Category: music

“Unwilling to believe that music was altogether useless, Darwin concluded that it may have made man’s ancestors more successful at mating. Yet if that were so, you might expect one gender to be musically more gifted than the other, and there is no evidence of that. So what is the point of music?”

“You can see clearly how various generations experienced a bump in participation as they got older. The so-called Generation X, however, has yet to exhibit an upward spike as it moves into middle age. Every classical organization in America should print out this graph, pin it on the bulletin board, and ponder what is to be done.” Alex Ross, a Gen X-er himself, holds out some hope.

“[I]deally how musicians are clothed should have no bearing on the sound they make. But the brute fact is that understated elegance inspires confidence in the performer, while ugly, ill-fitting and garish outfits (still the norm in our concert halls) make one sub-consciously doubt the wearer’s competence.”

“[W]hile albums and singles remain the mainstay of the music industry, technologists, innovators and composers are coming up with new tools to help modern listeners engage with the songs they love.” Among them are programs that let people “mix their favourite tracks in virtually any way they like,” then “share their creations.”

“[T]he ‘butts in seats’ mantra that has long been intoned by many marketing directors skirts the issue of what kind of audience you’re getting. Yet the audience’s tastes … are key to the future of the field.”

“Lomax’s microphones,” being of 1930s vintage, “tended to emphasize the higher notes,” but “some of the music is amazing. Lomax’s Holy Grail was the search for musical traditions as close to Mother Africa as he could find.”

“Alsop’s staff initially thought she was a little crazy. Major international orchestras work hard to be the best at what they do and be admired by their audiences, not mingle with them. Would amateurs be good enough to play with professionals? Would anybody be interested in such a scheme?”

The verdict was entered against the orchestra’s former financial director, 35-year-old Cameron Poole. “It is claimed Mr Poole used orchestra cheques and credit cards to pay for work on his house in Herne Hill, South London, and also to buy jewellery and artwork.”

The Tehran Symphony Orchestra has just completed a five-city tour of Western Europe featuring Majid Entezami’s Peace and Friendship Symphony, which Michael Kimmelman describes as “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness.” The audiences were embarrassingly small; almost the only people to show up willingly were protesters.

“Labels are signing artists all the time, of course, but usually, I believe, to much shorter, ‘let’s-see’ contracts of a couple of recordings at a time. If you have a chance at Lang Lang, however, you grab him; and Sony in any case seems to be in collecting mode at the moment.”