Category: music

The strangest new trend in live concertgoing is all about pretending that you’re actually alone. Rather than piling up walls of speakers to pump sound into a room, several music festivals have begun providing a bank of headphone jacks for people to plug in their personal ear gear, and the whole room rocks in what sounds to a non-participant like silence. “The idea of a live show experienced solely through headphones originated eight years ago in France when a Paris musician named Erik Minkkinen streamed a concert from his closet. As the story goes, three people in Japan tuned in. Despite the tiny audience, the idea evolved into a decentralized organization under the name le placard, or the closet, a kind of open-source music festival where anyone can establish a streaming and/or listening room.”

Contract negotiations with the musicians of the cash-strapped New Jersey Symphony are set to go into overtime tonight, when the current collective bargaining agreement expires. Both sides say negotiations are proceeding amicably, and there is no risk of a strike or a lockout. The NJSO musicians accepted a temporary pay cut in 2003, and are hoping to maintain their current salary of $44,975 under the new deal, even as they accept a role in bringing the organization back to fiscal stability.

For years New York’s Mostly Mozart festival was a listless affair that many critics thought should be put out of its misery. But under the festival’s new music director French conductor Louis Langrée, the enterprise has been reborn. “Though Mr. Langrée can be credited with the rejuvenation, he has had a crucial ally in Jane S. Moss, the vice president for programming at Lincoln Center. Back in the dreary days when Gerard Schwarz was the festival’s music director, the playing of the orchestra was listless and, even worse, pointless. The musicians would run through a performance of a staple like Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, and you’d wonder why they were bothering.”

“What is it that makes people who have earned some success or social status imagine that they have the gift to command musical attention? Why, for instance, does the present chairman of English National Opera, Martin Smith, conduct the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (which he once financed), albeit in private performances? Why did the former chairman of Sony, Norio Ohga, demand to conduct top US and European orchestras, albeit in exchange for a million-dollar donation? Are these men so deficient in reality sensors that they fail to consider what orchestral musicians who work with real maestros must make of their pathetic presumption?”

Korean pianist Paik Kun-woo thinks that the problems of classical music have been mis-characterized: “The real problem is commercial misuse of classical music. Sacrificing the quality of music never makes things better. Classical music is wonderful and complete in itself. Fusing two different genres of music can only ruin the original values of both.”

Conductor Donald Runnicles has been named director of Jackson Wyoming’s Grand Teton Festival. “In addition to his position as music director and principal conductor of the San Francisco Opera, Runnicles, 50, is also principal conductor of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York City and principal guest conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He guest conducts frequently in Germany, Austria and Great Britain.”

Digital music device maker Creative says it owns a patent for a feature used by Apple in its popular iPod. “Creative said the patent covers the way music tracks are selected on a device using a hierarchy of three or more successive screens. On the iPod, for instance, users can scroll from artists to albums to songs. Creative ranks far behind Apple in the market. Apple dominates over 70 percent of sales for music players that use hard drives to store music.”

Pop stars who sell lots of high-priced concert tickets on the road are finding that their recordings aren’t selling in stores. “Scenarios abound when it comes to the disparity between chart and box office numbers — figures that rarely tell the whole story. In some cases, like with the old guys, it’s that millions and millions of records have already been sold over decades, and fans feel that they have what they need. But sometimes, as with many of the big jam bands, it’s simply the live work that truly drives the train.”

“Chicago long has been a magnet for and a generator of great jazz talent. But in the past year or so, the promotion and support of Chicago jazz performers have intensified dramatically, with major developments energizing an already robust scene. On the eve of the Chicago Jazz Festival, which unofficially kicks off with performances Monday, jazz observers young and not-so-young agree that they’ve never seen anything like this dramatic change in the local scene’s infrastructure.”

“Destroying someone’s career or pulling work from obscurity used to be the province of well-financed mass and trade publications, but now anybody with a voice strong enough to stand out on the Web can have a real impact – and maybe make a couple of bucks in the process. Pitchfork Media is a case in point. Started by Ryan Schreiber in his parents’ house in suburban Minneapolis in 1995, Pitchfork has emerged as one of the more important indie music tastemakers in any medium, with 125,000 unique visitors a day and only three full-time employees.”