June 3, 2007

It’s this week in classical music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

Composer Joan Tower is presenting a festival of work by Women composers in New York City this month.  Titled “Notable Women”, the festival started friday and continues through June 17.  Tower said she hopes “Notable Women” will be a starting point for a larger festival in the future.  This weekend’s program focused on overlooked women of the past like Amy Beach and Ruth Crawford Seeger; the second presents major figures of the present (Higdon, Libby Larsen, Joan Tower) and the third spotlights the avant-garde with music by Joan LaBarbera, Eve Beglarian, Pamela Z and Julia Wolfe.  Each program will also include a new work commissioned from a young composer.  The series will be held at the Chelsea Art Museum.

Amazon.com recently joined EMI and others in the push to offer digital downloads without copy protection.  By removing the level of software known as DRM, customers can not only play their music on any device they choose, but  will also benefit from improved sound quality, a prospect that is music to classical enthusiasts’ ears.  Industry figures are hopeful that are hopeful that dropping copy protection and allowing for big, clear-sounding and non-compressed audio files, will result in even stronger interest in classical downloads, which have proved popular even in their current compressed state.

The newest musical craze for Chinese kids is piano playing.  Some say over 15 million kids are studying the keyboard, and the number is growing. One Chinese piano pedagogue says talented children typically start playing at age 3, can master Chopin Etudes by 8 and a Mozart concerto by 12.  by the time they’re 18, they can tackle big concertos by Liszt or Rachmaninoff.  Those unable to make it through the entrance exams at the country’s nine conservatories are opting for one of hundreds of private piano schools starting all over the country.   There’s been nothing to match this craqze since the 80s adoption of the Japanese Suzuki method of violin playing led to a virtual army or young violinists. 

For more information on these and other items and events, go to the KBAQ website at KBAQ-dot-org.… be listening every week at this time for another update, and join me at noon every weekday for the Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries, … I’m Randy Kinkel, for KBAQ’s  “This week in Classical Music”…  on 89-five KBAQ, K-B-A-Q Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University