A viola disaster, music for dogs, and more in this week's link roundup. Let's go!
- When you're a featured soloist in a concert, you can prepare as much as you like - sometimes, though, your instrument just has it out for you. Watch this violist come face to face with disaster:
Eek. pic.twitter.com/fdHeC1v6zW
— Classic FM (@ClassicFM) March 15, 2018 - David Marín is a Guatemalan musician and inventor who built instruments out of bicycles and other unusual materials. Watch it in action, and read journalist Kirk Pearson's account of his time in Marín's workshop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuwR_BwjSEw&feature=youtu.be - Warner Classics just released an album of music by Claude Debussy... played by none other than Claude Debussy.
- Some of our favorite messages to receive here at WCRB are from people who play our station for their pets to soothe them when they're home alone during the day. Well, composer Iain Jackson decided to research just that: what music is the most relaxing for dogs?
Here is the music Jackson composed for the project, called "A Dog's Tale:" - Despite a successful debut in 1932, Shirley Graham's opera "Tom-Tom," chronicling African diaspora and ending with the Harlem Renaissance, was never performed again. Harvard's Radcliffe Institute is reviving it.
- At last: a theremin for rats. Musician Dan Deacon recruited rats to make a film score, and they were surprisingly good at it. About the experience, Deacon says he is open to collaborating with other species - but he doesn't want to be known as "the rat music guy." What's next? Who knows?
- An oldie but a goodie: this mini maestro is the next great choral conductor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9r1LkRCV0
