Random Monday: Renee Fleming, Mixing Genres and Age Discrimination

Reflecting on items over the past week.

• At The Horn, there is a review of Renee Fleming’s new book The Inner Voice. I am going to have to pick that one up. I have not kept my adoration for her much of a secret.

• Conductor Kenneth Woods is featured in a UK Guardian article that reports his activities in mixing pop technology and classical music. For a tech-geek like myself, this was a fascinating read.
  

  …he has stormed through the repertoire, bringing an 80’s sensibility to his performances of Rite of Spring with an all-drum-machine percussion section, the Dvorak Wind Serenade with a matched set of Yamaha Midi wind controllers, and on and on.

• The Library of Congress has forged deals with most of the major Web 2.0 networks and soon will post video, image and audio clips to iTunes, Flickr and YouTube.
  

  Among the items Web surfers can expect on iTunes and YouTube are 100-year-old films from Thomas Edison’s studio, book talks with contemporary authors, early industrial films from Westinghouse factories, first-person audio accounts of life in slavery, and inside looks into the library’s holdings, including the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and the contents of President Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night of his assassination.

  …sweet!

  As a tool for arts education and research, this has huge potential.

• Robert Levine takes the current controversy of age discrimination at the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra and expands on the topic in a Polyphonic.org article. A very thought-provoking entry.

• In “Silencing a Music Critic” I found out that dethroned music critic Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer used to play the horn.