Category: music

After much controversy, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra has decided to “formally review its $17 million purchase of rare violins and other stringed instruments from philanthropist Herbert Axelrod last year, following revelations that some of the instruments are probably not authentic.”

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has a new music director – Stéphane Denève, a “complete unknown to British audiences.
Announcing the appointment, the orchestra’s chief executive, Simon Crookall, described the relationship between the players and the 32-year-old Frenchman as ‘love at first sight’.”

Pop music (and musicians) are getting more politically active this year than they have in years. “Less than 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 bothered to vote in the last presidential election, but if activity in the world of music is any indication, those numbers could increase dramatically this year.”

The New York Philharmonic has canceled some recent tours. Philharmonic officials are determined to “fix” the tour business model so it works. “Like so much else in the orchestral world, tour financing began to sour in mid-2002, with the recession and fears of terrorism. That was about the same time that several midlevel North American orchestras began to threaten bankruptcy.”

“Certainly, when it comes to classical music, few cities are so abundantly and audaciously full of life. As an inheritance from its decades of division into East and West, unified Berlin boasts a gloriously impractical number of musical institutions: eight orchestras and three opera companies. Municipal finances are in a shambles, and institutional squabbling abounds, but if you tuned out all the background noise this summer, you could find a thrilling array of options: fiendishly good orchestral concerts, willfully scandalous opera productions, open-air concerts on a beautifully restored square, contemporary chamber music and even music piped underwater into a swimming pool.”

Andrew Druckenbrod sums up a recent online blog on ArtsJournal about the stylistic future of music: “The critics essentially responded the same way: that there really isn’t a dominating musical language — such as tonality, serialism or polyphony — anymore. We are even beyond a postmodern reaction to modernism. Today, anything goes. That’s a good thing, since it allows composers to be unfettered in their creativity and critics to pick based on quality, not camps.”

How about a little sex appeal when marketing classical musicians? “It’s useless to be shocked by such tactics, and the shock, by today’s standards, is pretty mild. You’d page right past these photographs in a fashion magazine ad without even pausing. Sex appeal has been propelling stars for a century — and, for that matter, classical stars for longer than that.”

The Houston Symphony finished its 2003-04 season with an $880,000 deficit, much smaller than predicted. “A strike by musicians in March 2003, the first in the organization’s 90-year history helped the orchestra end the 2002-03 season with a $3.6 million deficit. But the strike settlement allowed the symphony’s board to implement a five-year plan to get balanced budgets on a regular basis and pay off its accumulated deficit by 2008.”

Interest in Shostakovich is increasing, and a flury of activity put him under examination. “Scholarship on Shostakovich is still in its infancy. There’s still a lot that we don’t know. The good news is that things in Russia have changed back. Now Russian scholars are going into the archives.”

Okay – maybe that’s an overstatement. But “the digital music era should offer listeners more information about jazz, not less. The stakes are high. If jazz fragments into millions of digital files, future generations could be left with a maddening cultural jigsaw puzzle. This music could quickly become one of the mysterious art forms that is translated to the public by a small group of experts.”