Category: music

“While jazz education is thriving, the business of jazz itself, as measured by things like market share and album sales, has been in a tailspin. Fifty years ago those fortunes were reversed.”

Tim Smith says that the Metropolitan Opera’s willingness to experiment with new methods of distribution and dispense with old notions of what the public will embrace is leading the way for other classical organizations to join the digital revolution. “Things are especially interesting in the opera world, which seems to be embracing the techno-cyber era more than anyone.”

U.S. CD sales fell in 2006, but downloads were way up. No surprise there, but did you know that classical music was the fastest growing genre among all music sales? Chris Anderson, author of a book on niche marketing, thinks he knows why. “Classical is so badly served in traditional bricks-and-mortar music stores [that fans are forced to turn to downloading.] The fact that it’s one of the largest categories on iTunes, despite the demographic mismatch with the typical iTunes customer, is evidence that consumers are flocking online for choice.”

Shakespeare has been a tantalizing influence for many composers across the centuries, but Philip Kennicott says that most musical adaptations of the Bard’s work are sadly lacking. “Classic Shakespearean titles grace staples of the concert hall repertoire… But each of these works is successful on its own terms, as a piece of music, a music drama or dance. None of them ever leaves the audience with the sense that they have seen Shakespeare successfully transformed or translated into a new medium. With other writers, something is always lost in translation. With Shakespeare, almost everything is lost.”

It’s been over a year now since Geraldine Walther made a daring professional leap, giving up her position as principal viola in the San Francisco Symphony to join the Takacs Quartet. The Takacs is considered one of the world’s great string quartets, but orchestra jobs are considered to be more secure, and furthermore, there’s never a guarantee that the chemistry necessary for a great quartet to succeed will develop properly with a new member. For her part, Walther says that she’s having the time of her life.

A fund set up as part of an anti-payola settlement struck by New York’s then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer and several major record companies has begun to pay out, and the state’s arts groups are benefiting. “The agreement stipulates that funds support music education and appreciation for the benefit of state residents.”

“Revising Candide is nothing new. This has been a work in progress ever since Lillian Hellman – burned by her grilling by the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington about alleged Communist ties – decided to collaborate with Bernstein on a work that would update Voltaire and ridicule the witchhunt of the Senator Joseph McCarthy era.”

“Nielsen SoundScan said U.S. album sales fell to 588.2 million units in 2006, from 618.9 million units in 2005. Digital track sales rose 65 percent to 581.9 million units in 2006, pushing overall music sales to 1.19 billion units, according to the music retail monitoring company.”

Joao Carlos Martins was a quirky brilliant and accident-prone pianist. Now he’s turned to conductying. “In Brazil, we only have orchestras sponsored by the federal and state governments. So when I took my first conducting lesson three years ago, I wanted to show that I could create a private orchestra that could support itself on private sponsorship and box-office receipts. Nobody believed me. But during 2006, we gave 50 concerts in Brazil.”

There’s a thriving “circuit of San Diego bars, cafes, and restaurants where amateur, semiprofessional, and professional singers perform. The phenomenon isn’t new, but it’s becoming more common.”