The musicians of the San Antonio Symphony have a new contract. The good news is that the embattled ensemble will apparently survive, and will mount 26 weeks of concerts in 2004-05. The bad news is that there will be no concerts this season, and musicians will have no salaries, no health insurance, and few local prospects for full-time musical employment in the interim. The contract calls for the musicians to receive a raise in weekly wages in 2004, but because of the short season, they will actually make far less in salary and benefits than they did prior to the orchestra’s bankruptcy filing last spring.
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NJSO: Basking in the Järvi Glow
So how do the musicians of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra feel about the appointment of Neeme Järvi as their next music director? ‘Ecstatic’ may not be a strong enough word. Järvi first conducted the NJSO last season, and the orchestra’s principal flute says that “after that concert, I heard the most unbelievable gushing from every section of the orchestra. The veterans loved him, the newbies loved him. Everybody fell for him.” Musicians are also praising the orchestra’s board for making them an integral part of the search process, rather than an afterthought.
Getting To Know Him
While the appointment of Neeme Järvi in New Jersey may have come as a shock to the orchestra industry, the new partnership is already looking like a natural match. After all, Newark is not so terribly different a city from Detroit, where Järvi has spent the last 14 seasons. And the NJSO couldn’t ask for a more down-to-earth musician to match its down-to-earth base of operations: by all accounts, Järvi’s strength is in his ability to take music seriously without ever forgetting that he and his musicians are entertainers first. “Do you know what is the difference between God and a conductor?” he asks. “God doesn’t think he’s a conductor!”
Baltimore Looks To The Arts
A wide-ranging collection of arts groups and cultural leaders will meet this weekend in Baltimore for the city’s second annual summit meeting on the arts. Mayor Martin O’Malley hosted the first meeting last year, which was billed as a citywide brainstorming session, and which drew 300 artists and activists. This year’s event will focus on ways to make up the national shortfall in arts funding, the future of private giving to the arts, and the omnipresent issue of how to draw out a city’s “creative class.”
Big-Time Opera, Hold the Sticker Shock
A British impresario has announced that he will shortly launch a new opera company in London designed specifically to be accessible to a wider and more diverse audience than the city’s other, larger companies. “The Savoy Opera company, based at London’s Savoy Theatre, will stage popular operas such as Carmen and the Marriage of Figaro, beginning in April. The aim is to not to compete with the capital’s two big opera companies, but to offer a cheaper alternative. Top ticket prices will be £50, compared to £170 at the Royal Opera House.”
Getting Around the DMCA
“Busting open a digital lock to get hold of copyright works normally is forbidden, but the Librarian of Congress ruled Tuesday that there are exceptions. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, prohibits, among other things, bypassing any technology that controls access to copyright material. This provision is criticized frequently by digital-rights groups because they say it stifles many legitimate activities in the process, including academic research, competition and innovation. But the controversial law also recognizes that there are certain cases when circumvention should be permitted… Basically, those who have a non-infringing, fair-use reason to circumvent copy protections should be allowed to do so.”
Online Music: Where’s The Variety?
Even before illegal services like Napster took off, the world of online music used to be “a place for artists to control and directly profit from their music. But in most online services today that dream has been lost, with the services functioning as online arms of the record companies while the artists receive pennies (or fractions of pennies) for each download.” Even more disappointing, there is a stunning lack of originality and forward thinking in the development of new download services, most of which are just mimicking the format and interface of Apple’s iTunes.
Michener: Disney “Radically Redefines” Concert-Going
Charles Michener is impressed with his first encounter with Disney Hall. “If the flamboyant façade doesn’t attain quite the iconic power of the Sydney Opera House as a city-defining monument (there’s no dramatic vantage point from which to view it whole), its interior radically redefines the experience of concertgoing. People in the concert business tell me that it takes about three years for an orchestra and a new hall to settle down acoustically. What I heard at Disney Hall suggests a marriage that is off to a roaring start.”
Miller To Close, Urinetown Left Dangling
The Henry Miller Theatre on West 43rd Street in New York will be closing this winter, to make way for a new skyscraper. But Miller is more than just another Broadway showhouse: it is currently the home of the unexpected smash hit Urinetown, which will be evicted by mid-February. No other Broadway theaters are currently available for the show to move into, and a move to off-Broadway would cause all sorts of union troubles, and would also be a strange move for a show enjoying the success of Urinetown. The Miller’s owners are planning to rebuild, possibly within the new skyscraper, but that project won’t be completed until at least 2008.
Why Songs Get Stuck In Our Heads (Damnit!)
Those annoying songs that somehow get stuck in our heads and can’t be chased out? There’s a physical reason, apparently. “A cognitive itch is a kind of metaphor that explains how these songs get stuck in our head. Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch. The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds.”