Earlier this week, the celebrated tenor George Shirley was the richly deserving recipient of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for his NewMusicBox essay on the music-education crisis in Detroit public schools. I'm embarrassed to admit that I missed the piece when it was first published, last year. It's an extraordinarily revealing account of how Detroit's once-mighty music-education program had a transformative effect on countless students, including many major players in the history of Motown. A must-read, from beginning to end.... Paul Griffiths, also an ASCAP-Deems Taylor winner for his ever-excellent Miller Theatre program notes, noted the other day that if Schubert had lived to Elliott Carter's age he would still have been composing in the year 1900. The great man has produced a stack of new scores, some of which will be premiered at concerts next month, around the time of his 103rd birthday; Boosey has the rundown.... Gogol, an opera by Lera Auerbach, had its premiere at the Theater an der Wien two nights ago. Dirk Schümer, in the FAZ, praises the freewheeling quality of Auerbach's musical language — "violent eclecticism," he calls it — but concludes that Gogol's life was not eventful enough to sustain an opera.... On Sunday night at Galapagos in Brooklyn, Orpheus joins forces with composer-singer Gabriel Kahane — the first event in a new series that seeks an atmosphere of dressed-down intensity.... Make Music NY, the midsummer outdoor music jamboree, is launching a winter-solstice counterpart, Make Music Winter. Phil Kline's Unsilent Night is the inspiration, and on this occasion Kline will introduce a new boom-box piece, called Peregrine.... WQXR has launched an amusing initiative called Beethoven Awareness Month, with posters instructing one to Obey Thoven. (As Allen Ginsberg might have said, "Please, master.") On Sunday there will be a Beethoven sonata marathon at WNYC's Greene Space, with such luminaries as Jonathan Biss, Joyce Yang, Alessio Bax, Jeremy Denk, Inon Barnatan, and Timothy Andres (a phenomenal pianist).... Brian Current conducts Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto on Dec. 8 and 9.
