Category: music

“In recent years, perhaps hundreds of independent and small-chain record stores in college towns have shut down or consolidated as music downloading all but eliminated the demand for them. The change may be an economic inevitability, but still a loss.”

Nearly everyone acknowledges that a major shift is going on in how music is created, distributed, and promoted, but no one seems to agree on just how the shift will impact everyone involved. “Can controlling how and when music is released backfire on artists and fans?”

In case anyone’s keeping track, the Metropolitan Opera still hasn’t pulled off a performance of Tristan und Isolde with both of its billed stars, Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt, onstage together throughout. The latest is that Ms. Voigt is ill again, and “the Met was still holding out hope that [the two] would finally take the stage together for the last performance, on Friday.”

Could Sydney’s world-famous opera house soon become as impressive on the inside as it is on the outside? “This is the vision conceived by the original architect, Joern Utzon… But most of the changes will not be visible to the public. And that is where the political challenge lies.” The planned renovation will cost the public AUS$700 million.

The Shreveport Symphony’s plan to convert all its full-time musicians to per-service players and slash their annual pay 75% is not sitting well with some of the city’s residents. “To pay professional musicians this rate is a disgrace and an insult… If this city wishes to attract young professionals then it would serve its best interest to fund the arts.”

Bud’s Jazz Records was an institution. “People in the jazz community could always depend on running into someone they knew there, and conversations often ran hot and heavy about the preferences for one artist over another. There was always an album on the CD player to compete with — or support — the conversation.”

A new book about Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky has elicited sharp attacks from Craft, now 80. “He denounces [the author’s] ‘total’ misunderstanding of Stravinsky as a human being” and deplores “the way that he became ‘disputatious, then rebarbative’, with a ‘sole interest’ in ‘gathering gossip damaging to me’.”

“Theories vary as to why it works. One is that it doesn’t fit with antisocial youths’ perception of cool; another that teenagers can hear high-frequency overtones that adults can’t detect, which upset them (though music students of a similar age are evidently immune). As for the rest of us, when TfL did a survey of 700 commuters, ‘they overwhelmingly agreed that hearing classical music made them feel happy, less stressed and relaxed’.”

“Big, mature cities have full-time symphony orchestras. If the Columbus Symphony Orchestra folds, it will be the moo heard ’round the world, and some corporations, for whom municipal prestige and national image are factors in recruiting top people, will rethink moving to or remaining in Columbus.”

Critics are attacking London’s Royal Opera for “showing classic signs of mid-life crisis and going to unseemly lengths to get younger flesh on its seats.”