“At a time when the ‘MP3 generation’ is getting its tracks for free from the internet, fortysomething music fans are beginning to dominate sales. According to current trends, the over-40s will account for more than 50 per cent of album sales in Britain within five years.”
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Coady To King: Shut Up And Go Count Your Royalties
Lynn Coady was a bit perplexed by Stephen King’s recent tirade against highbrow literary culture at the National Book Awards. “He seemed unable to stop himself… asserting that the gap between ‘the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction’ must be closed. To which a bemused Joe Average can only reply: Dude, you’re a billionaire. It is not for you to gripe about egg-headed and arbitrary distinctions between high and low art. Accept your award with humble aplomb and resume laughing your way to the bank.”
Harry Potter, Part XVI: Attack Of The Clones
One significant byproduct of the wild popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been an explosion of the entire children’s fantasy genre. Not all the Harry wannabes are particularly good literature, but with publishing houses and booksellers alike determined to find the Next Big Thing in kid-lit, there’s no shortage of new books involving young wizards, dragon eggs, and supernatural detectives.
Seuss Flick Fans Had Best Beware: Product Placement’s Everywhere!
“The new Cat in the Hat movie makes fun of infomercials and product placement, but the joke rings a bit hollow because the movie has no fewer than 16 corporate sponsors. All Dr. Seuss needed to create one of the most exciting and hilarious stories in the history of literature was 225 vocabulary words, four colors and some imagination. But it takes a zillion-dollar budget to make The Cat in the Hat into a movie, and movie studios do not want to spend any more than they have to… That’s why one of this year’s biggest and most avidly anticipated holiday releases has turned Seuss’ simple story into a marketing bonanza.”
Killing Off Underground Music
The sounds of silence will soon reign supreme in Boston’s subway tunnels and station stops. Well, except for the screeching trains and squawking public address systems, of course. The city has banned street musicians from using amplification or playing electronic keyboards or brass instruments on Boston’s underground platforms. “The rules are sure to transform Boston’s true underground music scene, which up to this point has been one of the nation’s least regulated. In New York and Atlanta, musicians must audition and sign up for slots; Toronto singers pay a $114 fee; in London, musicians need licenses to croon to commuters ‘minding the gap.’ And in Washington, D.C., they’re banned altogether.”
Met Opera To Take A Midwinter Nap
Ticket sales at the Metropolitan Opera haven’t been great in recent years during the weeks following the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. So the Met has announced that it will be taking a two-week break in the middle of its season, beginning in January 2004. “This will be the first midseason break since the Met began in 1883,” and it may not be the only change the company makes to its schedule. Executive director Joseph Volpe says that the Met is also considering replacing its Monday night performances with Sunday matinees.
Assessing Edo
When Edo deWaart took up the reins of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1993, he was exhausted, drained by the various stresses of leading orchestras in the dual pressure cookers of Europe and America. This week is deWaart’s last in Australia, and as he prepares to take over as music director in Hong Kong, he refers to Sydney as his “spiritual holiday.” During his tenure, the SSO significantly improved its musicians’ wages and working conditions, and critics say that the orchestra is a decidedly better ensemble than it was when he arrived.
Nonprofits Following Dean’s Lead
The internet has always held great financial promise for nonprofit arts groups and charities, but few of these groups have ever built a truly successful online fundraising apparatus. Now, with presidential candidate Howard Dean raking in record numbers of contributions from his online campaign efforts, nonprofits are taking notice. “They’re using e-mail lists to solicit donations and mobilize support. They run educational campaigns through e-mail to keep their community informed. They even arrange ‘meet-ups’ offline to keep supporters involved.”
Montreal Concert Hall In Jeopardy
For years, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has been begging for a concert hall of its own, with the sort of acoustics that turn a good orchestra into a great one. Last year, the MSO finally got its wish, when the provincial government agreed to fund a $300 million complex including a concert hall and music conservatory. But the promise of funding was made by the Parti Quebecois, which is no longer in power, and this week, the ruling Liberals announced that the price tag for the MSO project is just too high, and that it plans to seek private donations to bolster government funds. Opposition leaders are voicing concern about the dangerous precedent that could be set by moving towards an American-style system of private arts funding.
The Tiger Woods Of Short Stories
John Updike is master of the short story, writes Louis Menand. “The whole idea is to make language perform its own little supernatural act, which is to turn marks on a page into an emotion, an effect, an apparition of something that is not there, a ghost. You could say that the complexity of the machinery used to produce this is hidden beneath the surface of the writing, except that the writing is the machinery, just as sex is only bodies. The satisfaction comes from the creation of a feeling where there was no feeling, only words, or flesh, or golf balls. People like Updike, or Tiger Woods, make you aware, by what they do, that this satisfaction is possible in life, and that it can be as supreme a satisfaction as there is.”