Category: music

You probably think that your taste in music is your own, borne of your free spirit and personal experience. Well, it isn’t. No, the people who tell you what you like to hear (or at least control what you have access to) are a motley collection of TV presenters, marketing execs, and general know-it-alls who you have never heard of, and who generally like it that way. Of course, they must be fairly good at knowing what you like, since you do like that new Coldplay single on your iPod. Don’t you? C’mon, listen to it again…

“The conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who was dumped by a major record label after a long and distinguished career, has had the last laugh after his self-released album of Bach cantatas was named record of the year. Sir John, a world expert on the music of J S Bach, took the top honours at the Classic FM Gramophone Awards in London yesterday, one of the most prestigious dates in the classical music calendar. He took the decision to release the music himself after the label Deutsche Grammophon pulled the plug on him in 2000 after nearly 20 years, just as he was about to embark on a tour of Europe performing all of Bach’s 200 cantatas.”

Conductors of international stature regularly flit from job to job, leaving little mark on any one city in which they might alight for a week or two. But for conductors of smaller ensembles who make their careers with a single ensemble in a single town, the roots put down can run deep. So what happens when one of those ensembles dies for lack of money? Enter Ruben Vartanyan, the 69-year-old music director of the newly bankrupt Arlington Symphony in suburban Washington, D.C. “There is a move afoot to resurrect the symphony in a more modest form… But the odds are long. Funding is scarce. And the work to rebuild could be enormous. The old conductor, though, is available.”

The Columbia School of Journalism has released a list of 25 arts journalists who will be taking part in an NEA-sponsored Institute in Classical Music and Opera this October. “Participants will attend performances at all major New York concert venues, including Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. They will write reviews and take part in writing workshops led by critics and editors at the New York Times, the New Yorker and other major publications, study music history with professors at NYU and Columbia, and meet with leading decision makers and thinkers in the field of classical music.”

The musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony got an astonishingly mammoth raise this season, the result of a backloaded contract negotiated by a management team that his since left the building. And now, with a financial crunch on the horizon, the PSO’s current managers are hoping the musicians will be willing to take their raise back a notch. A proposed new three-year deal, which would replace the current contract, would shave $6,000 off the minimum salary, but restore the higher wage beginning in fall 2006, and preserve it through the 2007-08 season. The musicians will vote on the revised deal tomorrow.

In what will be seen as a major turnaround for a troubled organization, the Philadelphia Orchestra has announced a balanced budget for fiscal 2004, following several years of deficits and a contentious contract negotiation with its musicians which very nearly ended in a strike. The orchestra also announced that it played to 89% of its hall’s capacity, and that its ongoing endowment campaign has passed the $100 million mark.

“Musical training might be good for the heart, suggests a small study, which shows that it is musical tempo, rather than style, that is the greatest stress buster… Half of those taking part were trained musicians, who had been playing instruments for at least seven years. The remainder had had no musical training… Faster music, and more complex rhythms, speeded up breathing and circulation, irrespective of style, with fast classical and techno music having the same impact. But the faster the music, the greater was the degree of physiological arousal… This effect occurred, irrespective of the musical style or preferences of the listener, but was stronger among the musicians, who are trained to synchronise their breathing with musical phrases.”

When architect Frank Gehry designed the L.A. Philharmonic’s dazzling new concert hall, he promised to make it “a living room for the city,” and if the comfort level of the patrons is any indication, he succeeded. Whereas a concertgoer in anything less than a shirt and tie might have been well out of place in the Phil’s ultraformal old concert hall, the modern slopes and inviting facade of Disney Hall seem to have convinced many to shed the three-piece suits in favor of more comfortable attire. So why is the Philharmonic persisting in wearing those hopelessly over-formal tuxedos?

The musicians of the Milwaukee Symphony have ratified a new contract which will reduce their annual salaries by 9%, eliminate two full-time positions in the orchestra, and cut the ensemble’s season by four weeks. “A player making the minimum will see his or her salary fall from $59,125 to $53,625. Paid vacation drops from six weeks to five, and the players’ contribution to health insurance is likely to rise under a formula linking it to insurance costs.” Despite the concessions, the musicians ratified the deal willingly if not happily, which may have something to do with an unusual provision requiring members of the orchestra’s upper management team to take the same 9% wage cut as the players.

John Adamsa says his new opera Dr. Atomic is an attempt to reconnect us with history. “Every time you pick up a paper, turn on the TV or go on the internet, you’re presented with some huge human tragedy. It might be an Iraqi policeman blown apart, or somebody shot by a terrorist, but the way it’s presented in the media, it all just becomes so much data. The story of the development of the atomic bomb has become like a comic-book narrative: all these ingenious young American scientists building this bomb, and then setting it off in the desert, and then we drop it on the Japanese. We’ve heard this story so often that it doesn’t have any meaning any more. It’s just an event in our cosmic consciousness. It’s my job to make people feel the significance of the story again.”