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For composer Robert Paterson, a 35-minute work for orchestra, chorus, and narrator was not just a benchmark in his creative career. It was also the capstone of a three-year Music Alive residency with a major youth-orchestra organization, and an affirmation of deeply held concerns about the fate of Planet Earth. Paterson’s A New Eaarth, which the Vermont Youth Orchestra and Chorus premiered May 4 and 6 in Stowe and Burlington, Vermont, takes its theme and peculiar orthography—but not its text—from the recent book Eaarth by noted environmentalist Bill McKibben. More

Justin Brown knows how to craft a program. In his six years as music director of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Brown has infused the ensemble with his love of new music and gained it a reputation as an adventurous presenter of contemporary music. During Brown’s tenure he launched the ASO’s composer in residence program; the ASO has performed works by Elliott Carter, George Crumb, John Adams, and Peter Lieberson and won a first-place 2009-10 ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. In 2011, the ASO and Brown won ASCAP’s highest award: the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music. The ASO recently released a recording on the Bridge label of three commissioned works by Paul Lansky, whose Shapeshifters will be featured by the ASO when it comes to Carnegie Hall this May as one of six orchestras in the Spring for Music festival highlighting innovative programming by North American orchestras. More

We’ve all felt it—that simultaneous convenience of, yet enslavement to, our computers, email, iPhones, musical cloud. The merits vs. dangers of technology may seem an endless debate these days, but the Charlotte Symphony hopes to harness technology to visually engage a new generation of concertgoers. On Friday, May 4, the orchestra and Music Director Christopher Warren-Green present “Bolero Comes Alive,” featuring the classic Ravel score set to new video animation, commissioned by the orchestra, from New York-based artist Matthew Weinstein (above, bottom right). The program is part of the orchestra’s KnightSounds series, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which offers “multi-sensory” concert experiences. More

Known for amplifying cactuses and performing on suspended soda bottles, the Brooklyn-based quartet Sō Percussion is tackling a different sort of project this year: since September, the entire ensemble has been on the faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. It’s the first of two institutional appointments for the quartet founded in 1999, whose members are Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. They’re also amid a yearlong residency at Princeton University, where they primarily instruct composition students and perform their work. More

Last month, arts administrators, educators, and musicians from all over the country gathered at the University of Michigan’s School of Music in Ann Arbor to talk about the future of American orchestras. From March 20-23, American Orchestras Summit II (the first Summit was held in 2010) examined the cultural, social, and professional roles of orchestras, focusing on what’s working in the industry today and sharing ideas old and new that are succeeding. Among the issues addressed in Michigan were productive collaboration, serving audiences and communities, and the training of the professional musician in the 21st century. More

When was the last time you interacted with the art at a museum? Not gazed upon the paintings in reverential quiet, but actively shared your reactions in public, or posted your thoughts and ideas right there on the wall, or got the inside story from a curator brimming with insights and inspirations? No one should be manhandling the Mona Lisa, of course, but perhaps the museum experience might go beyond admiring the art from a slight distance.

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What shape might orchestras take 5, 10, 20 years from now? How do orchestras walk that fine balance between revering tradition and remaining relevant? And just how do you engage listeners with the symphonies of Bruckner in the era of the 140-character attention span? These and a host of related questions are just some of the issues that orchestras are grappling with today, as changing demographics, new digital media, and music in unusual venues present fresh opportunities. More

The National Symphony Orchestra is south-bound. The Washington, D.C.-based orchestra’s recently announced “Americas Tour,” its first under Music Director Christoph Eschenbach, will take it to five countries—Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil—for eight concerts from June 12 to 27. In her April 3 Washington Post online column, Anne Midgette noted a bit of related history: “The NSO’s first-ever international tour, in 1959, was also to Latin and South America More

How effective is music as medicine? Very effective, to judge from feedback about a program Wisconsin’s Madison Symphony has operated since 2005. The Madison Symphony is making a strong case for the healing power of music with HeartStrings, a music-therapy-based program for people with developmental disabilities, long-term illnesses, and dementia. And they’re showing other orchestras how, with a new toolkit just published. More

Mandolin doesn’t get much play in the classical-music world, apart from a certain well-known concerto by Vivaldi. But back in 2009, Chris Thile got attention by composing—of all things—a mandolin concerto in classical three-movement form. The mandolinist and singer may be best known from his years with the Nickel Creek acoustic trio and his current band, Punch Brothers, but rather than writing the bluegrass-tinged piece that many expected, More

The San Francisco Symphony turns 100 this season, but rather than take a nostalgic look back at past glories, it is tackling some of the big questions orchestras face right here, right now. The San Francisco Symphony is looking ahead, too, at what form orchestras might take in the future with its season-long American Orchestra Forum. More

What does it take to make the transformation from high-profile soloist to music director of an orchestra? Just ask violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. In 2008, she joined the New Century Chamber Orchestra, a conductorless all-string ensemble based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was charged with reinvigorating the orchestra and raising its national profile. More

“Gregor Piatigorsky was my childhood idol,” says cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, artistic director of the newly established Piatigorsky International Cello Festival set to debut March 9-18 in Los Angeles. Indeed there are few artists who loom as large in the annals of 20th-century cello performance and pedagogy as Piatigorsky, who built a towering career, first in Europe and then in the U.S., after surreptitiously leaving the Soviet Union in 1921 at the age of eighteen. The new festival, presented by the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music and the Los Angeles Philharmonic More

Amman, Jordan is a city of the old and the new, the ancient and the modern, all drifting together as pieces of a big unexpected puzzle. Roman ruins stand next to modern hotels and shops, florescent lights shine from the tops of tattered mosques, and older women wrapped in headscarves walk hand-in-hand with children dressed in American Eagle T-shirts. All of these were first time images for me when, on February 16, I and 17 of my Fayetteville Symphony colleagues, plus Music Director Fouad Fakhouri, traveled from our home state of North Carolina to Jordan. More

You probably read or heard about the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s visit to Venezuela earlier this month. Or maybe you watched, as I did, their extraordinary, culminating Mahler 8th performance combined with the Orquesta Sinfonica Simón Bolívar. Among tour highlights were shared music-making and teaching with that country’s inspiring social and musical movement known as El Sistema, which includes the Bolívar orchestra. The movement trained the LA Phil’s music director, Gustavo Dudamel, and he is a fervent advocate for its musical and social benefits. More

Meeting the educational needs of talented young instrumentalists in a rural, sparsely populated state with few musical resources in the schools is a challenge. And it’s a matter of paramount concern to Jeffrey Domoto, now one year into his job as music director of the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association. More

Here’s a really exciting development. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra just announced an internet contest for identifying a guest soloist. Any adult in the U.S. can compete in ten instrumental categories by uploading a video, not unlike the YouTube Symphony. Pittsburgh’s artistic team will review the videos and choose twenty semi-finalists. Then the world can vote to pick four finalists, who will be flown to Pittsburgh for an audition to play with the orchestra.

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For millions of Americans, hunger is a reality. According to recent studies, one in six people in this country will struggle with simply putting food on the table. Over the last three years, orchestras have stepped in to help. The Orchestras Feeding America food drive, launched by the League of American Orchestras in partnership with Feeding America in 2009, has harnessed the collective energies of orchestras nationwide to help relieve hunger. Since the inaugural food drive, some 250 orchestras in all 50 states have partnered with their local food banks to raise more than 350,000 pounds of food. More

In a recent essay in New York Magazine, classical-music critic Justin Davidson went public with his struggle to like Philip Glass’s music. “Drugs work differently on different metabolisms, angels appear only to the elect, and I lack the gift of spinning Glassian tedium into bliss,” he wrote. More

Baseball. Barbeque. Bruce Springsteen. One could argue that American culture has its own “three Bs.” Brass bands, though certainly not without precedent overseas, could easily be deemed a fourth, given the almost mythical space they occupy in New Orleans musical culture. Of course, leave it to the Big Apple to put its own unique spin on such a vital American musical tradition. The Asphalt Orchestra is a New York-based brass band incorporating dramatic elements More