Category: music

These days composers have the freedom to work in any musical language they want. But is this really freedom? “Is the progress from a common practice to a diverse one truly progress, when it compels us to choose between a reactionary, audience-friendly idiom, an exclusionary avant-garde, or a sober modernism or ironic postmodernism that hovers between these two extremes?”

The remaining 3 “major” labels – Universal, Sony and EMI – will be out of the classical business within 2 years. They will create no more than a handful of additional classical CDs.

Cleveland Plain Dealer critic Donald Rosenberg has detailed some of the allegations in his lawsuit against the paper and the Cleveland Orchestra. He says he was exiled “to a tiny room to write his deadline reviews after being falsely accused of having gone through the public relations director’s papers… barred from rehearsals, backstage, tour parties, the players’ bus and interviewing the conductor.” (The orchestra’s attorney has some strong words of his own.)

“Claudio Abbado’s term at the helm of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra has been extended for another four years, the Italian conductor said Thursday. Abbado, who has suffered from medical problems, will stay on as musical director of the Swiss festival’s orchestra until the end of 2014, artistic director Michael Haefliger added.”

“Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos”? It may sound like something a sketch comedy team would come up with, but there seems to be “an informal scene of performers and music aficionados who hope to introduce [the] category of Jewish music 2.0 — built from folk tunes and religious chants, and upgraded with modern-day beats and instruments — to a wider audience.”

“An internationally renowned harpsichord manufacturer who filed a lawsuit against an amateur orchestra in Japan demanding compensation for breaking a harpsichord he made was awarded 4.4 million yen in compensation in a ruling at the Tokyo District Court on Wednesday.”

“The Baltimore Opera Company’s petition for Chapter 11 protection, filed yesterday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Maryland, revealed $1.2 million owed to creditors holding the largest unsecured claims. Seventy other creditors were listed, without a dollar value.”

The use of rock’n’roll (played very loudly) as a military instrument of coercion is at least 20 years old. (Remember Manuel Noriega holed up in the Vatican Embassy in Panama?) Now, in the wake of Guantánamo, a group of prominent musicians is demanding an end to the practice.

Jürgen Flimm, artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, “told a meeting of the supervisory board on Tuesday that ‘he will no longer be available for further talks after 2011,’… Flimm’s decision to throw in the towel came after a bitter dispute with the festival’s drama chief, Thomas Oberender, over the standing of spoken theatre within the month-long festival of music, opera and theatre.”

The Louisville Orchestra has canceled its annual Martin Luther King Day concert to save money, and the decision is rubbing some the wrong way. “Do we really have to give up music, too? Do we really have to scrimp on saluting our heroes? He gave his life. Couldn’t this one be on the house?”