The Cleveland Plain-Dealer’s music critic Donald Rosenberg has been taken off the Cleveland Symphony beat–apparently for saying what many people (myself included) actually believe:   Franz Welser-Möst  is pretty much an unimaginative  hack in charge of a great orchestra.  Today’s Times. UPDATE:  Tim Mangan has more.

1938 was the beginning of a very rough patch for Europe but–as it turns out–it was a great year for the future of American music. Several of America’s most influential living composers were born in the early dawn of World War II, including John Corigliano, Joan Tower, Frederic Rzewski, Charles Wuorinen, William Bolcom, and John Harbison. The serendipity of that bountiful year has not gone unnoticed as a couple of new recordings and numerous 70th birthday bashes will attest. The most satisfying of these celebrations of the Class of ’38 to cross our path is pianist Blair McMillen’s revelatory Centaur

John Adams – On the Transmigration of Souls  Michael Gordon – The Sad Park  Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: The Key of Locust Phil Kline – Vigil Elodie Lauten: S.O.S.W.T.C

Sonny Rollins, aka the Saxophone Colossus, turns 78 today. Check out the multimedia celebration at his web site.  This year’s focus is on his fans, his web visitors, his greatest inspiration, Coleman Hawkins, and an extraordinary new recording. Sonny doesn’t seem to be slowing down.  The year began with his 50th Anniversary Carnegie Hall concert. He’s been around the world, all over the US, Europe, and Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore, Australia). Next month, two new releases celebrate his remarkable creativity, Sonny Rollins in Vienne, his first DVD, and a compilation of live performances, Road Shows, Volume 1.

Watching the gritty HBO series called Generation Kill about a platoon of young Marines at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, it struck me again how ambivalent music’s relationship to warfare really is.  Sure, one end of the music-as-weapon spectrum runs through the high-brow pacifism of Britten and Michael Tippet and the I ain’t a’marchin’ anymore populism of Phil Ochs.  All we are saying is give peace a chance. But on the other end lives the beat of tribal drums and primitive rhythms; the ritualistic mix of noise and fire and spirits that sends warriors off on a blood-letting

It’s been three years since the human and moral disaster that was Hurricane Katrina overran New Orleans and uncovered an ugly blight on America’s soul.   To help make sure that nobody forgets, New Amsterdam Records will release a digital version of Ted Hearne’s powerful work Katrina Ballads on August 29. “It is my hope that setting primary-source texts from the devastating week in 2005 when Katrina hit will help us keep this time active in our memory, challenging us to cut through the spin that followed, and bringing us closer to an understanding of the true aftermath,” Hearne says.  “New

Here’s a big loss to the New York new music community.  George Steel, who has made Miller Theatre at Columbia University an essential venue since taking over as executive director in 1997, is leaving Miller to become General Director of The Dallas Opera, effective October 1.   It’s a great career move, of course, but New York is going to miss his adventuresome programming which has made Miller a reliably memorable concert-going experience,  and attracted large and notably young audiences. Steel, a 41-year-old Maryland native and graduate of Yale University, is founder and conductor of the Gotham City Orchestra and Vox

In this age of Dobbsian-fueled immigration hysteria, what could be more timely than an opera about a beautiful Mexican drug smuggler who kills her lover after he betrays her and, in the process, becomes a folk heroine. ¡Unicamente la Verdad! ,  a “videoopera” with music by Gabriela Ortiz and libretto by Rubén Ortiz-Torres, is the story of the contemporary feminist heroine Camelia “la Tejana,” who has come to symbolize the idea of the strong woman in Mexican folklore and the subject of numerous   “corridos” — a form of Mexican ballad — popularized by Los Tigres del Norte?. “