Category: music

Most indie artists don’t have budgets to market their music. But new software is helping to connect musicians with potential audiences. “Software pushes independent artists’ songs through the Internet to the people with matching tastes, exposing their music to the people most likely to become fans. Each time the programs run, they download more songs for users to play and rate on a scale from one to five stars. The ratings help the software match each user to others who have parallel likes and dislikes. Once a match has been made, the software sends people songs that others with similar tastes have rated highly.”

Two things have been as sure as death and taxes in the city of Minneapolis recently: riverfront development, and massive new buildings for local arts groups. Now, the city’s largest community music school is leaping into the fray, announcing plans for a gleaming new headquarters in the heart of the developing river district on the northern edge of downtown. MacPhail School of Music would add 10,000 square feet of usable space under the plan, which will cost $12.5 million, and would, for the first time, have a modern building with air conditioning and a proper performance space.

There’s a brain disorder that results in a patient having musical hallucinations – one “hears” music clearly inside the head when nothing is playing outside it.There is “recent work by neuroscientists indicating that our brains use special networks of neurons to perceive music. When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody. Neuroscientists have been able to identify some of these regions with brain scans, and to compare the way people respond to musical and nonmusical sounds.”

Does music have any inherent meaning all on its own? “Can the compositional process of any music, from 12-bar blues to spectralism, be “publicly intelligible” without some kind of grounding in its conventions? If you’ve never heard a nursery rhyme in your life (difficult I know, for arguments sake imagine an extraterrestrial sentient being), wouldn’t it seem baffling on first listen?”

The Seattle Symphony and the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Ballet will both finish their fiscal years in the black, or at least close to it, but Seattle Opera has dipped into the red for the first time in over a decade. The opera’s deficit could be as much as $280,000 and comes just as the company is preparing to embark on a complete Wagner Ring cycle later in the summer, which will push its annual budget up by some $8 million. Meanwhile, no one’s really breathing easily at the symphony, where the accumulated deficit has been reduced but is still impressive, and the musicians’ contract is up for renegotiation.

After weeks of negotiations, the musicians and management of the Houston Symphony have tentatively agreed on a revision to their current contract. The revised deal includes a wage freeze, an unpaid three-week furlough, and an eventual 1% raise for the 2005-06 season. Negotiations went considerably better than the last time the orchestra was at the bargaining table, in 2003, when a bitter three-week strike left all sides unhappy and at serious odds. The revised contract is meant to lessen the organization’s dependence on capital campaigns for ongoing operating funds.

The troubled Jersey Symphony Orchestra, which recorded a $900,000 defict last season announced yesterday it has finished its 2004-05 season “within $100,000 of break even” on a budget of about $14 million. The orchestra also announced two major grants.

“The desire to perform is, I think, universally present, but the horror of failure or ridicule is almost as strong. Many people have had a eureka moment with music; a spark, a fuse, an explosion which might be talent revealed or, at least, the start of an enduring interest, love, even obsession. But perhaps the talent for hearing and enjoying music is actually separate from the ability to produce it.”

“The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has appointed 29-year-old Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko to lead the orchestra into the city’s capital of culture year in 2008.He has signed an initial three-year contract as principal conductor and will conduct up to 25 concerts. He will be the youngest principal conductor of any leading British orchestra, although he cannot beat the record of Sir Simon Rattle, who took on the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at 25.”

Why do pop musicians hide behind the phrase “Classically trained”? “Tossed into a bio or regurgitated in a feature article, that phrase—along with its cousins “classical background” and “classical studies”—can add depth to the frilliest of pop-culture images, leading some to think that a million-dollar contract is the only thing keeping their favorite artist from the recital hall. Alicia Keys, Dave Matthews’ violinist Boyd Tinsley, Beyoncé, and even the avant-hop producer the Automator, all have some form of ‘classical training.’ Here’s the problem: Few people outside of music students know what that really means.”