose headphones that emphasized the high and low pitches in song, Joshua started to build a tolerance to loud noises through classical music.
Never.
Ethan Shelton is living proof you can teach an old dog new tricks.
The 108-year-old Berrien County man and founder of Shelton’s Farms in Niles decided at age 107 he was going to start playing the violin.
“I told my doctor that’s what I was going to do and his eyebrows went up, ‘What?’” said Shelton, as he sat in his home in Berrien Center.
Shelton practices almost every day on a used violin he bought about a year ago for $25.
“It is close to 100 years old — almost as old as I am,” he quipped.
Listening to Mozart improves the outlook for mice undergoing heart transplants, a study has found.
Verdi had the same effect, increasing the time before the organs failed – but New Age music from Enya had no impact.
A crystal-embellished conductor’s baton made with beautiful SWAROVSKI ELEMENTS for The Miami Symphony Orchestra (MISO) fittingly illustrates classical music’s brilliance. For the first time in Swarovski’s 117-year history, the internationally known crystal designers have created a special Swarovski crystal-studded conductor’s baton, which will direct musical magic for the Miami Symphony Orchestra.
Hmm. Maybe I need a crystal oboe reed. I wonder. But my guess is the darn thing wouldn’t vibrate. (then again, how many of my reeds are vibrating these days?!)
During the first break in Wednesday morning’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra rehearsal, Eugene Izotov took a long look around the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and felt the past colliding with the present.
Not only did the orchestra’s 38-year-old principal oboist grow up in Moscow and attend school just a few blocks from the Conservatory, but “my father played on this stage,” he said.
Now Izotov was preparing to perform Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in that very same hall where he learned the piece— the composer’s triumphant, complex response to Stalinism — from hearing his father, violist Alexander Izotov, play it with the Russia State Symphony Orchestra. Izotov also remembers sneaking into a rehearsal being conducted in 1989 by Riccardo Muti, now the CSO’s music director, then leading La Scala in Milan, Italy.
“I heard him right from those seats,” Izotov said, pointing toward the back of the elegant shoebox of an auditorium.
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