Category: music

Some 250 years after they were made, Stradivari instruments are still unsurpassed. “Perhaps his genius really is inimitable. But the violins Stradivari made are not perfect; they can be moody; they have off-days. Modern violin-makers benefit from the knowledge brought by history and science. It may need another genius, but surely one day someone will produce instruments that not only match Stradivari’s, they supersede them.”

Forget the Olympics. This week in Finland, “experts” from all over the world will be converging on Finland for the Air Guitar International Championships. “What air guitar is all about is to surrender to the music without having an actual instrument. Anyone can taste rock stardom by playing the air guitar. No equipment is needed, and there is no requirement for any specific place or special skills. In air guitar playing, all people are equal regardless of race, gender, age, social status or sexual orientation.”

Telling college students no to download music isn’t a winning strategy. So universities have been looking for alternatives to illegal downloads. “Over the past year, schools have started using legal music download services, tried various technologies to block peer-to-peer traffic and beefed up education efforts and this work has helped address the problem.”

The Florida Philharmonic is no more, but South Florida has a new orchestr – the Boca Raton Philharmonic Symphonia. “The 29-member chamber orchestra will be made up almost entirely of former Florida Philharmonic Orchestra members. The ensemble is slated to present five concerts in the 2005-06 season.”

The London Symphony Orchestra has canceled its fall American tour. Consisting of 15 stops in the United States and Canada, the “Music of Hollywood” tour apparently was canceled due to sluggish ticket sales.

Live music is thriving in the UK. In all, an estimated 1.7 million gigs were staged across England and Wales last year in pubs, clubs, restaurants, etc. The study was conducted in advance of a new law that will require venues to get licenses for presenting live music.

Harrison Birtwistle is turning 70. George Loomis asks him if it isn’t a good thing that “composers are now free to do their own thing without the pressure of writing in a certain style? ‘Actually, it shows we’re in a state of crisis,’ he says, arguing that if you look historically at the subject of creativity, something always appears for people to rally around, as they did with cubism and serialism. ‘Right now we need something to come how do they say it in baseball? out of left field’.”

So much for the internet killing music sales. This summer in the UK, the music business has seen a nice upturn. It includes “improved album sales, a sudden upturn in legal music downloads and an increase in singles sales for the first time in five years.”

“The BBC is planning to mount a live broadcast of a new opera work aimed at a young audience. It will be set inside a mainline station and performed as commuters are making their way home from work. The event will require an hour’s suspension of station announcements.”

Dennis Hanthorn is Atlanta Opera’s new general director. But even before he officially begins, he’s had to make some difficult decisions. “With an almost 50 percent drop in subscriptions to date, Hanthorn eliminated a quarter of the opera’s performances for the coming year to avoid going deeper into debt. Four productions are still on the 2004-05 calendar: “Carmen,” “Don Giovanni,” “La Bohème” and “Fidelio.” But the total number of performances will be trimmed from 16 to 12.”