Category: music

The St. Louis Symphony has reported a $3.4m deficit and a severe drop in the number of tickets sold for classical concerts for 2007. The orchestra’s new president is stressing that stemming the tide of red ink won’t be a quick and easy endeavor.

The executive director of the Alabama Symphony has resigned after only six months on the job, citing “family needs back home [in Chicago] that require my attention.” The orchestra plans to expedite the search for a new administrative leader.

“Did composers ever think that newness consisted in simply more of something: more dissonance, more dynamic contrasts, more chance, more determination, more whatever? More is a bottomless pit. This kind of newness is closer to fashion.”

“Because teaching and composing are so often yoked together, I very seldom meet composers over 30 who aren’t also paid to tell people how to compose. What if most professional athletes also served as coaches?”

The Seattle Symphony’s star principal cellist was only 22 when he won the job two years ago. But after only a short time, Roman is moving on to a solo career.

“In any case, Gould’s relentless quest for musical perfection made him a natural for the studio, where he was free to record take after take and to meticulously assemble the results into an immaculate rendition of a given piece of music. The wonder of it was that, rather than producing sterile, hermetically sealed recordings, Gould’s technical manipulation — or ‘creative lying,’ as he called it — left behind a rich spectrum of recorded performances that speak to contemporary ears with astonishing immediacy.”

“The passive listening paradigm is a really important metaphor for being able to allow other viewpoints into your thought process, and as such is fundamental to the survival of democracy.”

“QTrax, a start-up website, spent an estimated £500,000 carpet-bombing Cannes over the weekend to promote its revolutionary service. Briefly, it convinced the world that it had signed up major record companies to create an online catalogue of 25 million songs.” But it wasn’t real…

Israel has at last apologised to the surviving Beatles for banning them from the country in the 1960s as a supposed threat to the morals of the nation’s youth.

Paul McGuinness said he believed the Silicon Valley culture and its ecosystem had to undergo a cultural shift, noting the original “hippy values” of the west coast technology pioneers in the late 1970s and their internet equivalents in the late 1990s. “Embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music,” he said.