All posts tagged: Composer

Minions & Monsters Nabs John Powell as Composer

John Powell, the two-time Academy Award nominee for his work on How to Train Your Dragon and Wicked, is set to score Illumination’s Minions & Monsters. The move reunites the music meister with Illumination, for whom he composed the score to 2023’s Migration and 2012’s The Lorax. Coming out of the Despicable Me movies, which is the biggest global animated franchise in history, Minions & Monsters in the third spin-off that focuses on the excitable small, yellow little creatures that seem to only exist to serve an evil master. This one is being billed as “rambunctious, ridiculous and totally true story” of how the Minions conquered Hollywood, became movie stars, lost everything, unleashed monsters onto the world and then banded together to try and save the planet from the mayhem they had just created. It is also being described as a love letter to classic Hollywood, which will allow Powell to let loose a variety of styles. But he better get a move on as the movie opens July 1. Minions & Monsters is directed by Academy …

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber to Take on the True Story of an Art Heist

Published by Jenni Sidey

Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind such durable hits as Cats (1981), Phantom of the Opera, and Evita, has teased a new musical about the early 20th century theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa. The news was first reported by the British publication The Stage. Lloyd Webber had already announced he was currently working on a musical based on the 2006 film The Illusionist. Speaking to entertainment journalist Frank DiLella after the April 7 opening of Lloyd Webber’s Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Broadway, the composer told him: “The other one I’m working on is the true story of the theft of the Mona Lisa. It’s a true story about how the Mona Lisa disappeared for three years and ended up in Italy.” Related Articles Leonardo started the portrait around 1503 while living in Florence but did not finish it for more than a decade. Early sources, such as 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari, claim that is a likeness of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. But the painting never ended …

Bluey composer reveals why he refuses to ‘dumb down’ orchestral music for children

Published by Daniella Wilson

Add Bluey to your watchlist As beautiful as a Mahler symphony is, I wouldn’t expect a young child to sit through an 80-minute performance in a concert hall. The capacity of children to enjoy classical music, however, is so often underestimated. That’s why, when composing Bluey – the smash hit TV series that follows Bluey, a lovable, inexhaustible blue heeler dog alongside her mum, dad and her little sister Bingo – I weave elements of Vivaldi, Holst, Mozart, Bizet, Bach and Ravel into the soundtrack. I don’t dumb down and I hope that by taking this approach to enhance the wonderful and clever animation, we’ve helped create a new generation of classical music fans. Bluey has become a phenomenon since it first aired in 2018 and its success, with parents as well as children, has taken us by surprise. As well as being a hit in the UK, Australia (where Joe Brumm created the series) and around the world, it was the most‑streamed show in the US in 2024 and 2025. Its music has a …

Cursor’s new coding model Composer 2 is here: It beats Claude Opus 4.6 but still trails GPT-5.4

Published by skeptic

Cursor, a San Francisco AI coding platform from startup Anysphere valued at $29.3 billion, has launched Composer 2, a new in-house coding model now available inside its agentic AI coding environment, and it offers drastically improved benchmarks from its prior in-house model. It’s also launching and making Composer 2 Fast, a higher-priced but faster variant, the default experience for users. Here’s the cost breakdown: That’s a big drop from Cursor’s predecessor in-house model, Composer 1.5, from February, which cost $3.50 per million input tokens and $17.50 per million output tokens; Composer 2 is about 86% cheaper on both counts. Composer 2 Fast is also roughly 57% cheaper than Composer 1.5. There’s also discounts for “cache-read pricing,” that is, sending some of the same tokens in a prompt to the model again, of $0.20 per million tokens for Composer 2 and $0.35 per million for Composer 2 Fast, versus $0.35 per million for Composer 1.5. It also matters that this appears to be a Cursor-native release, not a broadly distributed standalone model. In the company’s announcement …

Composer of Epochal Electronic Sounds Dies at 94

Published by José Betancourt

Éliane Radigue, a composer and electronic-music pioneer whose music paid meditative attention to the subtleties of sound, died on Monday at the age of 94. She was surrounded by family in Paris, according to Blank Forms, an organization that represents her electronic compositions for magnetic tape in partnership with the storied French enterprise Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Ina GRM). Radigue was born in Paris in 1932 and started working in the 1950s with Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who together developed the avant-garde movement known as musique concrète. Among their contributions was a stated prompt to consider sound as a sort of sculptural object, whether by way of tape that could be cut-up and spliced or other techniques through which musical and non-musical sounds could coalesce. Related Articles In the 1970s Radigue began working with electronic synthesizers on long-form music that would come to be her main mode for decades. Her works made with the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer followed long tones along lines of barely perceptible change, such that touchstones like Adnos I-III—a series …

Max Richter: the composer who crosses the invisible divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ music | Music

Published by Sam Flores

The German-born British composer Max Richter had never been nominated for an Oscar until this year, though he may – unintentionally – have once scuppered someone else’s chance of winning one. In 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Arrival on the grounds that viewers would find it impossible to distinguish the late Icelandic composer’s soundtrack from the bought-in piece of music that book-ended Denis Villeneuve’s alien invasion psychodrama: Richter’s soaring, maximalist-minimalist On the Nature of Daylight. A decade later, Richter is up for this year’s best original score for his work on the Shakespeare drama Hamnet. If he wins, it would be the crowning glory of an already superlative 12 months for the musician, who turns 60 a week after the Oscars ceremony in LA. Last year, his 2015 album Sleep surpassed 2bn streams across all platforms, becoming the first classical record to do so. Awarded a CBE in the new year honours list, his work will be celebrated with the Berlinale Camera award at …

Renowned Composer Philip Glass Withdraws Symphony from Kennedy Center

Published by José Betancourt

Celebrated composer Philip Glass has withdrawn a symphony he composed on commission honoring Abraham Lincoln for the 50th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he said in a statement today. The work, Symphony No. 15, was scheduled for its first-ever performance by the National Symphony Orchestra this June. Glass informed the center of his decision in a letter on Tuesday that he later shared on social media. “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony,” he wrote, adding that he viewed the decision as an “obligation.” Related Articles The Kennedy Center has grown increasingly marooned from its many patrons and performing arts peers, with the National Symphony Orchestra emerging as the most significant casualty of the ideological overhaul launched by the Trump administration at the Center last year. Glass joins artists including renowned soprano Renée Fleming in severing ties with the center, while the Washington National Opera, which had performed there since …

Composer Philip Glass Drops Kennedy Center World Premiere Over Trump Takeover

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) – American composer Philip Glass ‌withdrew the world premiere of his ‌symphony “Lincoln” from the Kennedy Center on Tuesday, saying the work’s values conflict with those of the performing arts venue that was taken over by President Donald Trump. Glass is the latest ‍musical luminary to withdraw from the Kennedy Center since Trump named himself chairman and filled its board with his allies last year. The Washington ⁠National Opera said this month it planned to leave its home of 50 years. “After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass, who turns 89 on January 31, wrote in a statement posted on X. “Symphony ‌No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are ‌in direct conflict with the ‍message of the ⁠Symphony,” he wrote. The symphony had been scheduled to be performed in June. TRUMP-APPOINTED BOARD APPROVED NAME CHANGE In December, the institution’s board voted to rename it …

Contextual AI launches Agent Composer to turn enterprise RAG into production-ready AI agents

Published by skeptic

In the race to bring artificial intelligence into the enterprise, a small but well-funded startup is making a bold claim: The problem holding back AI adoption in complex industries has never been the models themselves. Contextual AI, a two-and-a-half-year-old company backed by investors including Bezos Expeditions and Bain Capital Ventures, on Monday unveiled Agent Composer, a platform designed to help engineers in aerospace, semiconductor manufacturing, and other technically demanding fields build AI agents that can automate the kind of knowledge-intensive work that has long resisted automation. The announcement arrives at a pivotal moment for enterprise AI. Four years after ChatGPT ignited a frenzy of corporate AI initiatives, many organizations remain stuck in pilot programs, struggling to move experimental projects into full-scale production. Chief financial officers and business unit leaders are growing impatient with internal efforts that have consumed millions of dollars but delivered limited returns. Douwe Kiela, Contextual AI’s chief executive, believes the industry has been focused on the wrong bottleneck. “The model is almost commoditized at this point,” Kiela said in an interview with …

Composer Philip Glass Withdraws World Premiere From Kennedy Center

Published by Daniella Wilson

Celebrated composer Philip Glass is removing the premiere of his new symphony from the Kennedy Center lineup. In a post on Instagram Tuesday, Glass said the message of the symphony, entitled “Lincoln,” is in “direct conflict” with the values of the now-embattled Kennedy Center. The new work was scheduled to premiere June 12 and June 13 at the arts center, which the board has now renamed the Trump Kennedy Center, in a move that was met with outrage by Kennedy family members as well as the arts community. “After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass wrote on social media. “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony. Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” Glass was awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts by President Obama and was …

Skeptic Society Magazine

for honest conversations

Years

Authors

Filter by Month

Filter by Categories

Filter by Tags