Classical Music Magazine

Former Royal Academy of Music director jailed for £230,000 fraud

Janet Whitehouse, the former director of finance at the Royal Academy of Music who earlier this month pleaded guilty to charges of having defrauded the RAM of more than £230,000, was today sentenced to 20 months’ imprisonment.

The Independent

Song of the suicided Bomber: How ‘Babur in London’ negotiated a cultural minefield

The daring new opera featuring British terrorists planning an attack is being staged next month.

Israeli orchestra strikes note of controversy with Wagner work

A seven-decade old cultural taboo will be broken next month when an Israeli symphony orchestra will play works by Richard Wagner inside the country for the first time since the state’s foundation in 1948.

The Guardian

Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra concert to be live-streamed

Sell-out Venezuela orchestra concert to be live-streamed on Guardian website on 23 and 26 June.

Arts Journal – Slipped disc

Orchestra goes looking for unpublished composers

Now here’s one they haven’t tried before. The Britten Sinfonia want to hear from composers – but only if they haven’t been published before.

Gramophone

Hear the score behind the final Olympic film

Composer Thomas Hewitt Jones captures the spirit of the Games.

(Written on May 31, 2012 )

Open Goldberg Variations director Robert Douglass, pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, and music notation company MuseScore have been invited to demonstrate a unique score-following technology at the Classical:NEXT conference in Munich at the end of May. In addition, Robert Douglass will be speaking on a panel discussing crowdfunding music projects.

This score-following technology, developed by SampleSumo and MuseScore, recognises the music as it is being performed and follows the score accordingly, allowing the audience to see every note being played. This development will, for the first time, bring the score to the forefront of the audience’s experience of a live concert.

The demonstration will consist of Kimiko Ishizaka playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, with all members of the conference following the score in real-time, on their own computers, phones, or tablets, thanks to MuseScore’s technology.

Robert Douglass, the founder and director of the Open Goldberg Variations project, will also be speaking on a panel discussing the crowd-funding of music projects. The aim of the Open Goldberg Variations project is to provide a new public domain recording and score of the Goldberg Variations for anybody to listen to, copy, and use, however they like. Over 400 fans donated money towards the project via the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. The Goldberg Variations recording, made by pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, will be available as a free download for everyone in the summer.

For more information on the Open Goldberg Variations Project, please visit: http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/

For more information on MuseScore please visit: http://musescore.com

For more information on SampleSumo please visit: http://www.samplesumo.com/

For more information on the Classical:NEXT conference please visit: http://www.classicalnext.com/

(Written on March 20, 2012 )