Category: music

“The publishers said the suit alleges that XM engages in massive copyright infringement with devices that provide its service known as XM + MP3, which lets listeners store songs they hear on XM’s service and arrange them into playlists.”

Michael Tilson Thomas is at it again. “The latest phase of the San Francisco Symphony’s five-year, $23 million, multi-pronged project is a radio series titled ‘The MTT Files,’ to be distributed by American Public Media beginning next month. The eight one-hour shows are hosted by the media-savvy maestro and promise to be upfront and personal.”

Indie music is booming. But you won’t hear much of it on radio. “The reasons for radio’s resistance to independent music are numerous: laziness, knee-jerk conservatism, a tendency to equate small labels with musical inferiority, and, most crucially, the fact that over the last 40 years, FM radio programming slipped out of the control of actual music fans, and into the hands of careerist bean counters.”

Joshua Bell has been named the winner of this year’s Avery Fisher Prize, an honor which comes with $75,000 cash. “Previous winners include cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianists Emanuel Ax and Andre Watts, and violinists Sarah Chang and Midori.”

“The only concrete way to measure musical merit is by testing global impact, and the only way of counting that is by cash-till sales. Easier said than done. Until recently, labels have kept sales figures more tightly under lock and key than executive salaries, and for much the same reason. Lately, however, store-tracking technology and waves of label sackings have brought secrets into the open.”

A Music scholar has tracked down Chopin’s piano, missing for 160 years. “Prof. Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger traced the instrument to an English country home by researching the ledgers of Camille Pleyel, the Frenchman who built it for the Polish pianist and composer. Eigeldinger was able to identify the piano by its serial number.”

“At 39, Pierre Jalbert is one of the youngest composers ever to receive the $25,000 prize which is now awarded biennially in recognition for a body of work, or lifetime achievement in the field of chamber music composition, rather than for a specific piece of music.”

The arts media have been all agog in recent months over innovations being introduced to the opera world (notable, the Met’s simulcasting of live productions in movie theaters around the world.) David Patrick Stearns points out that though opera audiences are a notoriously conservative bunch, even by classical music standards, the changes had to come eventually. “Traditional views of traditional opera will always exist. But opera is among the greatest chameleons of the performing arts. It can be so many things. To make the traditional operatic experience the only experience is to cut off its tail.”

The English city of Manchester has long yearned for an annual festival that could rival the crowds and prestige drawn by Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival, and this summer, it hopes to get the ball rolling with an inaugural edition. 25 new musical works have been commissioned, and newness will be the theme throughout the three-week festival.

The Seattle Symphony has named Thomas Philion, the president and CEO of the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina, as its new president and CEO. Philion replaces Paul Meecham, who resigned last summer amid what many saw as differences with powerful Seattle music director Gerard Schwarz. Schwarz and Philion know each other well – Schwarz is the chief conductor at Eastern Music Festival in the summers.