Category: music

Young musicians who win prominent jobs quickly learn the value of a truly top-notch instrument to their careers. But the top string instruments are now so expensive that the decision to buy one frequently comes at the expense of other major investments, like a house.

The New York City Opera may lose its home at the State Theater for the 2008-09 season to allow for reconstruction, then return to the Lincoln Center venue for the start of Gerard Mortier’s regime.

“The entire enterprise is basically one massive excuse for the record industry to pat itself on the back, and after the financially disastrous year it just had, that’s not really something the business should be rushing to do. I know all this very well. And still every year, when the Grammy nominations are announced, I inevitably end up finding myself stunned.”

“The 5-foot-tall all-white robot, shown Thursday, used its mechanical fingers to press the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.”

“The last score that Peter Lieberson composed for his late wife, the beloved mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and a piece commissioned by a consortium of 65 American orchestras are two of the three leaders among the classical nominees for the 2008 Grammy Awards.”

The Bronx Symphony has been around for 60 years, blending amateurs and professionals into a much-loved community orchestra. “Yet, while the orchestra has survived television and crime waves, changing tastes and internal squabbles, it may not live through a policy change by the city that has put dozens of small arts organizations in competition for public money, ending decades of automatic annual financing.”

“A decade into the internet revolution, the demand for classical downloads is still too soft to define. Dedicated concertgoers, conservative to a fault, have stuck to buying old-fashioned CDs. Apple runs a classical line at I-Tunes, but with limited scope (don’t go looking for Birtwistle) and delivering a feeble 128-192 kilobits per second (kbps), barely one-tenth of the density on CD.”

An absurd idea, writes William Kraft. “A composer writes to express himself and his ideas to the best of his ability. He may want to communicate and share those elements with his public. He may not, but odds are that he would like to. The ivory tower is a myth.”

“Thriller” sold 40 million copies during its initial run. “From the distance of a quarter-century, the release of Thriller looks like … the most significant event in popular-music history in the past quarter-century. It is the record that ended commercial pop radio’s de facto apartheid, that ushered in the modern music-video era, that turned a former kiddie star into a new generation’s equivalent of Elvis and the Beatles.”

“The new video game Rock Band lets users willing to part with $170 strum along with the Ramones, drum with Jimi Hendrix, or croon alongside Keith Richards.”