Five Quickies: American Orchestral Crisis, MacArthur Grants Increase, M.I.T.'s Futuristic Opera, Tchaikovsky's Wrong Note, Six Hours of John Zorn at 60

News gets made fresh everyday.

And with the world's best musicians, singers, dancers and actors going back to repertory work after their summer stocks, there's more good news happening now than there was, say, back in July.

So, in an effort to keep all you Classicalites abreast of each and every situation, we'll be trawling the web for the best headlines--those stories, those people making the biggest waves.

Here, then, is today's news:

America's Orchestras are in Crisis: How an Effort to Popularize Classical Music Undermines What Makes Orchestras Great [New Republic]

MacArthur Increases "Genius Grants' To $625,000 [AP]

M.I.T.'s Opera of the Future [New York Times]

Tchaikovsky's "Wrong" Note [New York Review of Books]

SWR2 Celebrating the 60th Birthday of Composer John Zorn [SWR2]