How will you get your music? The music industry believes the future is portable. At a music industry conference in Cannes, mobility was the word of the day. “The offerings are nearly limitless: music through a wristwatch, hits played on a literally loud shirt or New Age themes on underwater headphones at the gym swimming pool during a hard-driving backstroke.”
Category: music
Downloading’s Tower Of Babel
Legal downloading of music is becoming increasingly frustrating as players and download stores support different formats designed to protect music from being copied on a mass scale. The problem? Music downloaded in one system won’t play on another. Now there’s an effort to standardize the digital rights management formats in hopes of making it easier for consumers. But will the plan catch on?
Trying To Save Peking Opera With Computers
Chinese researchers are setting up databases of traditional Peking opera, hoping to save it before it goes extinct. “The rapid globalization and the influence of foreign cultures in China have caused unprecedented challenges to the survival of Chinese traditional opera, which has been evidenced by more and more traditional operas vanishing. Statistics show there were 367 types of traditional operas in China at the end of 1950s, but the number has dropped dramatically to 267, and some of them are now extinct.”
How Snow Changes An Orchestra Audience’s Demographics
What happens to an audeince when snow shuts down a major American city? Well, in Philadelphia, “the orchestra put $10 snow tickets on sale starting Friday, and so at least an audience of about 750 showed up. Not surprisingly, they seemed to come mostly from Center City, and perhaps through weather-induced natural selection, they were overwhelmingly younger. On this single night, the median age of the orchestra audience shed at least 35 years.”
Springer: Opera Springer Is Offensive
And what does Jerry Springer the man think of Jerry Springer, The Opera? Evidently not much. He finds it offensive. “I wouldn’t have written it. I don’t believe in making fun of other religions or in saying things that could be insensitive to other people’s religions. You would have to talk to the people that wrote it. I don’t make religious jokes so I wouldn’t have done it. But it’s not up to me.”
Orchestra Better, Audience Gone
London’s Philharmonia Orchestra is playing better than it ever has. But “it is ironic that as the quality and enthusiasm of orchestral musicians has increased, so the interest in orchestral music within the general culture has declined so markedly. ‘We’re in a period now where the broad population of this country is totally unfamiliar with orchestral music and reluctant to enjoy anything that requires some investment of time and thought. Our world is shrinking by the day because of the overwhelming impact of popular culture’.”
Houston Symphony Declares Video-Free Sundays
The Houston Symphony performs onstage with giant video screens. But the orchestra has announced “video-free sunday” performances. “All the pops people love (the system). Most of the classical people love it. A small minority don’t,”
Building A Better Piano?
Paolo Fazioli thinks he’s made a better piano. He “insists that he never wants to make more than 150 instruments annually (so far he hasn’t topped 100), because of the personal attention given each one. ‘The Steinway is a very good piano, but it is not the only way to make a piano, just as there is not only one way to make a car. There used to be many piano makers but after World War II, one piano came to dominate the market and I thought that was ridiculous. I wanted to make a piano in which there is an evenness through all the sections, with a very clean sound, a long sound. Not every pianist will prefer it, but they should have a choice’.”
Maestro Switch – What If Philly And NY Had Gone Another Way?
If not for a few details, Christophe Eschenbach might be leading the New York Philharmonic while Lorin Maazel could have settled in Philadelphia. “History could have been reversed. Eschenbach was a top contender for the New York position, and had Maazel not unexpectedly clicked with the Philharmonic in a November 2000 guest-conducting engagement, Eschenbach might now have his job. Just as easily, orchestra chemistry could have conspired to put Maazel in Philadelphia. If that had happened, would their talents have been wasted? Or better utilized?”
Want Some Music Of Your Own? Why Not Commission It?
“Patronage of music by individuals may seem like a throwback to the days when noblemen maintained court orchestras with composers to write for them. Today, a few private donors have made names for themselves commissioning new music (notably Betty Freeman, who since the 1960’s has supported the likes of John Adams, Steve Reich, Morton Feldman and John Cage), but most of the big patrons of contemporary music are linked with institutions, giving money to symphony orchestras, operas and new concert halls. As it turns out, anyone can commission a piece of music.”