Another year of political turmoil, the deaths of André Previn and Michel Legrand, awards, premieres and festivals. Here’s C:T’s exclusive look back at another year in contemporary music…. January C:T ...
Yesterday evening the Ivors Academy announced the winners of the 2019 Ivors Composer Awards. Ivor Novello Awards were presented across eleven nominated categories that included jazz composition, works for chamber ...
On Wednesday the Incorporated Society of Musicians called upon the government to cover any post-Brexit costs associated with travelling to the EU27/EEA if there is a no deal Brexit. They estimated that ...
It was sad to see today that Borough New Music, whose season finished at the end of last month, has announced that it has no plans to continue. Though a relative ...
Last year I reported on the work by UK record label Drama Musica and its project partner DONNE, Women in Music, who conducted a gender balance study of the 2018/19 orchestral season ...
The Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) has released a new report entitled ‘Impact of Brexit on Musicians’: The main findings were: -Almost 50% of respondents identified an impact on their ...
It seems that the majestic Cavaille-Coll organ at Notre Dame has emerged from the dreadful conflagration relatively unscathed. Vincent Dubois, the organist titulaire, said ‘It’s a miracle! The most recent news, a priori, ...
Boris Johnson today reacted to the EU’s passing of Article 13, its new copyright law designed to protect content creators, including composers: This produced a backlash from a number of musicians… ...
Hannah Conway will join Streetwise Opera, a charitable organisation that runs programmes for the homeless, from April 2017. She replaces founder Matt Peacock, who will leave the company for With One Voice, ...
The German city of Schwäbisch Gmünd has awarded John Rutter the €5000 European Church Music Prize. Their citation commended him for ‘his great contributions to the field of clerical music: John Rutter ...
Brexit is not the only European issue that British composers should be thinking about right now. You may have seen, especially from platforms such as YouTube, a concerted action against ...
In 2018 C:T celebrated Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday; congratulated the many composers who received honours, awards and prizes; reviewed recordings; interviewed composers and mourned the loss of some much-loved colleagues. ...
Congratulations to this year’s British Composer Award winners, who were announced in a ceremony at the British Museum last night. There were twelve categories, with the winners as follows: Amateur or Young ...
Judith Weir has been announced as this year’s commissioned composer for King’s College Cambridge’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. The tradition of commissioning a new carol for each service ...
Vanessa Rose. Photo Credit: Julia Gang. On 30th October Anne LeBaron, Board Chair of America Composers Forum, announced the appointment of Vanessa Rose as their new President and CEO from ...
Melvyn Bragg has added his voice to debate on how Brexit will affect the art in the UK, saying in the House of Lords: Today our musicians travel freely; connections are ...
Congratulations to young Scotsman Gregor Forbes, who is the first composer to win the International Hanns Eisler Scholarship by the City of Leipzig. He will receive 5000 euros and be invited to ...
If you are an ageing composer whose heart was warmed by the news that Simon Rattle has ‘discovered’ nonagenarian Betsy Jolas, you should probably moderate your enthusiasm. Whilst Rattle knew very little ...
The excellent politics.co.uk, edited by the even more excellent Ian Dunt, posted an article on 3rd September pointing out how Brexit, whilst being a cry against metropolitan elites, will probably end up focusing ...
The London Symphony Orchestra has announced the appointment of six new composers to its LSO Soundhub and LSO Jerwood Composer+ programmes, and two composers who will continue onto the next ...
There have been some astonishing composerly revivals during the course of music history: Bach was underrated until Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in March 1829, ...
On Thursday the House of Lords European Union Committee reported on the likely implications for the cultural sector once the UK has left the European Union. It stressed the importance of freedom ...
Germany’s Goethe-Insitut makes an annual award for those who ‘have performed outstanding service for the German language and for international cultural relations.’ One of this year’s prize winner is Hungarian ...
The BBC announced yesterday that it is to leave its Maida Vale Studios. Starting life as the Maida Vale Roller Skating Palace in 1909, it has since played host to ...
Whether a recent story about proclivities of Admiral Lord Nelson is true or false, it rather proves that the sexual lives of the renowned dead provide good copy. This has always been ...
Classical music streaming service IDAGIO has announced a collaboration that will make the entire Warner Classics and Erato catalogue available to its users. The IDAGIO catalogue, which already comprises over ...
Jennifer Higdon has been awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition for ‘her highly acclaimed and wide-ranging compositions that have led to her status and one of most ...
A belated ‘happy birthday’ to Samuel Adler, who celebrated his 90th birthday on 4th March. Some composers will know him best from his widely used treatise The Study of Orchestration, but ...
Kaija Saariaho has been announced as the winner of the 10th edition of the BBVA Foundation Contemporary Music Award. The prize is $500,000. From the BBVA website: The BBVA Foundation Frontiers ...
Geraldine Mucha in the 1980s. Image: geraldinemucha.org Whilst last year marked the centenary of the birth of Scottish composer Geraldine Mucha, 2018 will see further celebrations of her life and work. Mucha ...
It has been reported that Bingley Grammar School charges children £5 per week to take GCSE music lessons after school. The decision was described by the Incoporated Society of Musicians as ‘shocking ...
Presumably when Matt Hancock, the new UK Culture Secretary, compared the creative industries to a woolly mammoth on Tuesday, he meant ‘big’ and and not muddle-minded. We can only hope he is ...
The Government has released its Creative Industries Report prepared by the Department for Exiting the EU. You can read it here. The opening paragraph makes it clear that this is not ...
2016 was viewed by many in the music world as one to forget. There were the deaths of Boulez, David Bowie, Peter Maxwell Davies and Prince and the twin political earthquakes ...
I was lucky enough to attend the British Composer Awards last night, held at the British Museum, London. The ceremony was presented by Andrew McGregor and Sara Mohr-Pietsch of Radio ...
A selection of reviews from the opening of Nico Muhly’s Marnie, premiered at ENO last Saturday. Muhly’s second opera for the company, it is based upon either or both the 1964 ...
On 9th November the Paul Hamlyn Foundation announced their Awards for Artists list for 2017. The Award, which provides ‘individuals with financial assistance at a timely moment in their careers’, has been ...
The British Academy of Songwriter, Composers and Authors (BASCA) has announced its nominees for its 2017 composer awards, which will be presented in London on 6th December. 2017 British Composer ...
Sound and Music has announced its 2017/18 ‘Adopt a Composer’ pairings. These are: Anna Appleby with Merchant Sinfonia Max Charles Davies with Côr Crymych a’r Cylch Esmeralda Conde Ruiz with The Fretful Federation Mandolin ...
Perhaps there’s life in the old beast yet. Sibelius yesterday announced ‘Cloud Sharing’, which will allow the program ‘to send Sibelius scores to the cloud for rendering that can be displayed ...
Arts Council England has just announced its portfolio organisations that will receive funding over the next four years. A greater percentage of money than in previous years will be used to fund ...
Musicians looking for rays of soft Brexit hope following Theresa May’s disastrous election last week might reflect on the fact that far from softening Brexit, it may have produced something ...
Maria Wanda Milliore, originator of the fantastical lake opera sets at the Bregenz Festival, died on May 12th aged 96. It was for a performance of Mozart’s Bastien et Bastienne in 1946 ...
The Royal Philharmonic Society announced their music awards yesterday evening at The Brewery in the City of London. The awards celebrate live music-making and recognise outstanding musical achievement in the UK during ...
In Philadelphia, a project to reanimate over 1,000 broken instruments owned by the school district is reaching its latter stages. The project is the brainchild of Robert Blackson, Director of ...
I am currently spending a few days as an observer at the International Musicological Society’s 20th Annual Congress (19th–23rd March) in Tokyo, partly to provide company to my partner, who ...
A very happy birthday to Samuel Barber, who would have been 107 today. To mark the occasion, here is a preview of a soon to be released documentary about the ...
Following the enormous success of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, which has been performed nearly 100 times around the world, the Royal Opera House has commissioned a new opera from the ...
The PRS has just announced the twelve UK composers who will receive funding ‘to enable them to realise projects and ambitions that may not be possible through traditional commissioning models.’ ...
With the loss of a number of musicians, cultural icons such as Peter Shaffer, Umberto Eco, Harper Lee, Elie Wiesel and Alan Rickman, not to mention some seismic political events, ...
On December 2nd Valery Gergiev will give the ‘world premiere’ of Stravinky’s Funeral Song.The piece, which was performed just once before being lost, was decribed by the composer as “The best ...
From the King’s website: The composer of this year’s commissioned Christmas carol is British composer Michael Berkeley, who has set to music a the traditional 15th century Christmas text This Endernight. ...
Four visual artists and three composers have just been announced as recipients of the £50,000 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award. ‘Awards for Artists was launched in 1994 and are the largest individual awards ...
On 19th October Steinberg released the first version of its scorewriting software Dorico. This is an event of huge significance, since it promises to give professional composers, engravers and educators ...
Ok, so it has very little to do with contemporary music, but if you haven’t seen this musical parody of the second presidential debate you must watch it immediately—it is ...
Do you have a composition website? Ah, the tedious art of self-promotion. If you’re anything like me, you try to put in every positive thing that you’ve done, that one ...
A happy birthday to Steve Reich, who turned 80 yesterday. For those wishing to get to know or revisit some of his key works, take a look at this article, which ...
Ravi Shankar was working on an opera at the time of his his death in 2012. This is now slated to received its world premiere in May at Leicester’s Curve ...
A date for the diary. On October 1st Sonostream will free livestream Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Donnerstag, the first opera from his monumental Licht cycle. From the Sonostream website: The first of the seven operas, „Donnerstag“ (Thursday), ...
Recently giving evidence to the UK Government’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, George Vass, Chair of the British Arts Festival Association, and Mark Pemberton, Director of the Association of ...
It seems that a contingent of Remainers plans to use the Last Night of the Proms to wave a large number of EU flags. This has provoked angry interventions from Leave ...
Two leading arts figures have this week quit the UK in the wake of the decision to leave the European Union. On 4th September Nicholas Mansfield, the British director of ...
Norman Lebrecht recently drew attention to comments made by Jacques Attali: Je crois personnellement que la musique atonale est une impasse, elle ne correspond pas à la nature même de l’audition, elle ...
Palmyra Concert Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Opera Orchestra gave a concert at Palmyra yesterday. The recapture of the ancients ruins by Russian-backed troops was one of the few pieces of good ...
The shenanigans at English National Opera would seem to be an obvious vindication of Micawber’s advice regarding fiscal contentedness. We are entitled to ask, however: to what extent should an arts organisation ...
Sound and Music has just published the results of its second Composer Commissioning Survey. This year it aims to give a more international perspective, with the Australian Music Centre also providing ...
There was much talk of doom after the close of the UK Sibelius Office in 2012. With hindsight, it now seems that it was justified. The next paid upgrade to the ...
I was enormously impressed to find Naxos disks available on Apple Music. Since starting to use the service, however, I’ve noticed a curious thing. Last month some albums that I ...
Despite waxing lyrical about the joys of being on the road, the comfort of a Pembrokeshire Christmas almost persuaded me to give up my nomadic lifestyle. I have finally, however, ...
Using their extensive concert database, the people at Bachtrack have put together a fascinating analysis of classical concerts during 2013. Unlike CT, their listings do not concentrate on contemporary music so, using ...
Today, I have been trying to think of pieces of music that might be appropriate for the celebration of a royal baby. The Cunning Little Vixen, perhaps, with its story of ...
A retelling of Benjamin Britten’s last years in yesterday’s Telegraph brought a tragic note to his centenary celebrations. The article was an extract from Paul Kildea’s new biography: Benjamin Britten: A Life in ...
On July 2nd, Avid Technology, the company who recently acquired Sibelius Software, announced a major restructuring. This included the shedding of 350 jobs and the sell-off of the audio peripheral division M-Audio and ...
Susanna Eastburn has been appointed as new Chief Executive for Sound and Music. Eastburn is currently Director, Music, Arts Council England and has an impressive track record in the arts ...
So did anyone sign the open letter to Sound and Music? I received a copy a couple of weeks ago, but in the confusion of moving house forgot about it. ...
‘He fiddles with the keyboard, commanding the computer to play an aria for mezzo-soprano and orchestra…In meekly peeping tones, the computer sings a sinuous, long-breathed melody, twisting and turning over ...
Some while back I wrote about my experience of visiting the Guggenheim in Bilbao. What I especially found striking was how many people were prepared to visit a gallery of contemporary art ...
In 2004 the Office of Fair Trading asked the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) to stop providing guidance about commission fees paid to composers, saying it was anti-competitive. To ...
More evidence that the UK is living in artistically straitened times emerged yesterday from the Arts Council of England. A £100m budget cut in October has led to a reduction ...
