Category: music

When the English National Opera performed before 10,000 rock fans at last summer’s Glastonbury Festival, it seemed to be that rarest of occasions: a coming together of high art and popular culture with no one getting so much as their feelings hurt. But ENO chairman Martin Smith may have rolled back much of the good will the performance built up with his recent comment that the concertgoers ‘hardly knew how to spell opera’. “Mr Smith has made a number of gaffes during his tenure. He has often been regarded as the source of ENO’s travails, accused of importing to the company a high-handed, bullish approach imported from banking, and appointing an artistic director too weak to stand up to him.

The English National Opera is claiming that The Guardian has created a controversy out of nothing by taking Martin Smith’s words out of context in a deliberate attempt to smear him.

Classical music devotees tend to be sharply split over the issue of contemporary music, to the extent that a conductor devoted to the work of, say, Elliott Carter may quickly find himself with a very small core audience. “The problem isn’t just a decline in musical literacy. You don’t have to be able to read a score to ‘get’ a piece by R. Murray Schafer or Einojuhani Rautavaara, just as you don’t need a thorough basis in colour theory and composition to respond to a painting by Frank Stella or Joanne Tod. Without really thinking about it, the broad arts public has decided that the truth of our times is not to be found in contemporary music, or at least not to a degree to make the search worth while.”

More and more jazz artists are taking the recording business into their own hands. “Artist-run independent labels are nothing new, especially in jazz. (Decades ago, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach formed Debut Records; singer Betty Carter once founded her own BetCar imprint.) But established jazz musicians are going their own way in surprising numbers today, touching on age-old and new business issues.”

A forthcoming Australian government report on orchestras is said to recommend downsizing the Tasmanian Symphony from a full orchestra to a chamber orchestra with just 38 full-time equivalent musicians.
“It further recommends that governments provide $1.1 million in one-off funding to assist the TSO to meet redundancy costs. The shock recommendations are contained in a national review of orchestras headed by former Qantas boss James Strong. The final report is due to be handed down in Canberra in two weeks.”

A Canadian professor has an idea he thinks would breathe new life into the music business. He “proposes putting all recorded music on a robust search engine — Google would be an ideal choice, but even iTunes might work — and charging an insignificant fee of, say, five cents a song. In addition, a 1 per cent sales tax would be placed on Internet services and new computers — two industries that many argue have profited enormously from rampant file-sharing, but haven’t had to compensate artists. The assumption is that if songs cost only 5 cents, people would download exponentially more music. The extra windfall for musicians and those who own the publishing rights to the songs could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, Pearlman.”

A recording company (Hyperion) wants to record ancient music. A scholar claims copyright on his work recreating them. Impass. “What are the consequences? The gloomiest scenario doing the arty rounds is that, since most old musical compositions and stage works have been edited in some way, thousands of scholars will now claim millions of pounds in royalties, destroying the finances of performing organisations already operating on the most precarious budgets.

“Of the millions of people who illegally download free music using various peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, only about 8,400 have been sued by the recording industry—including, last month, an 83-year-old dead woman from West Virginia. Those odds seem pretty good, until it happens to you…”

Riccardo Muti speaks out about the labor strife that has thrown La Scala into chaos. “Today, I am accused of not wishing to be just musical director, but artistic director as well, and perhaps also superintendent, or even of influencing the candidature for the next mayor. I would have to smile, if the spectacle were not so depressing. However, I was prompted by the serious concern of many people who with me perceived the slow but inexorable decline of La Scala’s artistic programme, in stark contrast to the improvement in the quality of artistic production. At a certain point, I decided to protest to the board, and to the mayor, about a situation that was threatening La Scala’s image, and before which I felt impotent.”