It’s been talked about for months.  The 28-year old composer Nico Muhly has been at work on a new opera with playwright Craig Lucas for the Met.  The project is one of several pieces in development but not yet scheduled for debut by playwrights/composer teams. On Thursday, the Met committed to the piece for the 2013-14 season.  It will be co-produced by the English National Opera in London where it premieres next June.  Titled “Two Boys,” the opera recounts the story of a youth who uses the internet to hire out his own murder. Read the Times story here: “Muhly and Lucas’s Opera...

The Sunday Times Magazine featured a rather definitive profile (4,500 words!) of jazz composer/pianist Fred Hersch. Writer David Hadjdu (author of the Billy Strayhorn biography “Lush Life”) calls Fred’s music, “luxurious, free-flowing, unashamedly gorgeous” and shows how it’s beauty has been out of step with the traditionalist currents of jazz but also prophetic of a new trend just arriving.  The story chronicles Fred’s coming out as gay and as HIV positive and gives some painful detail about recent, grave illnesses including a two-month long coma last...

Thanks to all of you who visit this site, My Big Gay Ears surpassed 5,000 hits today. That’s since launching in late September 2009. But only 13 comments?? Come on folks, let’s get some conversation going! I invite you to consider this posting an open forum for ideas and suggestions on how to build on the site, help promote out musicians, and encourage new talents — or whatever else you think MyBigGayEars could accomplish.  On a day to day basis I guess my main goal is to provide something good to read and enjoyable to look at.  Help me keep track of the bigger picture.  After...

Composer Jennifer Higdon earned her first Grammy Award, in the category of best contemporary classical composition, and guitarist Sharon Isbin earned her second, as best instrumental soloist. The awards were announced in Los Angeles prior to the telecast.  Higdon’s winning piece was a pecussion concerto performed by Colin Currie with Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra.  Isbin won for her disc “Journey to the New World.”  Congratulations to these out artists! In other awards, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony won big for their recording...

“Horowitz once said that there were three types of pianist: Jewish, gay, and bad,” writes Stephen Hough on his blog for The Telegraph.  The entry was prompted by a a listener and psychologist who sensed gayness in Hough’s playing and delved deeper. Continues Hough, “Was the earlier age of repression and illegality – the fear of policemen waiting at the dressing room door – a reason for the loneliness you can sometimes discern in this aching turn of phrase, or that camp corner of puckishness?”

Composer Pauline Oliveros’ trainings in Deep Listening are conducted in immersive retreat settings each summer and the locations are usually pretty spectacular, if remote. Participants bond over meals and recreation and begin morning and afternoon sessions in meditation.  In addition to Oliveros’ informal instruction, the new age-y atmosphere includes discussion and sharing, an introduction to Tai Chi, and sometimes personal and group healings through sound.  Though the work is not strictly for composers, everyone is encouraged to come up with a new composition to be performed toward...

A FULL EVENING OF ORCHESTRAL MUSIC BY HENRY COWELL When’s the last time that’s happened anywhere? Leave it to Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra to make it happen. 8 p.m. Friday January 29, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center (pre-concert talk at 6:45 p.m.) The program: Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 3 (1944) Atlantis (1931) ( NY Premiere ) Variations for Orchestra (1959) Symphony No. 2, “Anthropos” (1941) Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra (1962) Symphony No. 11 (1953) Seven Rituals of Music (NYC Premiere ) Featuring soprano Heather Buck, mezzo-soprano Elise Quagliata,...

Stephen Sondheim musicals keep getting revived, often in chamber versions, and at 79, he’s still writing songs as well as a two-volume treatise on theater and lyrics. “Sondheim Makes His Entrance Again, Intimately” by Patrick Healy (New York Times, January 3, 2010)

An event on January 23 at Roulette in New York will mark the release of “Sounding Out,” a new DVD of works by six lesbian composers. Produced by Everglade Records, the collection features music by Madelyn Byrne, Renee T. Coulombe, Linda Dusman, Mara Helmuth, Kristin Norderval and Anna Rubin. “It is now ‘okay’ to come out as gay or lesbian,” writes Coulombe, in a statement about how the project was conceived. “But what about bisexuals, intersexed or transgendered folks, queers or members of the BDSM community?  (This) is a moment to assess what coming out means almost 40...

Sharon Isbin performed solo and with Joshua Bell in an Evening of Classical Music at the White House on November 4. Here’s a shot of the First Listeners taking it in, followed by two beautiful clips, compliments of the White House. In the first, Sharon performs Albeniz’s Asturias and Mangoré’s Waltz Op. 8, No. 4, then it’s a duet of Paganini’s Cantabile.