Category: music

“The quality of Brendel’s alertness — his sensual intellectuality or his intellectual sensuality, whatever it is — is breathtaking; and it is refined, solidified, by technique and scholarship and reflection, so that he never falls back solely upon the force of his own subjectivity. Like all musicians, he is an interpreter, but he is not another jolly manufacturer of “interpretations.” It is the music itself that Brendel desires to disclose. He believes that at the piano he can narrow the distance from the real. Brendel’s pianism is neither personal nor impersonal. That is its uncanny achievement.”

Two men have convicted of illegal music filesharing in the UK. They are the first to be charged in Britain. “High Court judges ordered two men to pay the British Phonographic Industry between £1,500 and £5,000 for making thousands of songs available online.”

Producers of the “Jerry Springer, the Opera” tour say ticket sales are down because of protests by a Christian group. “Despite having a show which has won all the best musical awards and critical praise, I would say that it looks to me like (lobby group) Christian Voice are winning the audience battle.”

Ringtones are turning into a big money-maker for the recording industry. “In 2005, tones pulled in $600 million, 20% ahead of estimates and more than double the 2004 take. The year’s leader, 50 Cent’s Candy Shop, sold 1.9 million downloads, more than the top-selling digital song: Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl, with 1.2 million. As options build and the cellphone is positioned as a digital command post, growth seems inevitable.”

“Accepting Mozart, and putting him and his aesthetic at the centre of the classical canon, also seems to require some distortion of what and who he was. People have been poring over his scores and letters ever since he died, and what they’ve written about the character revelations they find there often tells more about the authors than about Mozart. Like early-modern Europeans in the New World, they tend to see what they expect to see.”

Why was Renee Fleming suddenly replaced for Mozart celebrations in Austria this week? The circumstances raise questions. “Why was the Mozarteum so inflexible, refusing either to substitute another aria for the one scheduled or to hire someone else for the aria but let Ms. Fleming perform the rest of the program?”

“The multinational music industry is gushing forth Mozart, calculating that one in four classical CDs has his name on it and the guy has brand recognition. Classic FM has produced a Mozart disc for babies. What we are witnessing is the rebirth of Mozart as McDonalds: everywhere you look, and always the same the world over. This coming weekend will serve up triple Mozart-deckers and Mozart-lite for weight watchers. I’m loving it….”

Wal-Mart has launched its own online music service. Dubbed “Wal-Mart Soundcheck”, the service features studio performances and interviews with new and established bands and musicians.

“The tenori-on, a prototype from Yamaha’s product design laboratory, produces computer music through a grid of 256 illuminating buttons on a brushed-aluminum tablet. By pressing buttons along rows and columns, users can program melodies like plotting notes on a scale. When the tunes are looped and layered, the machine creates a symphony of synthesis, musical blips and bleeps matched with light patterns that bounce and ripple across the device.”

The orchestra may not finish out its season. “The orchestra projects a $500,000 deficit for this fiscal year, no longer has any lines of credit and is not paying many of its bills. The orchestra’s board planned a $3.5 million fund drive this year, but said that depended on reaching a contract deal by Dec. 31 with the 71 full-time players.”