Category: music

The St. Louis Symphony musicians’ strike is taking its toll. Musicians are hurting for money, the orchestra says it’s lost $700,000 in revenue. “Fifteen subscription concerts have been canceled. Thousands of schoolchildren have missed out on educational concerts at Powell Symphony Hall, a cavernous former vaudeville theater built in 1925. Half a dozen of those were canceled, along with 20 concerts in churches, schools and homes for the elderly in poor neighborhoods that were part of the orchestra’s lauded outreach program.”

If you’re older than 30, you remember when music came on vinyl records and cassettes and you had to turn the record or cassette over to play the other side. Now the CD generation gets its chance. DualDiscs are here: CD on one side, DVD on the other. The cost is about the same as a conventional CD, with prices ranging from $12 to $19.

Classical music in trouble? Not at all, writes Nicholas Kenyon. “The fascinating question is why the repertory has been creatively disoriented in the way it has over the past couple of decades, why people now find gamelan music or 13th-century organum as meaningful to them as the classics. I believe there is a very simple answer to this: we have finally reaped the harvest of a century and more of recording and broadcasting, which has gradually made the widest possible range of music available to us, all at the same time, in an almost frighteningly all inclusive way. How could this overwhelming experience not have a drastic influence on our taste?”

Richard Taruskin’s new 3,800-page, 1.25-million-word history of classical music is a thematic telling of the story. “This notion – that even the most “transcendent” music is at the same time part of the complex political and social currents of its time – is Taruskin’s great theme. All that stuff we grew up with about composers being autonomous, divinely inspired geniuses is one of many shopworn intellectual heirlooms from German romanticism that Taruskin turfs out. In his book, composers take their place as “collaborative participants, along with patrons, performers, scribes, editors, publishers, critics, audiences and many others, in what the sociologist Howard Becker calls an ‘art world.’”

Composer Tod Machover has invented a new toy to teach children how to make music. “Working with the Fisher-Price toy company, Machover has come up with Symphony Painter, musical composition software that allows children ages four and above to draw music and have it played through a hand-held device. Selecting from a palette of 24 musical patterns and 24 instruments and zany sounds, the child draws his composition on a small screen called a Color Pixter. The device is fun but not mindless, and encourages the youngster to listen carefully while constructing a coherent piece.”

Since the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic, an interesting thing has happened in South Florida: a proliferation of small music groups. New ensembles are forming everywhere. “But with the upturn comes irony: There’s now a player shortage. It’s common for a musician to perform in several groups, creating a scheduling headache for the organizations. Conductors complain that they aren’t sure who’ll be playing, say, second violin from concert to concert.”

Why are some cities using classical music to ward off hoodlums? “There’s something very poignant about the idea of classical music as bug spray, as pest control. This is one of those many stories about what happens to classical music after it’s ‘classical.’ Even as public understanding of the style has hit an all-time low, the music retains some residual prestige, whether it’s played to children in the womb or hoodlums in the park. They’re choosing it because the music is still in some ways exalted. It’s now ‘magical’: We’ll spray it around like some kind of incense.”

What’s wrong with modern-day symphony orchestras? How about “icompetence, naivety, venality, snobbishness, dishonesty and amateurishness”? (and those are just the mean things they say about themselves)

Ratings plummeted for Sunday night’s Grammy show. “An estimated 18.8 million people watched Ray Charles’ swan song clean up with eight awards Sunday night, a startling 28 percent drop from the 2004 Grammys. After two years on an upswing, Grammy ratings sunk to their lowest level since 1995.”

American orchestras seem to be making a very deliberate attempt to reel in concertgoers with non-threatening programs full of “standard repertoire” works which couldn’t possibly cause anyone to have a strong adverse reaction. But the danger of such a strategy is that such “safe” programs frequently don’t inspire any strong reaction, positive or negative. Alexander Coppock has had enough of this approach: “When you program idle, trite, and useless music for my education and protection, I feel condescended to, because I have a need for honesty. Would you be willing to program music that you love, so that I may love it?”