Category: music

“Classical music has become a booming sub-culture on the World Wide Web. In this decade alone, hundreds of classical sites have surfaced, like green shoots after a warm spring rain. Encyclopedic, all-you-want-to-know sites cater to beginners and music professionals. Internet radio sites range from South Africa to South Florida (like Miami’s Beethoven.com). Sites offer everything from collections of viola jokes — the knock-knock jokes of the music world — to basic night-at-the-opera diary entries.”

“The list of semifinalists in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, announced near midnight Tuesday at Fort Worth’s Bass Performance Hall, had one jaw-dropper after another. What was the jury thinking?”

Katherine Jenkins wins Classical Brit album of the year. “Welsh performer Bryn Terfel won the prize for male artist of the year, while US conductor Marin Alsop won the female award. Belfast-born flautist Sir James Galway was given a prize for his outstanding contribution to music, 30 years after his solo career began.”

Leonard Slatkin, who recently ended a mixed tenure as music director of the BBC Symphony, has been named principal guest conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Slatkin was also recently named principal guest in Los Angeles, and he will continue as music director of Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony through spring 2008. His name also tends to pop up whenever high-profile American music director openings are discussed.

How serious is the strike at l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal? In the two weeks since the OSM’s musicians walked off the job, the two sides have not met at the bargaining table even once. Still, things have taken a slight turn towards compromise, and negotiations could resume later this week. Meantime, the musicians are keeping busy not only with picket lines, but with the usual free concerts designed to drum up support and keep connections to the larger community open.

One of the most frequent complaint about modern classical music is that it ignores what the audience wants to hear in favor of intellectual calisthenics too difficult for most ears to comprehend. But the California-based Pacific Symphony shouldn’t be hearing any complaints when it unveils its next commission, if only because the composer will have been chosen by audience vote. “The composer who captures the most audience ballots will walk away with a $5,000 commission for a work the Pacific Symphony will perform next season… The idea, conceived by symphony president John Forsyte, was a big hit in its first incarnation two years ago, attracting more than 200 submissions from composers around the world.”

The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has come up with a unique way to fund a major new commission – it’s offered to pay composer Dennis Eberhard by the measure, and just to make things interesting, “individuals and organizations may purchase one or more measures of Eberhard’s score for $25 apiece… Contributors to the commissioning project will receive a printed copy of their measure or measures, and they will be invited to a gala premiere celebration. In addition, they will have a chance to meet with Eberhard while he is composing the work to discuss its development.”

Last year, Duke University spent $500,000 on iPods for its students. The plan was hyped as a tech step forward. But the experiment wasn’t exactly a big success…

What was Philadelphia Orchestra president Joe Kluger’s impact on his orchestra in 16 years at the helm? “He leaves behind an orchestra that for several years was worse for his presence, and in more recent years, better off. A lot went wrong at Philadelphia’s most important cultural institution in his 16 years – an awful 64-day strike that took the mayor to settle, an impotent response to the orchestra’s losing its national and international presence in radio and recordings, and the hiring of a music director whose name, when announced to musicians, was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. How much of what went wrong was Kluger’s fault? How much the board’s? The musicians’?”

“Some may call it sound design, sound sculpture or sound art, but it’s actually music. Bypassing the visual sense, they send their messages and ideas straight to the brain with their aesthetic treatment of sound – and that is surely what music is. What is interesting to observe, though, is that in a world increasingly dominated by the visual, with adverts, text messages and multi-channel TV, sound and music is becoming an alternative and more powerful force, finding a way into our emotional lives and functioning in a way that art does.”