Category: music

“In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country’s most hardened prisons, hundreds of prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains. The budding musicians include murderers, kidnappers, thieves and, here at the women’s prison, dozens of narcomulas, or drug mules, as small-scale drug smugglers are called.”

“Irish folk music has reeled around the revolving door of popular approval numerous times in the past few decades. Now it’s rising again, like a rose through the concrete sprawl, tended by the immediate descendants of such frontiersmen as Christy Moore and Shane MacGowan.”

After years of decline, choirs are becoming cool, spurred by the success of the choirmaster Gareth Malone’s award-winning BBC2 series on choirs. There are now more than 25,000 registered in Britain. They make people feel good.

“The Kansas City Star has eliminated the position of classical music critic, and with it Paul Horsley, who was given his walking papers on Monday after more that eight years in the job. Also gone from the culture department are the fashion editor and two of the three calendar editors.”

Pupils as young as four will be in the £3m, three-year “In Harmony” programme, led by the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber. It will begin in three or four pilot areas within months.

Will there be such a thing as a pop superstar in 20 years? There might not be such a thing as a major record label.

“Fortune 500 companies are waking up to the fact that young hipsters are congregating on MP3 blogs. This is an extremely desirable demographic for many of these companies. The people who troll for music on MP3 blogs tend to be tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers. But they’re also difficult to reach through traditional media.”

“There seems to be enough data now to demonstrate that the Battleship Met has indeed turned around. Just two years ago, every indicator for the Met Opera was pointing down. And now they’re all pointing up — attendance, subscriptions, sellouts, philanthropy. And if one looks at that ephemeral quality associated with success — buzz — the Met now has it again. In fact, the Met has become the hot cultural ticket in town.”

Ultimately, though, the most overused torture song is I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur. On the face of it, the lyrics may seem deeply inappropriate: “I love you, you love me – we’re a happy family./With a great big hug and a kiss from me to you,/Won’t you say you love me too?”, but anyone whose child watches the television programme will know how grating
it is. In the torture trade, this is called “futility music”, designed to convince the prisoner of the futility of maintaining his position.

“In the music world, recording technology has greatly complicated the issues of ownership, authorship, and proprietary rights by simplifying the acquisition of creative property. Since the rise of sampling and downloading, digital technology has transferred many of the privileges of authorship from what was once an elite of professional musicians to the iPod-ed masses.”