Category: music

“Simon Rattle conducted a rehearsal of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on Tuesday for the first time since a large fire two weeks ago at the orchestra’s home… The roof [of the Philharmonie, which was damaged in the fire,] has now been temporarily repaired and will be fully restored by the end of the year.”

“The music boom fits in with the Dubai ruler’s ambitious plans to make the city attractive for the rich and famous, and to fuel mass tourism. Glitzy top-level sports, like March’s Dubai Tennis Championship, are another factor. Artists who perform in Dubai expect to earn ‘twice as much’ as they do in the United States or Europe.”

“Before an election, a politician will make a lot of promises — ‘I will do this, I will do that, I will reduce taxes.’ A musician is judged not by the words or the promises, but by the facts of the music that he makes.”

“David Byrne, who interprets the term artist with marvelous expansiveness, doesn’t actually play the building in Playing the Building; it’s visitors who make the sounds. He made the architecture orchestral–feeding air into flutelike heating pipes, triggering hammers on cast-iron columns, and vibrating motors against ceiling beams as if drawing a bow across the strings of a giant fiddle.”

So Universal wants to be both the recording company and the artist manager. But “it is worrisome for presenters and management to be the same. Managers always think they’re the artist. They think they own the artist, which they don’t. They work for the artist. The artist has free choice. The artist can leave. The commercial interests want the stadium appearances, the glamour. They don’t want the artist to do what the artist does.”

Fifteen have been murdered so far. “The attacks on musicians come amid a wave of bloodshed in Mexico, which has usurped Colombia as the drug trafficking capital of the Americas, unleashing violent turf wars and fighting with police. For their part, Mexican musicians have been increasingly singing about cocaine, corpses and Kalashnikovs alongside their traditional tales of poverty and lost love.”

“Six and a half years after opening night, more than $300 million later, Philadelphia didn’t get what it was promised. At least the Kimmel’s current leaders are now acknowledging failure, even if they carefully avoid the word. That’s progress. For years after opening night, top Kimmel and orchestra officials sneered at critics who said Verizon’s sound varied in quality from seat to seat, or that the sound in general didn’t have enough presence or impact.”

At many pop concerts, the audience is so busy filming and recording the experience with their cell phones, they forget to pay attention to the music. “As a performer, it’s frustrating to look out and see a sea of cell phones instead of faces. There’s definitely a problem where people are so busy documenting the moment that they forget to just live in the moment.”

The economy may be in the dumps, with smaller orchestras struggling to survive, but the salaries paid to music directors of America’s top orchestras continue to spiral upwards. Incoming Chicago Symphony director Riccardo Muti may be getting more than $2m per season, and even mid-level orchestras are paying their MDs in the high six figures.

The New York-based Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas may not have the pedigree of a major orchestra, but it has something more important: a mission: “to explore the largely virgin territory of symphonic music from the New World, to draw a popular audience and to open doors for performers on the threshold of their careers.”