There were lots of good articles this past week! Perhaps there was some built up energy from the July 4 festivities.
Pianist and scholar Robert Levin speaks at Curtis Commencement on May 16, 2009. If you click on nothing here, you must listen to this if you are a classical musician. It takes about 15 minutes. It’s worth it. [It’s not from the time period specified in this post’s title, but it’s still great.]
Make Your Audition Pianist Happy by Billie Whittaker on her blog Good Company is an informative and funny article. It is specifically written for singers, so you should definitely check it out.
Sitting Quietly, Doing Something from the New York Times bog Happy Days is about the science of happiness. In particular, it is about a Buddhist monk who is demonstrably the happiest man in the world. Turns out that happiness is trainable. There’s also an embedded video that is very interesting.
I Don’t Know How they Do it by Jessica Duchen at Standpoint. This is an appreciative article about Joyce DiDonato who sang Rosina in Barber of Seville with a broken leg. It goes on to ask for pity for singers who cancel due to health concerns.
Coffee Breakdown: Is there a Link between Caffeine and Hallucinations? from Scientific American. As the name suggests, this article describes the effects that caffeine has on stress…and they aren’t good.
Music Review-‘Prima Donna’: The Diva has Issues from New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini is a gentle mixed review for the first full opera by Rufus Wainwright. I love Rufus’ music and would love to hear his opera.
Youtube: Where Customers Get the Last Word from Small Business Trends discusses the recent case of professional musician Dave Carroll whose guitar was badly damaged on a United Flight. He countered with some hard hitting songs on YouTube, and now United is listening. [By the way, if you are a voice teacher or singer, then you are a small business. This is a great blog to follow.]
And yet…You Tube Pulls Audio from Greatest Music Video Ever from CNET is about the audio track being pulled from the parody version of “You Make my Dreams” by Hall and Oates. It featured the “keyboard cat”. Weird. Read the comments too (in the article, those on YouTube are totally R rated in protest). Turns out audio tracks have been yanked from personal videos because a copyrighted song happened to be playing in the background.
The Capacity for Honesty from Once More With Feeling is a good “musing” on the difference between artists and performers as well as honesty and artifice as related to repertoire decisions.
Finding Ways to Communicate: Fitting Your Audience’s Style by Rachel Velarde has a lot of good social media tips.
Learning to Sing: Deciding When to Start from Finding my Singing Voice offers some excellent advice for teachers of young singers and their parents.
