Category: music

Hate the sound of cell phones ringing? Music producers don’t. For them, ring tones are a huge and growing business. “In 2004, your average record company executive is more likely to stifle a cheer every time he hears a tinny version of a chart hit bleeping from a nearby Nokia. According to some sources, the mobile phone ringtone has come to save the music industry. Last year, mobile phone users spent $3 billion on them. They account for 10% of the world’s music market.”

The Milwuakee Symphony is cutting “more than $2 million off its $17 million operating budget” and laying off 17 employees in an attempt to balance its budget. Additional cost reductions will come from other areas of the organization over three years. The layoffs come as the MSO stops the practice of dipping into its unrestricted endowment fund for operating cash.”

Is the Philadelphia Orchestra slipping a few steps? “With a new performance space, and a European tour imminent under a new director, all seems rosy enough superficially. But there have recently been mutterings in the press about strife beneath the surface, including difficult contract negotiations for the players and arguments about poor acoustics at the Kimmel Centre. But then in Philadelphia, there is a sense, more than other places I’ve been, that the orchestra is a potent symbol, an ambassador of the city, and everyone you meet has an opinion about it.”

Opera Australia posts its second annual deficit. The company’s chief executive says Victorians were “not getting the opera they deserved. He said the company could not afford to service Melbourne as it would like unless the Victorian Government increased its contribution. ‘The funding level of the company is too little to do all the activities that are asked of the company and the cost of staging opera in Melbourne had been seriously underestimated when the formula was drawn up in 2000. As a result, Victorians were now seeing fewer productions.”

So Peter Stumpf has his priceless Stradivarius cello back, thanks (apparently) to the benevolence of a woman who was ready to turn it into a CD rack. But why won’t anyone at the L.A. Phil, Stumpf included, answer questions about the incident? Simple embarrassment might be part of the reason, but some observers speculate that the owner of a valuable instrument is much better off if the world doesn’t have a lot of details about what harm may have come to it. In fact, the world of high-end instrument dealing is so shady these days that it doesn’t seem unlikely that the Philharmonic might be hiding some of what it knows about the case of the stolen cello.

Lost in all the hoopla surrounding the impending departure of Pittsburgh Symphony music director Mariss Jansons is the memory of how long it took the orchestra to adjust to its leader. Jansons’s style was so different from that of his predecessor, Loren Maazel, that it was several years before musicians and conductor seemed to feel at ease with each other. But the result of the collaboration has been widely deemed to be worth all the effort spent building a rapport – in recent years, the PSO has been hailed by critics as regularly coming up with “once-in-a-lifetime” performances. Jansons bows out this weekend, with the ultimate curtain-closer: Beethoven’s 9th.

It was 1976 when the New York Philharmonic, in an effort to improve the acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall, gutted the place and mounted a huge renovation. It didn’t help much, and last year, the Phil, not wanting to run the risk of another unsuccessful construction project, attempted a merger with Carnegie Hall. The merger fell through very publicly when the boards of the two organizations couldn’t reconcile their schedules and goals, and the orchestra was once again stuck with Lincoln Center. Now, the plan for a new renovation of Avery Fisher is back on, at an expected cost of $300 million. Construction won’t begin until 2009, and the Phil will have to find a new temporary home for a couple of seasons during the renovation.

The New York Philharmonic has no guarantee that a new Avery Fisher Hall will be any acoustically better than the one it has now. Still, it’s a $300 million risk worth taking, says Anthony Tommasini, and not only for acoustical reasons. “The Philharmonic is exploring a bold plan to remove some 350 of its 2,738 seats to make room for a smaller recital hall. Quite apart from acoustics, the hall has long seemed an impersonal and inefficient public space. So these changes would be welcome, perhaps even exciting.”

The science of violin-making hasn’t changed much since the days when Antonio Stradivari cranked out some of the greatest instruments known to man. But the music world has changed, in ways both subtle and obvious – top-quality instruments are now bought and sold for unthinkably high prices, and the science behind them is examined in all its minutiae by individuals hoping to unlock the secrets of the great masters. For one American luthier, the quest for the perfect instrument is quixotic, but fulfilling nonetheless.

What would classic rock music have been without Bob Moog? The New York engineer’s musical invention – the world’s first playable music synthesizer – revolutionized the genre when it debuted in the late 1960s, and helped keyboardists to emerge as important figures in rock music. “After a long legal battle, Bob Moog not long ago won back the rights to start marketing synthesizers in his name. The timing couldn’t have been better. After years in the shadows of digital keyboards and software-based synths, the fat bass and piercing highs of analog keyboards have re-emerged — big time.”