Category: music

“New York’s latest stab at creating an opera company is a Baroque one at that. The group is called Opera Omnia. It has shown an unconventional bent from the start. They can draw on a large pool of underemployed but accomplished singers, many of them young, who continue to pour out of conservatories and university music departments.”

“In a new music reality show, Maestro, eight celebrities – Jane Asher, Peter Snow, Goldie, Katie Derham, Alex James, Bradley Walsh, Sue Perkins and David Soul – will compete with each other to become a conductor, and display their new skills at a BBC Proms in the Park concert, in front of an audience of 30,000, and countless more television viewers.”

“This summer’s raft of daft surveys has already included a ‘behavioural scientist’ from the University Bretagne-Sud in France who’s been spending lots of time hanging around bars in an effort to prove that people drink faster when the volume of piped music is turned up (by and large they do, but I reckon that’s because they can’t wait to get away from the noise).”

“In a new poll, 20% of those surveyed said that they would love to trade their jobs for a gig in the music biz, and 50% complained that in school there was not enough information about music careers.”

“Not so long ago, mysterious men would dictate whether certain records were suitable for Britain’s pop diet. At the BBC’s Written Archives Centre in Caversham the files of the Dance Music Policy Committee have been preserved for public inspection. This was pop’s equivalent of the Bilderberg Group. It was a shadowy unit set up in the Thirties that took the role of Britain’s cultural guardian very seriously.”

The accordion was, post-war, the most popular instrument in America. Then came rock ‘n’ roll. The guitar took over. The new music style killed it. Now the accordion is hip again. “Credit the rise in popularity of norteño, zydeco and American folk.”

It all started when Sir Roger Norrington, an advocate of the “musical authenticity” movement, ordered that Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory – nearly the de facto national anthem – be played without vibrato. This, for the Proms’ nationally revered final night on September 13…

In its heyday in the 1960s and 70s, Lebanon’s Baalbek festival attracted visitors from around the world. Stars like Ella Fitzgerald, Herbert von Karajan and the Lebanese singer Fairuz performed here. But in 2006, the festival was cancelled as war broke out between Israeli and the Shia Muslim movement Hezbollah.

“The expectation among rights holders is that in order to create a success story, you must reduce the rate of piracy. We’ve found that is not the case.”

American music is enjoying a golden moment. Literary bands, with songs that revel in intricate language, complex narratives and cinematic plot twists, are on the rise.