Category: music

“The latest sales figures for the quarter to June showed 9m sold – the lowest quarterly number since 2006. In short, the iPod, launched in October 2001, looks to be in terminal decline. While Apple is unworried – sales of its iPhone and iPad are booming – the drooping figures for the digital music player market are a concern for another sector: the music companies.”

A growing number of artists are drawing “from the music of the sixties and seventies with great fidelity, sometimes from one performer in particular. The goal of these artists isn’t just able mimicry, though a skeptic would say that the work begins there. But the method accepts a certain pragmatism of pop–that enough work has been done that starting from scratch is just plain inefficient.”

“The worry is that, like the city’s old neighborhoods, Beijing opera could fall victim to China’s rampant commercialism and modernization. If it did, it would be a bit like Italy consigning Verdi or Donizetti to a few small halls in Milan and Rome, or to those folkloric shows for tourists who mostly do not know much about what they are seeing.”

New pay agreements are all over the map…

“The Rock Hall turns 15 this week. And there is much to celebrate. The not-for-profit institution is on solid financial ground, thanks to the establishment of a $5 million endowment. Attendance is up. And an overdue redesign of the museum interior is right around the corner, while the hall’s long-awaited library and archives are taking shape.”

“The two sides have been deadlocked in a battle over steep pay cuts that would, in the most contentious proposal on the table, leave base salaries for veteran players at $73,800 in three years, 29% lower than the $104,650 they make today.”

“The music we hear is never quite what the musicians make. Did you really imagine that Paul McCartney sat down with a string quartet when he sang Yesterday? Or that the voice you hear on an opera album is necessarily the diva’s?”

“Notions of what culture is remain fundamentally split between what we persist in regarding as high and low art. When we talk about a cultured person, it’s clear we’re also making an inference based on class. To use Tony Harrison’s words: Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives comic bits to: prose!“

The national company, in a co-production with Houston Grand Opera, will present three complete cycles of the tetralogy in late 2013, with a possible repeat in 2016. Because the Sydney Opera House cannot accomodate a production of this size, the Ring will be presented only in Melbourne.

“Contemplative in some moments and mind-bending in others, the music is steeped in things elemental, with no place for superficial prettiness or irony. And after decades of Russian domination (1945-90), nobody tells them what to do.”