Category: music

Here’s One: “The pitches in musical scales are likely derived from language. Turns out, aspects of spoken English and Mandarin correlate to the intervals between notes in a chromatic scale (the black and white piano keys in an octave). Is it music we love or the sound of our own voices?”

For 60 years, the Music Performance Fund, an unsung charity financed by a small fraction of record company sales, has “helped to bankroll thousands of free concerts annually all over North America.Now, though, the popularity of music downloads and file-sharing via the Internet has eaten away at record company revenues. And as the industry has dwindled, so has the performance fund’s ability to underwrite pro bono shows.”

“On a summer’s day in late June 1928, Armstrong and his quintet, the Hot Five, went into a recording studio in Chicago and created his supreme masterpiece, one that summarizes the brilliance of his art and points a way forward for all jazz — and many other kinds of music as well.”

“Perhaps it is a result of the Beach Boys’ influence on pop culture that this summer you can’t get away from them. Today, as in the late Sixties, America is a country whose reputation has been battered by an unpopular war. Perhaps this is why bands have been driven towards the innocence and purity of their musical roots.”

“A musicians union has filed a federal lawsuit against the producers of ‘American Idol,’ claiming musicians were underpaid because the show’s live music was re-recorded for reruns… In 2007, the producers started cutting out the show’s soundtrack and using different musicians to re-record new music for the past-season highlights show.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom “has written to instrumental and vocal ensembles that are supported by Grants for the Arts,” requesting that the groups play wedding music at City Hall next week. The wording, which implies that the groups have a duty to perform, has some in the area’s arts scene upset.

With the likely demise of the Columbus Symphony, the community’s youth orchestras, which have always been administered by the CSO, are in trouble. “Symphony leaders… met with 125 parents last week to review options, which could include higher tuition fees, independent fundraising and a bigger role for parent volunteers.”

San Antonio Express-News music writer and columnist Ramiro Burr, resigned from the paper after allegations emerged “that he hired a ghost writer to produce more than 100 stories and columns since 2001.

“Nonclassical, run by Gabriel Prokofiev, DJ, producer, composer and grandson of the great Sergei, is a monthly classical club night that mixes live performances from instrumentalists and singers with sets from electronica DJs. Talking during the performances is not frowned upon – in fact, it’s positively encouraged – and drinks are served at the bar throughout the night.”

“Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived… It was a cacophonous, confrontational subgenre of punk rock, Dadaist in style and nihilistic in attitude. It began around 1976, and within four years most of the original bands had broken up.”