Category: music

With new ads on MTV promoting their cell-phone ring tones in advance of their new album’s release, the band Green Day is a veritable case study of the blurring between music and marketing. Ring tones are huge business in the UK – a new major source of revenue for the music industry. And now US bands are following: rap stars 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg have recently signed ring tone deals. Consumers seem to want the tones, and U.S. record companies, looking to boost sales, are eager to oblige.

Hakan Hardenberger is consdered by many to be the world’s foremost trumpet player. He’s on a mission – to stimulate more composers to write for the instrument. “Hardenberger’s eagerness to encourage composers to celebrate the trumpet was born of frustration at the paucity of things written for it, but then, he says, ‘I started to see it as an advantage. Although I am not a composer, I had to be creative – to look for something new’.”

What does it take to direct a festival of contemporary music? A composer? How about conductor? Robert Spano, who is directing this summer’s Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. “Mr. Spano has been an inspired choice. He assembled an eclectic program – eight concerts in five days – that touched on everything from the most abstruse essays in rhythmic and harmonic complication to works rooted in rock and jazz, and with classics like Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 (1951) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge” (1956) nestled against freshly minted scores.”

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted its first musicians in 1986, six of the 10 honorees were black. Now Miller Brewing is marking the “50th Anniversary of Rock ’n’ Roll” with eight beer cans featuring Rolling Stone cover shots of great rock ’n’ roll artists, all of them white.

Dallas’ Meyerson Hall has a terrific organ. But after some initial concerts after the instrument was first installed, it’s had little use. “Organ fans here and beyond are frustrated that it’s used so little. Similar stories are cropping up in other cities with glitzy new concert-hall organs; $2 million instruments are becoming expensive décor accessories.”

“The symbolic battle, all those years ago, was to make the world outside its own cabal take jazz seriously. This could more easily happen, it was decided, in a wealthy place that forced a certain kind of attention from social elites and the media. ‘We have no particular love for Newport. Yet in one sense of the word we have brought democracy to Newport, which was the last place in the world where it could have been expected to be found in America’.”

The Cleveland Orchestra departs on a European tour – it’s the only American band in Europe this August. “It’s a costly tour, but an important one. Despite the orchestra’s accumulated deficit of $7.4 million, the tour is unaffected. The trip’s $2.3 million tab is being picked up by the European presenters ($1.2 million) and sponsorships, including gifts from Jan and Daniel Lewis and the Frances Elizabeth Wilkinson International Touring Fund. The tour is especially significant for its prevalence of firsts.”

The Colorado Symphony and the Colorado Springs Philharmonic both end their seasons with small surpluses. “The success enjoyed in the Springs is particularly impressive, considering that the orchestra started with no assets. It emerged out of the collapse last year, under the weight of a $1 million debt, of the Colorado Springs Symphony.”

Does knowing the composer make for a more authentic performance if you’re a performer? The answer is probably not, writes David Patrick Stearns. Association with a composer is no guarantee of anything, and when you see how unreliably composers themselves often have been with their own work…

“Iceland may have more musicians per capita than any country in the world. This nation of two hundred and ninety thousand people—roughly the same population as Cincinnati—has ninety music schools, about four hundred choirs, four hundred orchestras and marching bands, and some vast, unknown number of rock bands, jazz combos, and d.j.s. Before Björk ascended to world fame, in the early nineties, it never occurred to many outsiders that such a small country could have such an active music scene.”