Category: music

Classical Recording Dead? Don’t Tell Naxos.

At a time when many big record labels are shedding their classical divisions and many smaller niche labels are going dark altogether, Naxos is an unusual and telling success story. “Ten years ago, some people were more than a little sniffy about the Naxos phenomenon… [but] these days, Naxos is picking up awards, with two mentions in the New York Times last year for adventurous recordings of William Bolcom and Peter Maxwell Davies. The British Gramophone and Penguin Guide magazines regularly hand out praise.” The label has released some 3,000 albums since its inception in 1987, and has made nearly its entire catalogue available online.

Was This Actually In Doubt?

The Last Night of the BBC Proms is not exactly what most classical musicians would consider high art – in fact, it’s mainly a bunch of flag-waving and patriotic folk songs with a raucous crowd singing along – but it couldn’t be much more popular, and so this week, shortly after being appointed the new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony, Jiri Belohlavek went through the usual motion of dashing the faint hopes of critics across the UK and assuring the public that Last Night would continue to be just as it has always been.

New Music… Or Whatever It’s Called

Frank Oteri edits a web magazine on contemporary music. But what to call that music? “For better or worse, everything has a name. Everything, that is, except the music we feature in this web magazine. Sure, we give it names like “contemporary classical” or “post-classical” or “new music” but usually we preface the name by clearing our throats or doing some other sort of mea culpa. For years, we’ve bemoaned our music’s lack of a name in articles, conversations, editorials, you name it (pun intended). And many of the big names in our field have weighed in: Milton Babbitt with “cultivated music,” David Lang with “other music,” and on and on. I even posited Ivor Darreg’s one-time “neoteric music” a few months back. (Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)”

Lebrecht: Why Is There Still A BBC Orchestra?

The BBC Symphony Orchestra has a new music director (and a good choice it is, too). But, asks Norman Lebrecht, did anyone think to ask whether there there is still a need for a radio orchestra? “Broadcast orchestras belong, it could be argued, in the Natural History Museum alongside the dinosaur and the whittled stick. They came into being in the early 1920s as the cheapest means of filling airtime in an era when the best orchestras operated a broadcast ban and symphonic records were full of scratches and had to be changed every three minutes. But what, you many wonder, is the point of maintaining two orchestras in London and one in Manchester at a time when the BBC is making 15 percent cuts in all other areas as it battles for charter renewal?”

The Language Of Music (Forget The Mechanics)

Today, however, the teaching of music—even at the great conservatories—is often a more mechanical affair. The problem, Bob Abramson says, lies in what these students have been taught about what matters musically—not experimentation, but repetition; not invention, but perfection. His students come to Juilliard knowing how to decode the symbols of music but not knowing how to infuse them with meaning. “We teach reading without literacy,” he says.

Classical Music – All Good Stories Have An Ending

Is Western classical music coming to an end? Every good narrative must have an ending, and Richard Taruskin’s new six-volume Oxford History of Western Music is an epic story. So “why is the sky falling, according to Taruskin, whose motives are no doubt higher than to simply lend his work cultural resonance? To him, it is an ‘ashes to ashes’ sort of scenario, one that he describes without passing judgment. Simply put, it is electronic music, which needs no scribblers but rather “ear players” to compose, coupled with the advent of the recent phenomenon of “sound artists” which signals that this tradition is not so much headed for a dustbin, but destined to shake off the shackles of notation, free at last to simply be music.”

Beware The Composer-Critic

There is a long and noble tradition of great critics who have also been composers. But Josh Kosman writes that he still has an innate distrust of the composer-critic. “The artistic marketplace is an adversarial arena—or at least a competitive one, like any marketplace—and that makes it a setting in which it’s important for the participants to be clear and consistent about their allegiances. A critic’s exclusive allegiance, I am convinced, should be to his or her fellow audience members. A composer, by contrast, has other allegiances entirely—to his or her own creative imperatives, to the larger community of artists, even in some cases to posterity.”

The Composers And Their Letters

“The best way to find out what the great composers of the past were like is to read their letters. Even those who left few or no other writings of significance (among them Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, and Ravel) often come through with special clarity in their correspondence with friends, colleagues, spouses, and lovers. As for those composers who doubled as part-time professional writers, their letters almost always supply strikingly fresh perspectives on their life and music—as well as no less strikingly candid opinions of the music of other composers.”