Category: music

A few weeks back, it was reported that Washington, D.C.’s lone classical radio station, WGMS, was soon to be bought by the owner of the city’s NFL team and switched to sports talk. Now, the deal is apparently falling through, but WGMS’s management may choose to abandon the classical format, regardless.

As music education in public schools continues to go the way of the dodo, several prominent music colleges have begun stepping in to fill the gap. The hope is that the people in charge of American schools will eventually recognize the inherent value of arts education, and make music a regular part of the curriculum again.

A new $235 million concert hall in Orange County, California, has been drawing rave reviews since it opened in September. But as the newness wears off, some patrons have begun complaining about bad sightlines, poor wheelchair access, uncomfortable seats, and an air conditioning system that seems to be set to “Arctic” on many nights.

The Seattle Symphony has had a turbulent year filled with musician unhappiness over the orchestra’s musical leadership. The orchestra’s talented executive director got out when things started to get really bad, and the orchestra posted a big deficit. But the city’s two newspapers have done a lazy job of covering the problems, and a messy situation has become even worse.

We’ve all heard the techophiles bleating about cell phone ringtones being the new frontier of recorded music, so should we be encouraged when we learn that Beethoven-based ringtones are some of the most popular? Or should we wonder, instead, whether those who choose the Ode to Joy are even aware of what they’re hearing? “Ours is a time when all things great are pulled down to the lowest level, everything subject to its own form of Cliff Notes… Rather than have your music so devalued, it is probably better to remain unknown to the great unwashed, permanently enshrined in a state of anonymous immortality.”

Composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s complex legacy (was he a Stalinist stooge, or a quiet rebel?) has so far meant that his archive has never been given the sort of permanent home or widespread study that other great composers have been granted. ” Moving Shostakovich’s archive into a museum where it could be scrutinized by music scholars would put to rest many myths that still cast a pall on his legacy… But interest in the archive is low.”

“Has the Sydney Festival abandoned classical music? Or, to put it another way, has classical music become so terminally unfashionable that image-conscious publicists have run out of ways to pretend it is something it isn’t? …Those looking for what we rather clumsily call the classical concert experience are left feeling like people refused entry to a fashionable bar on the grounds of poor dress sense.”

Last week La Scala canceled a production of “Candide” that featured a dancing George Bush. This week, the production’s director says it’s back on. “In a long telephone conversation with La Scala General Manager Stephane Lissner, ‘I urged him to reconsider, and that’s what he’s done,’ Robert Carsen said. The two agreed to talk about specifics in January.”

“Beyond typical wartime attitudes of belligerence, protest and yearning for peace, in 2006 pop moved toward something different: a mood somewhere between resignation and a siege mentality. Songs that touched on the war in 2006 were suffused with the mournful and resentful knowledge that — as Neil Young titled the album he made and rush-released in the spring — we are ‘Living With War,’ and will be for some time. Awareness of the war throbs like a chronic headache behind more pleasant distractions.”