Category: music

Everyone’s talking about the internet’s impact on helping the careers of indie artists. But “while the notion of unsigned artists circumventing radio and television and “shaking the major record labels to their core” is a romantic one, whether it’s happening to the degree being portrayed in the media is another matter entirely. In fact, could it be the idea of the internet, rather than the internet itself, that is driving exposure of emerging artists?”

A new venue-licensing regulation in the UK is killing live music in small venues, say musicians. “Reports have been received by Equity branches that the work involved in getting an entertainment license now means many venues have simply stopped using live performers altogether and reverted to using recorded music.”

The critics are starting to turn on conductor Simon Rattle, four years into his reign atop the Berlin Philharmonic. He’s being accuse of “being boring and predictable, and inducing ‘mild despair’ in his audiences.”

As part of the inauguration of its new organ, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center offered the public an opportunity to pay to play it. “Fifty-four people put down $25 a minute or $75 for a five-minute block for the afternoon event. A student from New England Conservatory’s Preparatory School in Boston drove six hours for a minute. An organist from New York City bought 10 minutes.”

Pinchas Zukerman wants a new hall for Ottawa’s National Arts Center Orchestra. “The orchestra needs a new venue because there is not enough space at its current location, Zukerman said. He added that a new building would give the orchestra a new identity and downtown Ottawa some much-needed nightlife. Zukerman said he envisions the new facility to be a world-class building that would have three halls – a 2,000-seater, a 1,200-seater and a 500-seater – as well as an orchestral academy for budding musicians.”

A festival celebrates the ultimate outside. “Harrison’s music does not stand apart from so much as, like a giant sponge, absorb all around it. A feisty individualist, he was an outsider artist who happened to be the ultimate musical insider. He was an expert geneticist-composer who made musical hybrids no one had ever heard before, particularly in his pioneering grafting of Asian musical instruments and genres onto Western ones. And he wrote melodies — gorgeous, unpredictable, brain-sticking melodies — with the best of them.”

“Volpe admits that ticket sales have plummeted at the Met, but blames 9/11 traumas. He points strenuously to a few innovative productions, but rests his laurels on a stubborn pursuit of tradition. There is no question that this dictator kept an orderly house in a world notorious for chaos. Even Volpe’s detractors praise his organisational skills. It cannot be surprising that he will soon join a consulting firm run by his buddy Rudolph Giuliani, ex-mayor of New York.”

“After four years, the Simon Rattle System is quite familiar. The British conductor and the 120 members of the Berliner Philharmoniker are no longer madly in love, but instead preoccupied with delivering top-notch musicianship, maintaining their reputations. In the meantime, we have learned that the fellow with the sunny disposition is human just like the rest of us.”

Self-produced recordings are the hottest thing in classical music these days, and artists and orchestras around the world are embracing the concept as a more than viable alternative to dealing with disinterested major labels. Even more promising is that fact that there doesn’t appear to be any one road to self-produced success, and musicians are quite literally tailoring their recording process to suit their needs.

Three years after agreeing to wage and benefit cuts in an effort to help their organization dig out from under a $4.4 million deficit, the musicians of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra have a new contract which will restore the cuts, and boost minimum salaries to nearly $81,000 within five years. “The agreement was reached after a week of negotiations and well in advance of the current contract’s expiration date in August.”