Category - Miscellaneous

1
A Polyphonic Thanksgiving MUSICAL FEAST!
2
Winter Issue of Symphony Magazine Now Available
3
The Violinist: A Tale for Valentine’s Day
4
Getty Grant Awards Announced
5
When Jean Sibelius Almost Taught at the Eastman School
6
Most definitely not a viola joke
7
The Force Is Already With Us
8
The Magic of Serendipity
9
Have Bass, Will Travel. Nervously.
10
A must-read piece on performance anxiety

A Polyphonic Thanksgiving MUSICAL FEAST!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours from everyone at Polyphonic.org!  To celebrate the holiday, we asked each of our editors to design a musical “feast” – a menu of some favorite musical selections for which they are thankful.  Enjoy! Ann Drinan – Senior Editor Appetizer: Hot brie cheese and spicy goat cheese with fancy crackers,[…]

Read More

Winter Issue of Symphony Magazine Now Available

You can read the winter issue of Symphony Magazine here.  The issue contains a number of interesting articles including the following: Hyperlinked: Emerging classical artists embrace social media Music Alive: New models for embedding contemporary composers with orchestras – and communities How Can Orchestras Become More Diverse? Five African-America orchestra professionals in a roundtable discussion[…]

Read More

Getty Grant Awards Announced

22 Orchestras Receive Getty Education and Community Investment Grants from the League of American Orchestras Intended to help stimulate growth and excellence in education and community engagement programming, the grants will fund orchestras’ long-term in-school and after-school music programs with social development components, as well as orchestras’ health and wellness programs for populations including hospital[…]

Read More

When Jean Sibelius Almost Taught at the Eastman School

File this one under the category of “fascinating music school history.” According to Vincent Lenti’s 2004 book, “For the Enrichment of Community Life: George Eastman and the Founding of the Eastman School of Music,” the famed Finnish composer Jean Sibelius very nearly became a faculty member of the Eastman School to teach music theory and[…]

Read More

Most definitely not a viola joke

It’s not often a story this inspiring comes out of our business: Many people speak about the healing power of music, and I was lucky enough to be able to experience the truth of the idea. In the summer of 2013, I traveled with my now-wife then co-dreamer Lauren to the Middle East to bring[…]

Read More

The Force Is Already With Us

John Williams is one of the most important and influential composers writing new music for orchestras today. In fact, the most exciting and anticipated new music for orchestra this year is John Williams’ new score to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Yet, despite his incontestably successful forty-year career writing new music for orchestra and his[…]

Read More

The Magic of Serendipity

My wife and I were recently in Amsterdam revisiting the major art museums and enjoying that wonderful freedom which makes this city so extraordinary. The weather had been really hot, and on this particular day, the heat had joined forces with a great tumult of humidity.

Read More

Have Bass, Will Travel. Nervously.

Whatever airline horror story you have about lost or mishandled luggage, I’m pretty sure Robert Black can top it. Robert, as many of you around here know, is a brilliant, nationally recognized double bass player and teacher. He is perhaps best known for being a founding member of the avant-garde music ensemble, the Bang on a[…]

Read More

A must-read piece on performance anxiety

The New Yorker continues to be the best magazine in the English-speaking work for coverage of arts issues (as opposed to arts news), as demonstrated by an article-length review of Sara Solovitch’s book Playing Scared: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright: Stagefright has been aptly described as “self-poisoning by adrenaline.” In response to stress,[…]

Read More