Category: music

Citizens in Peru, Ind., have bought Cole Porter’s boyhood home and are planning to open a museum dedicated to the songwriter. “Led by town mayor Jim Walker and working largely from donations, the group raised the cash to buy the house last year. They plan to refurbish it and open it to the public next summer.”

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reassigned its classical music critic, making him a general assignment arts writer. The paper says it’s not cutting back on classical music coveraqge, and that it wants to cover it differently. But “even if the classical crowd winds up with as much coverage as ever, some fret that the switch from a staffer to a freelance critic might signify to readers a lesser commitment to the arts.”

“The jazz/hip-hop nexus is simply a cultural and genealogical fact. Turntablists, MCs, and jazz musicians are collaborating every day. And yet the impact of hip-hop on some of the best new acoustic jazz still isn’t widely understood.”

The Toronto Symphony “lost $2.19-million last year, boosting its accumulated deficit to a dizzying $9.47-million. That’s more than half the orchestra’s annual budget, and over $2-million more than the debt the TSO carried when it nearly went bankrupt four years ago. Last year’s results include a climb in revenue of almost $2-million, and a rise in attendance to a respectable 85 per cent of capacity. Marketing and administration costs dropped almost across the board. And yet the TSO still couldn’t balance its books. There just wasn’t enough fundraising to cover the gap between ticket revenue and the expense of putting on concerts.”

iTunes has become one of the largest retailers of music. “The Apple-owned computer store made the top 10 US record sales list for the first time. iTunes beat Tower Records, Borders, and Sam Goody. But it was beaten by others, including Wal-Mart and Amazon.com.”

When the Austin Symphony took to the stage Friday night for its schedules concert, its conductor Peter Bay was conspicuously absent. “The mystery of the missing conductor deepened when the principal horn player, Tom Hale, bounded onto the stage, bowed and then rose to the podium. The principal horn player?” So what delayed Bay? The orchestra certainly didn’t tell the audience…

A new piece by an aging rocker. “Two decades after Roger Waters broke with Pink Floyd, as bassist, lead singer and composer, fans flew here from across Europe to hear his latest creation. And it seemed to matter little that he had written a 19th-century-style opera called “Ça Ira,” or “There Is Hope.”

It’s in Boca Raton. “Those leading the new chamber orchestra are proceeding along a very cautious, slow-growth path, determined to avoid setting an overly ambitious agenda or digging a financial crater. With a modest annual budget of $365,000, the Symphonia is committed to being revenue-driven.”

A California man says he’s in possession of fragments of Beethoven’s bones. “Paul Kaufmann made the announcement at the Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, which helped coordinate forensic testing aimed at authenticating the fragments and determining what killed Beethoven at age 56.”

“Not many music lovers have warmed to the idea that they don’t retain all the rights to the music they buy. The crux of the debate is this: When you buy a song, an album, or a movie, are you buying the content only in the form it comes in? If you purchase a song from Apple’s iTunes store, should you be able to play it on any hardware you want?”