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Just before 3 o’clock Sunday, the Atlanta Chamber Players’ “Rapido!” national finals were about to start, the culmination of an eight-month, 29-state composition contest (read more here). The audience was filing into the High Museum of Art’s Hill Auditorium. One of the judges, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Music Director Robert Spano, asked the other judges — [...]

The Cobb Symphony had been in the business of playing the old-time classics for 60 years. But orchestras that perpetually take from the repertoire and never give anything back are no longer living in today’s arts community. They have stagnated into something akin to “heritage tourism,” closer in spirit to a Civil War re-enactment or [...]

A rare few inches of snow, a cap of ice and slick streets across metro Atlanta — and a dearth of snowplows — has shut down schools for three days and now canceled performances by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Alliance Theatre. Thursday night’s planned performance of “Bring It On: The Musical” at the Alliance has [...]

Turnaround Records had a full-blown coming-out party in 2010. The two-year-old Atlanta label had been relatively quiet since its founding, releasing only the debut disc from its sole artist, New York tenor saxophonist Albert Rivera, in 2008. Last year, “Evidence of Things to Come” by Atlanta saxophonist Brian Hogans (here’s my review) rolled out, and another local [...]

Where do you draw the line with folk music? When cultures intersect and cross-pollinate, is it possible to find the one authentic seed, the single point of originality? Or, mixing metaphors, is it like cutting open an onion, where the peelings themselves are what you’re looking for, since there is no core? On Thursday, the [...]

In part, it’s a numbers game. About 800 music students are enrolled at New York’s prestigious Juilliard School. The Sichuan Conservatory, in Chengdu, China, has 10,000. By some measures, between 40 and 100 million children in China are learning Western classical music, mostly piano or violin but enough other instruments to populate symphony orchestras around the [...]