Category: music

Some big music stars will release albums this fall. “But whether any of them can sell the type of huge numbers that the industry enjoyed two, three years ago — or even last year — remains to be seen. While music sales have been on the downward trend the past few years, this year’s slippage has reached alarming levels, and it’s unclear whether the release of any artist — even two powerhouses on the same day — will prompt consumers to reach for their wallets.”

“The Philadelphia Orchestra has hit upon a way to firm up attendance for its concerts at the Mann: free lawn tickets. This past summer, attendance, measured on a per-concert basis, was up over last year by 42 percent. An average of 4,221 listeners heard the orchestra each night it played in Fairmount Park, up from last summer’s 2,968.”

“A graphic score is any musical score that isn’t (or isn’t entirely) written in conventional Western, five-line-staff notation. No two composers use the same system — if system is even the right word for what is often a very open-ended way of representing music — and a composer may invent a new language of notation for each piece he or she writes.” A gallery show puts the scores on view….

“The Colburn School, where thousands of Southern California children have learned to master a musical instrument,” has a big, new building, a new president, 100 live-in students at its Colburn Conservatory of Music, and a fight on its hands. “Parents of the 1,500-plus kids attending the Colburn’s popular community-based School of Performing Arts division say they’re being shortchanged as attention is shifting to professional training for the conservatory students.”

A forensic expert in Vienna says he believes Beethoven was inadvertently killed by his own physician, who overdosed the musician and composer with lead.

“The mighty music business is in free fall — it has lost control of radio; retail outlets like Tower Records have shut down; MTV rarely broadcasts music videos; and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple. “The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content. Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music. And there’s no clear answer about how to fix that problem.”

“Classical music isn’t dying, but the term itself means less with every passing year – not because it represents an osteoporotic tradition, but because its ever-widening embrace includes musicians who refuse to be bound by notions of appropriateness. There are no accepted standards or styles, which means that the critic lives on shifting sands.”

“Scientists call songs that get stuck in your head ‘earworms’ after the German Ohrwurm. We don’t know a lot about how or why they happen — it’s hard to get funding to study this type of thing — but we know a little. Like, it tends not to be a whole song that gets stuck in your head, just 15-20 seconds of one, and it tends to be a simple song that even non-singers can hum without effort.”

Despite all the talk of a classical recording glut, enthusiasts know that many of the greatest recordings from decades past are all but lost, unavailable to the public at any price. “ArkivMusic, an online retailer that launched in 2002, is out to reverse that trend and restore as much of the deep catalog as possible. In addition to stocking every classical CD in print, it now offers what it calls ArkivCDs: reissues of out-of-print CDs produced on demand for the consumer.”

“On Saturday night the Cologne Opera will perform their version of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio at Scotland’s premiere international arts festival. That a German company and not Scottish Opera will take to the stage is being seen as the legacy of cuts made by the Scottish Executive three years ago. Scotland’s national company had been approached to stage an opera but it had proved considerably cheaper to work with Cologne Opera instead.”