LPs Are Not Taking Over the World

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According to SoundScan, vinyl record sales are up 32% over last year, but the LP is hardly back, as Mashable recently declared. Total music sales--CD, digital download, and vinyl--were about 300 million units in 2013, and of those, only 6 million, or around 2%, were of the big, black disc variety.

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Don't Stop the Christmas Music

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Christmas is over, but there's no reason to stop listening to music for the season. Here are some suggestions of things that haven't yet become holiday classics, but which deserve hearing while you're still in the mood. Written in 1927, A Carol Symphony by British composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson is an honest-to-goodness four-movement symphony based on traditional holiday tunes. It's entertaining as all get-out, and deserves to be played more often this time of year. Of course, Naxos has a recording of A Carol Symphony available. A Carol Symphony - Allegro ene... Though not strictly a Christmas piece, David Lang's Little Match Girl Passion  reminds us that this is a time of year to remember the neediest. Lang's 30-minute meditation on Hans Christian Andersen's short story about a poor girl who dies alone in the cold on New Year's Eve received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall  in 2007. Another contemporary American work, John Adams's  El...
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HEAR Initiative Makes the Philadelphia Orchestra Look Like a Do-Gooding Think Tank, and That's Awesome

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More and more, orchestras in the United States are investing in non-traditional, community-based programs  that are not only helping to re-establish themselves as part of the civic fabric but are also broadening the notion of what constitutes an orchestra musician. Earlier this month, the Philadelphia Orchestra became the latest and most prominent American orchestra to take this step when it announced i ts HEAR initiative . It's cutesy acronym that stands for Health, Education, Access, Research , but is looks like the work behind it is anything but frivolous. An example of a HEAR project is the orchestra's partnership with the Temple University Arts and Quality of Life Research Cente r and the Broad Street Ministry.  After receiving music therapy training, orchestra musicians perform together with ministry guests, who include victims of homelessness and abuse. Temple University researchers then observe these performances to determine, as the ministry website puts...
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Bartok Lived in Riverdale Too

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It ends up that Hungarian composer Bela Bartok lived in the Bronx, just down the street from where I live now. Small world, eh? After leaving Europe to avoid the Nazis, Bartok settled in Forest Hills, Queens in 1940. The next year, he crossed the Harlem River to Cambridge Avenue in Riverdale. Apparently, the well-treed parks of the neighborhood put the composer at ease and reminded him of Budapest; he stayed for three years before moving to 57th Street, close to Carnegie Hall. He passed in 1945. While in Riverdale, Bartok worked for Columbia University as a researcher--he was a renowned collector of Hungarian folk music--and also composed his most famous work, the Concerto for Orchestra, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered in 1944. Here's the last movement: You can hear snippets of this piece and get a little background on NPR.org .
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