Here’ a cheerful Monday treat,  ECS Publishing has made available for the 150th year of Frank Lloyd Wright a four-minute introduction to Daron Hagen and Paul Muldoon’s Frank Lloyd Wright opera Shining Brow.    The opera concerns events that occured between 1903 and 1914 during the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s life. Wright’s determination to leave his wife and children, his relationship with Mamah Cheney, and the subsequent murders and conflagration at Taliesin, are all part of the historical record. The opera takes Wright to the point at which he vows to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah’s memory. The opera

Samuel Barber, one of America’s most celebrated composers, was born on this day (April 9) in 1910.  The young filmmaker  H. Paul Moon has made a full-length documentary about Barber that will be released later this month. “I went out on a limb with this project, self-distributing, keeping it independent, making sure I got things right without compromise,” Moon says. The 3-minute trailer below lines up some famous people with their insights on Barber, in this order:  William Schuman, Thomas Hampson, biographer Barbara Heyman, Leonard Slatkin and Leonard Bernstein. OFFICIAL SITE:  www.samuelbarberfilm.com FACEBOOK PAGE:  www.facebook.com/samuelbarberfilm PAUL MOON ON TWITTER:  @hpmoon

The Stone, the landmark non-profit performance space founded in 2005 by John Zorn and dedicated to the experimental and avant-garde, will move to The Glass Box Theater at Arnhold Hall on 55 West 13th Street, in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village. Arnhold Hall is the performing arts hub for The New School, housing the three performing arts schools of The College of Performing Arts: Mannes School of Music, The New School for Drama, and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Beginning in March 2018, The Stone at The New School will operate five nights a week,

In 2010,  a 16-year-old African-American child named Kalief Browder was accused of stealing a backpack. a crime he insisted he hadn’t committed. Because his family couldn’t afford bail, he endured three years on New York’s notorious Rikers Island and his case was postponed 31 times before it was dismissed. While being held, Browder spent months in solitary confinement, missed the last two years of high school, and become so despondent that he tied his bedsheets into a noose. In June 2015, Browder committed suicide by hanging himself.  Last year, the New York Legislature passed a bill known as “Kalief’s Law” to ensure

We are a little spoiled here in Charleston, the biggest little city in America, so if the new music portion of Spoleto Festival USA 2017 is a little less adventuresome than last season’s 40th anniversary program (which featured a production of The Little Match Girl by Helmut Lachenmann as well as a ravishing new production of Porgy & Bess), it may be that our expectations have reached impossible limits. Which is not to say there aren’t plenty of goodies still to be had.  Here are some of the programs, I’m looking forward to May 25 to June 12.. Quartett  May 28, 31,

The idea for Nate Felix’s at home show, Classical Music Kegger, came to him when he saw an opera performance in a train station when he lived in Los Angeles. Felix decided to compose a show with only pianos. Despite the fact that he had never composed a piano piece, nor did he know how to play piano, when Felix returned to his hometown of Austin, he somehow snagged six free pianos off of Craigslist and got to work.  Felix wants to give his community more than just the music itself. so he donated the pianos to schools.

Elizabeth Bell Friou, award-winning composer and co-founder of New York Women Composers, Inc., died on Monday, December 19, in Tarrytown at the age of 88. Known professionally as Elizabeth Bell, she served as a member of the Board of Governors of the American Composers Alliance (ACA) and was involved in numerous other music associations. A direct descendant of the ninth US president, William Henry Harrison, she was born in Cincinnati in 1928 to William Procter Bell and Sophie Buckner Bell. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1950 and from the Juilliard School in 1953. Ms. Bell served as the music

Boston Conservatory at Berklee – recognized for offering one of the best opera programs in the U.S. – is launching a summer program at Berklee’s campus in Valencia, Spain for students from all over the world looking to pursue a career in opera. The Boston Conservatory Opera Intensive at Valencia is a comprehensive three-week program taking place June 25-July 15, 2017. This is the first program to be developed jointly between the Valencia campus since the merger between Berklee and the Conservatory in June 2016. “This summer program is designed for students who are serious about building a career in

Composer, conductor, and pianist Richard Carrick has been named chair of Berklee’s Composition Department. Carrick is a 2015-2016 Guggenheim Fellow and co-founder and co-artistic director of the contemporary music ensemble Either/Or. He succeeds Arnold Friedman, who had been the department’s chair since 2012. Friedman remains on the faculty. Carrick recently moved to the Boston area after living in Kigali, Rwanda, on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Musical Composition. In Rwanda, he was commissioned to pen a new official arrangement of the country’s national anthem for the Rwandan Military Band. During this time, he premiered five works in New York, Boston, Tel Aviv, and Kigali. Carrick

The brilliant Argentinian composer Osvald Golijov returns to Charleston, SC this year as composer-in-residence of SpoletoUSA’s wildly popular chamber music series.  Golijov has been part of the festival’s chamber music series for 20 years  through numerous performances of his compositions, including well-loved pieces and world premieres, and through several residencies, most recently in 2011.  The 2016 series will feature world premieres of two of his new works–Anniversary Bagatelles (June 3) and Agamemnon’s Aria (June 5),  as well as three of his well-known older works, Tenebrae (May 30 and 31), Lullaby and Doina (June 1 and 2), and Last Round (June 2 and 3). Golijov’s seductive and haunting compositions defy easy