Category: music

The songs Joel Tenenbaum was fined $675,000 for illegally downloading are now available on Pirate Bay as “The $675,000 Mixtape.” “Although there is no evidence that Tenenbaum was responsible for putting the playlist” there, “the record companies have accused him of defiantly encouraging further illegal downloading by linking to the service directly, from a website created for his defense.” They want a court order to make him stop.

“‘I am going to sell you an accordion,’ said Anne Romagnoli,” the octogenarian proprietor of the Italo-American Accordion Co. “‘Not right — ‘ began the teenage boy. ‘No, listen, I’ve got to sell you an accordion. Why can’t I sell you an accordion? You need an accordion. Look at you.’ … You need an accordion? She sells accordions. You need a leather strap to shoulder that 30-pound instrument? She sells the leather straps. Need anything else? She sells nothing else.”

English National Opera’s Gaddafi: A Living Myth, three years ago, was “one of the most risible nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre.” Life imitates art “in the photographs this week of Gaddafi’s celebrations of 40 years since the revolution. The shots of actors recreating a mass hanging, enveloped by a strange green light, or dancers shaking it in front of a model Sphinx with red-laser eyes could have come straight out of ENO’s ill-fated stage designs. There are dramatic parallels, too.”

“The orchestra is dropping some expansive productions that would have required larger-than-usual ensembles, and costly soloists. Those performances are being replaced with programs that R-P-O president Charlie Owens says will be equally ‘compelling’.”

“I grew up in the old town of Nazareth,” says Saleem Abboud Ashkar. “With its narrow streets and its bazaar – all the oriental cliches, in fact. The mosque. The call to prayer. This is what my auditory environment was. And in the middle of it I was sitting there practising Haydn.”

“Leave it to stubbornly iconoclastic filmmaker Werner Herzog to breathe new life into the well-worn score of Puccini’s La Bohème. In a new short film that will screen this week at the Venice Film Festival, Herzog takes the love duet “O soave fanciulla” … and sets it to images of the Mursi people in southwest Ethiopia.”

“Matthew Jodrell, a jazz musician, was riding the subway home after a Sunday night performance in Lower Manhattan. Then he made the mistake of nodding off,” whereupon he was robbed. “The thief did not take Mr. Jodrell’s money, but he did take two beloved brass instruments: a flugelhorn made in Switzerland and a Bach Stradivarius trumpet, together worth nearly $10,000.”

Cellist and composer David Teie “has been developing a theory to explain why music plays on human emotions. His theory is that music relates to the most primitive sounds we make and respond to, like laughter, heartbeats, or a mother’s cooing.” His evidence? Monkeys’ responses to the music he’s written for them.

“The Malaysian website for the September 25 event, sponsored by the Guinness brewery, had specified it was ‘restricted to non-Muslims aged 18 and above,’ triggering controversy in the multicultural nation. … However, in an about-face, concert organisers Artists World Entertainment said that anyone [over 18] was free to attend.”

“Milan’s La Scala has closed the uppermost seating gallery in the storied opera house while work is carried out to remove asbestos discovered months earlier.”