By Steven Brown   CHARLOTTE — Two or three weeks with no day off. Coming and going through busy airports. At work, dozens of people watching your every move. Having three jobs in two cities would be enough to wear you down – if it didn’t immerse you in uplifting music. So Scott Allen Jarrett is […]

Bard Conservatory Graduate Conducting program is accepting applications!   The two-year M.M. program is orchestral and choral conducting is designed and directed by HAROLD FARBERMAN (founder and director of the Conductors Institute at Bard; JAMES BAGWELL (director of Bard’s undergraduate Music Program, music director of the Collegiate Chorale and principal guest conductor of the American […]

Hour 1 concludes with a composition from the Jewish liturgy. I was organist at Temple Sinai in Bay Shore, New York eons ago. George Rochberg’s piece brings back some happy memories of accompanying a young cantor who always sang a mix of traditional and ‘hot off the press’ music. The Allegri mass in Hour 2 […]

By Mark Swed   CARACAS, VZ — When the Los Angeles Philharmonic arrived backstage at Caracas’ Teatro Teresa Carreno for its first rehearsal with chorus and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony Wednesday morning, the first reaction from many Angelenos was a gasp, a wow and a big smile. Then they whipped out […]

GRAND JUNCTION, CO — A Colorado high school student says he quit the school choir after an Islamic song containing the lyric “there is no truth except Allah” made it into the repertoire. James Harper, a senior at Grand Junction High School in Grand Junction, put his objection to singing “Zikr,” a song written by Indian […]

BRISTOL, UK — ON March 1, 1837 – just a few months before 18-year-old Princess Victoria came to the throne – a group of gentlemen met in an upper room at The Montague Inn, Kingsdown, to sing madrigals. Since those days – discounting the Second World War, when it was suspended – Bristol Madrigal Society has […]