Category: music

On Sunday afternoon, “a new Chi-Jazz El Train will swing around the Loop, rumble up the Purple Line to Evanston and then head back downtown — with jazz musicians playing onboard all the while. The performers will hold forth in one car, the music piped in live to all the others. To ensure that everyone gets face time with the jazzmen, passengers periodically will rotate from one car to the next.”

“The study, which was financed by both Microsoft and Intel and written by two academics at Carnegie Mellon University and a third affiliated with Stanford University, found that buying an album digitally reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 to 80 percent relative to a best-case scenario for purchasing a CD.”

“The Metropolitan Opera is trumpeting record first-day sales for its upcoming season, with the Met box office taking in $2.5 million for the 2009-10 season.”

“The dust and the din raised by 210 pipe bands from across the world – more than 8,000 pipers and drummers from 16 countries – have subsided on Glasgow Green, following Saturday’s World Pipe Band Championships, leaving Scottish bands and piping aficionados to ponder why it is that, for the fourth year running and for the eighth time over the past decade, the coveted grade one world championship has been piped off by an overseas band.”

The latest version of the evergreen string-instrument-lost-in-a-cab story: Korean violinist Hanh-Bin “took a cab from Lincoln Center to his apartment in Chinatown, arriving at 12:40 a.m. Monday. Exhausted from the trip, he did not realize that his credit card and his violin, an 18th-century instrument built by Giovanni Francesco Pressenda, were still in the cab….”

“More musicians are getting more music out to more people. But I don’t see that ‘more recordings’ equals ‘revitalization of an industry.’ Because I always thought that an industry is a field that makes money. And very few of these recordings do. The companies that put them out are, increasingly, non-profit organizations.”

“The Washington National Opera announced Monday that for the second straight year, the company’s opening-night performance — this year, ‘The Barber of Seville’ on Sept. 12 — will be simulcast live at Nationals Park, free of charge. Last year’s simulcast of ‘La Traviata,’ the first such broadcast at the stadium, was planned within a matter of weeks and drew about 15,000 people.”

Inside the new Koerner Hall at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music, curves “ripple along the walls, bulge out beside the stage, and run riot across the ceiling. They do a lot to animate the look of what is essentially a high rectangular box, but how they look counts for less than how they sound.”

“Every great composer has a white elephant – a piece as grand as it is unsuccessful, a flop that only genius can create, and all the more embarrassing for that. Adventurers like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, whose output is marked by an almost compulsive search for new ground, were fated to have at least one. Bernstein’s was the gargantuan 1971 Mass … Sondheim’s case stretched over 15 years with a musical whose titles ranged from Wise Guys to Bounce to Gold! until finally becoming Road Show late last year.”

“Ann Arbor’s Firefly Club, a beacon for live jazz for nearly a decade and regarded by aficionados as metro Detroit’s finest all-around jazz club, has been closed and its property seized by the Michigan Department of Treasury due to a delinquent sales tax bill.”