Category: music

In a dramatic turnaround, Apple CEO says recording companies ought to abandon digital rights management schemes. “Jobs pointed out that the vast majority of music bought today — only 10 percent of all music sold last year was through an online store — has no copyright protections and freely allows consumers to copy music to their computers. Attaching digital rights management to music bought online has only limited the number of online music stores, he wrote.”

The Philippines’ San Miguel pulled the plug on its corporate sponsorship of an orchestra and chorus. “The San Miguel Orchestra and Chorale came together even when some tried to rip them apart. They performed, they educated, they popularized what once was alien. They held concerts, came out with their albums. And now they’re gone. Oddly enough, the blame game is being cranked up as if that would resurrect what has been laid to rest.”

“As the principal percussionist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ted Atkatz had reached a pinnacle in his profession. … But in May, Mr. Atkatz pulled a modern-day Don Quixote. He quit his job to devote himself full time to his alternative rock band.”

“Buoyed by the early response to its decision to make live opera performances available in movie theaters, New York’s Metropolitan Opera will encore two of the high-definition transmissions, this time to a wider selection of outlets.”

“In an unlikely alliance between an English opera company and a Japanese electronics giant, Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console is sponsoring a production of La Bohème which opens in London later this month. As a result, the 103-year old London Coliseum will host hi-tech PS3 machines in the theatre foyer and the show will be supported by interactive programs, in an attempt to woo fans of the high art to more modern forms of entertainment.”

“Caracas is a surprising place to find Claudio Abbado. The fragile, refined maestro is one of the most wanted conductors on the planet. Yet he chooses to spend more than two months a year amid the snarled traffic and sprawling urban poverty of the polluted Venezuelan capital, rehearsing and performing with the country’s top youth orchestra.”

“The 10th annual Sphinx Competition in Detroit, which opens Wednesday, shines a spotlight on the lack of minorities in classical music. Some of the finest young minority string players in the nation, accompanied by the all-black and Latino professional Sphinx Symphony, will compete for more than $100,000 in prizes and scholarships to top music schools and opportunities to perform with leading American orchestras.”

Last week the Dallas Symphony appointed Jaap van Zweden as its new music director. So who else was on the shortlist?

“Their credibility and timeliness continue to erode. As the Internet accelerates the way music is distributed, consumed and evaluated, fans can turn to many credible and far more timely outlets to find the year’s best songs and albums. Increasingly, the Grammys can’t help but be perceived as a relic of a time when MP3 files didn’t exist.”

“We are children of the video age. However many hours you may have spent in theaters or concert halls, the likelihood is you’ve spent vastly more time in front of a video screen or listening to recordings. For most of us, our primary relationships with performing artists are no longer through live performances but with their electronic offspring.” That’s why The Metropolitan Opera’s new experiment may be the most significant advance since supertitles.