The orchestra said an inquiry found credible claims against the musicians of sexual assault and harassment. They denied the charges.The New York Philharmonic said on Monday that it had dismissed two players after an inquiry uncovered what it described as credible claims against them of sexual assault and harassment.The players — the associate principal trumpet, Matthew Muckey, and the principal oboist, Liang Wang — had previously been accused of misconduct, and the Philharmonic tried and failed to fire them in 2018.But the musicians were put on paid leave in April when the orchestra fielded new questions about that case. An investigation that began then has now turned up additional claims of misbehavior, the Philharmonic said.The orchestra last month informed the players that they would be dismissed at the start of the next season. They will remain on paid leave until then.“We have done the right thing and we have followed the letter of the law,” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s interim leader. “The facts strongly supported our case.”Ms. Borda said the inquiry had uncovered “patterns of sexual misconduct and abuse of power” by the two men. She added that Mr. Wang had engaged in inappropriate relationships with students and had improperly tried to influence decisions about tenure. In total, 11 women came forward with accusations against Mr. Wang, the Philharmonic said, and three against Mr. Muckey. The orchestra said the accusations ranged from inappropriate remarks to assault.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Igor Levit returned to New York after streaming dozens of concerts from his apartment during the pandemic.When the pianist Igor Levit streamed dozens of performances from his apartment in Berlin during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, he wore neat but casual clothes: closefitting sweaters, hoodies over T-shirts. He was inviting you to a concert, yes, but also into his home; he offered, in milieu and music, both elevation and comfort.Carnegie Hall, Levit made clear from the moment he walked onstage there Thursday evening, is like home for him, too.Appearing for his first solo recital in the gilded Stern Auditorium, he came on wearing a dark, slouchy collared shirt, left unbuttoned to reveal a crew neck underneath, and black jeans. The impression, as usual with him, was of an artist who dispenses with formalities and fripperies to focus — with relaxation but also intense seriousness — on the music.It was, also as usual for him, an elegantly organized program. A Beethoven sonata that ends in a suite of variations led into the premiere of a new set of variations by Fred Hersch. A transcription of the prelude to Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde” was followed without pause by the B minor Sonata of Liszt, Wagner’s champion and eventual father-in-law — which ends, as “Tristan” does, in the key of B.Building to a mighty climax in a grand account of Liszt’s sprawling sonata, Levit projected a kind of burning patience through the evening. His playing is changeable, but never comes across as improvisatory; there is always a sense of deliberation, sometimes in tempos but always in approach, a palpable sense that everything has been thought out. Yet the results feel confident and fiery, not merely or coolly analytical.From its gently rocking opening — here a mistiness out of which emerged quiet clarity — Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30 in E (Op. 109) received a dreamier, and eventually more explosive, rendition than on the recording Levit released in 2013.He has a gift for gentleness, shaping soft, tender melodies that ache without slackening. In the third movement, he built the final variation to furious, ecstatic runs. But the greatest impact came when those runs dropped out, leaving the remnants of a barely audible trill as the path back to the theme.Hersch is best known as a jazz pianist, but he also writes poised concert works. While Levit has played some of his short pieces, this new Variations on a Folk Song is substantial, a bit more than 20 minutes long.The theme here is the plaintive “Shenandoah,” and Hersch gives sober, subtle, respectful treatment to a song that, as he writes in a program note, “I learned as a child and has so much emotional resonance for me.” One of the 20 variations is slightly skittish; another is slightly robust; the most memorable sprinkles tiny quivers in the pauses of a mild piano line. But the mood is consistent, and kindly.Levit is one of classical music’s most politically outspoken figures, which is one reason that the untroubled sincerity of Hersch’s interpretation of “Shenandoah” is so striking. The song is thought to have its roots among the fur trappers of the early American Midwest and their relations with the Indigenous population; it is a melody that touches the core of our country’s history, in all its complexity. But these unvaried variations are a musical vision of nearly unbroken serenity and benevolence — notably, curiously nostalgic.The “Tristan” prelude was here, in Zoltan Kocsis’s arrangement, far more progressive, its opening almost surreally elongated by Levit so that his eventual landing on flooding chords offered some of the shock this work held for its first listeners. Kocsis’s arrangement ends in shadows, out of which Levit’s Liszt emerged; a rough contemporary to “Tristan,” the sonata was here a stand-in for the opera.It had the time-bending effect “Tristan” often does, its contrasting sections seeming to float alongside one another in a vast expanse. The sense of scale was memorable, as was Levit’s touch: densely liquid low rumbles; charcoal-black stark chords; extremely soft passages that sounded candied, like snow glittering in moonlight.The coherence of his conception of the evening extended to the encore: the actual ending of “Tristan,” the “Liebestod,” in Liszt’s transcription. Its climax — which Liszt achieves by working the extreme ends of the piano simultaneously, to delicately epic effect — spoke for the recital as a whole, judiciously balanced yet thrilling.Igor LevitPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

Pearl Jamm’s guitarist Tim Love says that he can’t understand why the Eddie Vedder-fronted rock band made the demand for them to hand over email addresses and destroy merchandise.

Jan 19, 2021
AceShowbiz – Pearl Jam has threatened London-based tribute act Pearl Jamm with legal action if they don’t change their name.
The group has received letters from the real band’s lawyers, demanding guitarist Tim Love and his pals hand over email addresses and destroy merchandise.
“They’ve asked us to change the name of the band,” Love told the BBC.
The tribute act has over 9,100 followers on Facebook and Love admits he can’t understand why his heroes are so upset.
“No one’s ever come to a show, got to the end of the show and came up to us demanding their money back because they were expecting to see Pearl Jam play at the Garage in Highbury,” he said.

  See also…

The band has published an open letter to Pearl Jam on Facebook, stating, “You have known of our tribute band for years yet have waited until a global pandemic to have threatening legal letters sent. This isn’t the Pearl Jam we know and love, the Pearl Jam that stands up for social issues and against corporate giants. Yet your lawyers tell us it is indeed you, the band, that are behind this…”
“We know of at least one other tribute band that decided to call it a day over this. It may have been easier, cheaper and more effective for one of you to reach out to us personally. We would have done that for you. But not like this.”

“Your actions are out of character and unreasonable yet our love for the music endures. We sincerely hope that, despite confirmation to the contrary, you are blissfully unaware of actions being taken in your name. We invite you to respond either publicly or privately and rescind the legal threats that have been made.”

You can share this post!

Next article
Gigi Hadid Reveals Her Hardest Day Dealing With Nausea During Pregnancy

Related Posts More

The Greek-French composer, who was born 100 years ago, created a revolution in music.“Greeks are like that,” the composer Iannis Xenakis said in 1967. “They are a people continually in search of themselves, always ready to launch out into all kind of rapid, violent actions, and end up by not finding themselves.”He was in his prime when he made that comment, known internationally for his music and collaborations with, for example, Le Corbusier. Yet the search never stopped, and Xenakis managed to stay elusive until his death in 2001, along the way building a legacy that is being observed this year, the centennial of his birth.The premiere of “Metastaseis,” in 1955 in Germany, put Xenakis in the company of the era’s respected composers. Admirers and opponents alike were struck by the work’s sheer violence of the masses of sound, which were constructed not by notes, but by ever-changing glissandos going up and down, and landing briefly into visceral clusters of pitches.It was something new and exciting. The composers of the Darmstadt School, then the powerhouse of avant-garde music, had been focused on serialism, and the belief that every aspect of composition should be under control, measured and organized in a highly abstract manner. But Xenakis, in an article titled “The Crisis of Serial Music,” took issue with the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, essentially accusing them of leading music into an impasse.Xenakis, for his part, embraced chaos. A Greek French artist born in Romania, he went to explore it through philosophy and science, as the ancient Greeks did; “I felt I was born too late — I had missed two millennia,” he used to say. In the first chapter of “Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition,” a dense 1971 treatise on compositional technique and methods, he wrote about the “collision of rain with hard surfaces” or “the song of cicadas in a summer field” as inspirations for his concept of stochastic music, an approach to writing music that was concerned with large numbers, chance and probabilities, which were manipulated to achieve a particular goal. (“Stochos” means “target” in Greek.)Another example he gave: Imagine a large crowd of people demonstrating in the streets. They chant slogans in waves from front to rear, determining where to go next. Suddenly, the enemy attacks, dispersing the crowd by firing machine guns into the air and into the crowd itself. “After sonic and visual hell,” Xenakis wrote, “follows a detonating calm, full of despair, dust and death.”DURING WORLD WAR II, Xenakis joined the Greek Communist resistance and fought against Italian and German occupying forces. That was short-lived, however: In late 1944, Winston Churchill ordered British troops to suppress the Communists and keep Greece within the Western sphere of influence. Their ideals were crushed within a few weeks. On Jan. 1, 1945, a shell from a Sherman tank scarred Xenakis for life.“He told me once,” the composer Pascal Dusapin recalled in a recent documentary, “that he keeps trying to reproduce the sound he heard when the shrapnel went into his face.”There is no shortage of explosions, at extremities of force, in Xenakis’s music — whether in “Terretektorh” (1966), one of the first modern spatial compositions, or “Jonchaies” (1977), in which the full dynamic power of 109 musicians slowly builds up after a surprisingly melodic introduction. “Keqrops” (1986), on the other hand, starts with a sonic blast, with a solo piano trying to catch up and penetrate the massive orchestral sound.It wasn’t just the sound of war that shaped Xenakis. He spoke with vigor about the “fantastic spectacle” created by the German occupiers when, while the air was filled with echoes of whistling bullets and explosions, enormous military searchlights lit up the night. Those memories directly affected the “Polytope” series, a daring journey toward a creative assemblage of architecture, light show and electronic music, usually on a grand scale.He talked about his wartime experience with sinister overtones. And if one thing stands out in his music, it is the absence of “human pathos and emotional compulsion,” said the cellist Arne Deforce in an interview. But that style, leaning toward the extreme, egoless but at the same time natural — in the way a deafening storm is natural — had its origins on the streets of Athens.“Xenakis has been discovered — liberation!” the composer Reinhold Friedl said. “To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.”Laszlo Ruszka /INA, via Getty ImagesXenakis left Greece in 1947, while the country was being torn apart by civil war, after hiding in Athens. He was sentenced to death, officially for political terrorism. (A pardon came only after the end of the right-wing junta, 27 years later.)A young civil engineering graduate, he initially wanted to go to the United States but never made it beyond Paris. After a few harsh, depressing weeks of getting to know the city, he found a job with the architect Le Corbusier. He also studied with the composer Olivier Messiaen from 1951 to ’53, whose interest in non-Western music inspired Xenakis to follow suit. (In 1978, having exploring the music traditions of Southern and Eastern Asia, he created “Pléïades,” a 45-minute, multicultural tour de force for six percussionists.)Xenakis’s relationship with Le Corbusier went on to be both fruitful and celebrated, leading to the creation of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. And as Xenakis garnered fame, his dramatic past stirred up fantasies for many people, especially during May 1968 protests in Paris. A banner reading “À bas Gounod! Vive Xenakis!” (“Down with Gounod! Long live Xenakis!”) was hung from the windows of the Paris Conservatory, and Xenakis said on television, “It’s not just about sound and music; it’s about transforming people, too.” Unlike his Italian contemporary Luigi Nono, though, Xenakis refrained from sharing strong political statements, and left mixed impressions on the public.The composer Reinhold Friedl, who directs the Berlin-based contemporary music ensemble zeitkratzer, remembered his discovery of Xenakis in the mid-1980s: “Xenakis has been discovered — liberation! To lose oneself in the sound was intoxicating. He was a freedom fighter against the bourgeois distinction of new music.” The music writer Ben Watson, however, criticized Xenakis’s lifelong commitment to classical instruments: “Ironically, Xenakis’s lack of interest in alternative methods of realizing music — such as free improvisation (which he calls ‘a fashion, like jazz’) — fixes 19th century methods as absolute.”Xenakis nevertheless was revolutionary in music. “Concret PH” (1958), a short musique concrète piece used for the Philips Pavilion, along with Edgard Varèse’s “Poème Électronique,” is the first known occurrence of granular synthesis, a basic part of any electronic artist’s vocabulary today. As a pioneer of electronic music, Xenakis was also behind the creation of UPIC, a graphic sound synthesizer.The relationship between the graphic and the auditory was essential for Xenakis. He typically created a graphic score first, then meticulously transformed it into a traditional one. The means of production notwithstanding, he opened new horizons through the use of clouds or masses of sound. “Do not think in pitches but in sound processes,” said Deforce, who frequently performs Xenakis’s demanding solo cello pieces “Nomos Alpha” (1966) and “Kottos” (1977). “That perspective has been one of the big game-changers Xenakis realized in Western art music.”The baritone Holger Falk said in an interview that Xenakis’s music “feels like diving into a world of rituals that pushes you beyond your everyday consciousness.” Falk often sings Xenakis’s “Aïs” (1980), a dazzling, sonorous piece about death that makes use of exaggerated falsetto, lip smacks and neigh-like glissandos, accompanied by a large orchestra. John Eckhardt, a double bass player, used the word “ritualistic,” to describe his state of mind when performing “Theraps” (1975-76), along with “focused and heroic.”Glimpses of these feelings can be reached by listening, too. Heard live, the music pins you to your seat. How did Xenakis manage that? Perhaps it is the urgency with which he tackled the unknown, went beyond known musical idioms and clichés, and thus found something both unique and universal. His works resemble natural events both terrifying and awe-inspiring: storms, the formation of branches, tsunamis. But instead of mimicking the forces of nature, his music is a force of nature on its own. More

Instagram/WENN/JLN Photography

The Cincinnati-originated musical group leans on their R. Kelly era, singing songs like ‘Contagious’ and ‘Busted’, during their ‘Verzuz’ battle with Earth, Wind and Fire.

Apr 5, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Fans’ excitement for the showdown between The Isley Brothers and Earth, Wind & Fire in the latest edition of “Verzuz” has been marred with some R. Kelly references. The Cincinnati-originated musical group, whose discography spawned hits made by the incarcerated singer/songwriter, refused to severe tie with the disgraced musician during the Instagram Live series.

Facing off the “Let’s Groove” hitmakers in the Sunday night, April 4 edition of the Timbaland and Swizz Beatz-created series, The Isley Brothers leaned on their R. Kelly era. They sang their songs which were written or produced by the accused sexual abusers, like “Contagious” and “Busted”, though Ronald Isley and Ernie Isley notably avoided singing R. Kelly’s part in “Contagious”.

Viewers were understandably shocked and upset after learning that The Isley Brothers performed the R. Kelly songs on “Verzuz”. One Twitter user expressed her/his feeling with a GIF which caption read, “Girl, I’m bout to have a fit.”

  See also…

Another was equally surprised, weighing in, “I didn’t think he was gonna sing it! He let Mr. Biggs out #Verzuz.” A third one was not thrilled to listen to the songs, claiming, “I hate these stupid R. Kelly songs lmao #Verzuz.” Another canceled the incarcerated star, “F**k R Kelly, but the Mr Bigg era is everything!!! #Verzuz.”

A fan, meanwhile, had to jump to The Isley Brothers’ defense before the group was chastised by critics. “Me begging one of you mfs to try & cancel The Isley’s when they jump in they R. Kelly bag of hits #Verzuz,” the said person wrote. Another, meanwhile, admitted to still loving the song despite hating the man who created it, “Ugh R. Kelly ruined everything would’ve loved to hear contagious down low and friend of mine #Verzuz #mrbiggs.”

Some others were angry at R. Kelly fans who made use of the occasion to call for R. Kelly’s release from prison. “Not people tweeting free R. Kelly…,” one person reacted. Another wrote, “Stop all the Free R Kelly nonsense…his perverted a** needs to be EXACTLY where he’s at.” Also noticing the fans’ action, someone else added, “A these people crying ‘ Free R. Kelly’ in the Verzuz are alarming. He’s right where he belongs.”

The Isley Brothers have not responded to the criticism for featuring R. Kelly songs on their “Verzuz” appearance.

You can share this post!

Next article

Bella Robertson of ‘Duck Dynasty’ Feels ‘Like the Luckiest Duck’ After Bridal Shower Celebration

Related Posts More