Category: music

The newly formed Sacramento Symphony played its season premiere this past weekend, and issued paychecks to its musicians. Monday morning, the checks bounced. “Although the checks cleared on Wednesday, the situation raised questions about the financial position of the symphony and its parent organization, the Metropolitan Music Center.” The MMC is reportedly operating in the red, and still owes money to a Los Angeles-based chamber orchestra from a concert in 2001. Still, the orchestra is insisting that the rubber checks were merely a banking error.

The Ig-Nobel Prizes were handed out this week, and the top prize went to a researcher from Auburn University in Alabama, for a groundbreaking study which proved that suicide rates among white men are demonstrably higher in areas saturated by country music.

Despite all the fireworks coming from Philadelphia and Montreal, there are a number of major orchestras making a real effort to negotiate a new musicians’ contract without a lot of public sniping. In Cleveland, where the musicians and management recently agreed to extend their current deal in order to keep negotiating without a work stoppage, both sides say that progress, while slow, is definitely being made.

“While great cathedrals survive majestically from the 15th century into the 21st, most of the music heard within them has slept in libraries, and would continue to do so unless kissed back to life by an unlikely mechanical prince: a MIDI synthesizer.” Now some of that music not only lives but is accessible via the Web, thanks to an associate professor at Princeton University, who “has translated 50 unheard scores into an ethereal though artificial sound – completely out of personal curiosity.”

Everyone loves a good Ring cycle, right? Well, maybe not the musicians in the orchestra pit, who have to play for 16 solid hours to get through the four Wagner operas. Wagner’s music is as physically demanding as classical performance gets, and injuries are a very real concern. In Australia, where the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is gearing up for its first Ring, organizers have gone as far as bringing in physical therapists and other specialists to assist the musicians in completing the cycle without injury.

“Rival technologies that baffle consumers will run more companies out of business in the nascent music download market than will head-to-head competition, one of the lead creators of MP3 playback technology warned Wednesday… Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-sized device, play music and videos on their mobile phones and buy albums at the click of a button. But to their chagrin, a bewildering array of competing playback compression technologies and anti-piracy software options determines which songs play on which devices.”

An overhaul of television in the former Soviet republic of Georgia has spelled the end of the Television and Radio Symphonic Orchestra. “As part of the reduction processes underway at the state-owned 1st Channel, the television management disbanded (the) symphonic orchestra that was formed in 1937 and basically has been recording compositions of Georgian composers and created a ‘gold fund’ – high quality collection of records for Georgian television and radio for the last 70 years.”

Art students are, as a rule, fairly well engaged with the world of contemporary art, and a serious knowledge of current masters is considered as essential as being able to distinguish between French Impressionists. So why are so few music students conversant with new music? An outspoken official at the UK’s Royal Academy of Arts thinks that the answer may be that no one has ever bothered to make new music as accessible as modern art has become. A “rigorously and cruelly curated new-music festival in London, like a Biennale” might help, and while we’re changing the world, why not make new-music concerts free to the public, since they never make any real money anyway?

“Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan,’ Dickens’s ‘Mystery of Edwin Drood’: These are all works of art left incomplete by their creators, works that have invited speculation and fantasy for years. Those with a love for American popular music would immediately add ‘Smile’ — the legendary, lost Beach Boys album, begun and abandoned in the mid-1960s — to this list. … So what are we to think of ‘Brian Wilson Presents Smile,’ a new CD released yesterday?”

“Germany should have quotas for the radio airtime to be dedicated to pop sung in the native language, industry officials say. They estimate only 10% of German radio’s play lists is sung in German, falling way short of France, Italy and Spain’s 50% native language ratio.”