Category: music

Gustavo Dudamel is only 26, and won’t yet be 30 when he takes over the music directorship of the LA Philharmonic in 2009. But the Phil has a long history with young conductors, and its collection of music directors has been quite a diverse one by orchestral standards, which seems somehow appropriate for the City of Angels. “Los Angeles and its environs are not one thing culturally — nor two, nor 20, nor even 200. The area is not the sum of its parts — it’s a kind of uber-multicultural metropolis.”

The announcement that Esa-Pekka Salonen will leave the LA Philharmonic in 2009, to be replaced by 26-year-old Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel, caught the vast majority of the orchestra by complete surprise. But after taking a few hours to process the new information, many musicians were quick to praise Dudamel’s energy and skill on the podium, and expressed relief at the unusual double announcement: “The future of the orchestra is secure. We’re not going to flail around with our hat in hand like every other orchestra, saying, ‘Will you please come?'”

New music has never been hotter than it is right now in New York’s underground club scene, says Alex Ross, and a generation of musicians and composers for whom blurring the lines between concert and club music are largely responsible. “Sometimes the blurring of boundaries leads to overamplified mush. Just as often, though, it generates a new kind of interstitial music–one that makes a virtue of falling between the cracks.”

Busking just isn’t what it used to be. These days, commuters joined at the ear canal to their cell phones, PDAs, and iPods go rushing right past street musicians without so much as a sideways glance or a thought of tossing a buck into the open case. But surely, if the busker standing outside your local subway station was superstar violinist Joshua Bell, things would be different, right? Um, actually, as it turns out… no.

Handel’s Messiah is a beloved part of the Christmas tradition all over the world. But the piece was originally intended for Lent, not Christmas, and Handel wrote it “to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.”

Discussion of the great composers tends to be reverential, and even character flaws or professional failings are looked at through the lens of a career that resonates even in the present day. So it can be a bit disconcerting to come across a classical music scholar who is deeply interested in, even obsessed with, the sex lives of Brahms and Beethoven.

Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra has stood the test of time rather nicely, but “as children’s entertainment, the Young Person’s Guide… which assumes total and passive concentration from a seated and silent audience, falls pretty short against its audiovisual rivals for a child’s attention.” One UK composer is hoping to build on Britten’s theme with an entirely new introductory orchestra piece designed to appeal to those endlessly multitasking 21st century kids.

“These are trying times for the sheet music business, which has been increasingly chipped away at by illegal photocopying and online file sharing. The loss is especially noticeable in New York. The 1947 telephone directory listed nearly 100 places in Manhattan to buy sheet music. Now, only a half dozen are listed.”

Another Stradivarius sold at auction for millions of dollars last week, and once again, it’s a sure bet that the buyer wasn’t a musician. In fact, there are nearly no musician-owned Strads left, thanks to the ever-escalating value collectors place on the Cremonese gems. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Yes, it does mean that most musicians, even great ones, will never get to play on the best of the old Italian violins, but it also forces the music world to pay attention to the stunning number of great instruments being crafted by living makers.

The Chicago Symphony is known within the orchestra business as being one of America’s most tradition-bound orchestras, suspicious of change and slow to embrace new technologies. But now, with a new “chatty” broadcast series, an in-house record label, and an incursion into iTunes, the CSO is “acknowledging that, along with many other symphony orchestras, it must retool its services in a more contemporary way if it is to access new audiences and retain a pre-eminence in the field of radio and recordings it has enjoyed for some 50 years.”