Kategorie: English

Everything that is wrong with „Mozart in the Jungle“ – Episode 1, PILOT

 von Moritz Eggert

Everything that is wrong with „Mozart in the Jungle“ – Episode 1, PILOT

Of course there is nothing wrong with „Mozart in the Jungle“. It’s a great and funny series with fantastic actors, witty scripts and a theme that is not your usual run-of-the-mill comedy soap. It is also based on a book which I recommended in the Neue Musikzeitung a while ago, even though readers will recognize little from the true life stories of Blair Tindall in the TV version.
Nevertheless, watching the series as a classical musician makes you wonder how much exactly the producers actually know about the real world of classical music. And I don’t mean the sex and the drugs, because these certainly exist in classical music.
And because nitpicking is kind of fun, I present to you an ongoings series of in-depth analysis of the mistakes or at least idiosyncracies that crop up in…

 von Moritz Eggert

An interview with Dan Tramte – creator of Score Follower channel on youtube (part 1)

Probably most of you have at some point used youtube to read scores along with the music. There are many fantastic videos around which follow the music exactly and turn the pages for you. Although many of these videos are for classical music there are dedicated channels especially for contemporary music, and they feature a lot of music that would probably be hard to get as scores.
But who are the great people behind these efforts? Are they doing it as a hobby? Are they composers themselves? What drives them to put so much work into something that benefits the modern music community as a whole?

 von Moritz Eggert

The evolution of writing music

Even though many people are aware of it, it has never been really acknowledged that the notation of music has gone through a much more dramatic evolution than other written sign languages experienced since the introduction of machines and later computers.

To give an example – for authors the introduction of the typewriter (1860) was the last really dramatic change in the basic way they work. Writing became considerably faster (if one was good with a keyboard) and it is probably inconceivable to imagine a fast writer like the great Jim Thompson churning out his manuscripts in the speed he did without the help of a typewriter.

 von Moritz Eggert

Preparing Atopy. A lecture in 6 parts. Part 1: The long Goodbye

(This is the English translation of a 6 part lecture that I gave in Mainz about the possibilities of what I call „atopical“ music)

THE LONG GOODBYE

It’s downright impossible to talk about the end of something. Endings tend to come later than one thinks, and when they come early, one usually didn’t expect them.
But still, I want to say it here, because it is true and because it is important to understand the full ramifications of this truth: that what we call “Classical Music” is…perhaps not completely dead, yet. But completely futile.

Konrad Boehmer is silent.

 von Moritz Eggert

Konrad Boehmer is silent.

On Saturday 4 October, the composer and music critic Konrad Boehmer (born 24 May 1941 in Berlin) died in Amsterdam at the age of 73. He had suffered a cerebral infarction on 10 August while on holiday in the south of France, and since 24 August had been cared for at the Onze Lieve Vrouwe Gasthuis (OLVG) in Amsterdam.

Konrad Boehmer had lived in Amsterdam since 1966. His large compositional oeuvre includes both acoustic and electronic music, which was performed throughout the world. In 1983 he received the Rolf Liebermann Prize for his opera Doktor Faustus. As a music critic he wrote for the weekly Vrij Nederland magazine and also published internationally on contemporary music and authors’ rights.

From 1972 onwards Konrad Boehmer taught at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, where he directed the Institute of Sonology from 1994 to 2006. He held numerous chairmanships, including of the Dutch musical authors’ rights society BUMA/STEMRA and the Society of Dutch Composers GeNeCo.

Konrad Boehmer received the honour „Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau“ from Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

The date of the funeral will shortly be announced.