Category: music

“Online services account for just a small fraction of overall music sales, but they’re growing rapidly. And the new choices they give consumers threaten to remix the recording industry’s traditional revenue streams, pumping up the volume of singles and subscriptions and turning down album sales. The shift to online shopping could be lucrative for the music industry if the flexibility and convenience lead people to spend more on tunes than they do today. But some industry executives and analysts fear the opposite result, with music lovers buying a few 99-cent singles instead of $15 CDs.”

The Boys Choir of Harlem has named Ernie Hart, chief of staff to New York City Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott as its new director. The choir’s founder was asked to step down earlier this year for failing to report allegations that a counselor was abusing a student.”

“The Royal Scottish National Orchestra launched two days of workshops yesterday, with a ‘noise team’ aiming to work out ways of playing orchestral music safely. While deafening music is usually associated with the thundering basslines and power chords of rock, the classical world has been stirred into action by European regulations limiting the noise to which musicians can be exposed. There has been rising concern in the UK over the potential damage to musicians’ health from sound and stress in the workplace.”

The chief cultural export of the Finnish town of Oulu is “the Shouting Men’s Choir, which is exactly what it sounds like: 30 men of Oulu in black suits, shouting in harmony. You don’t get that sort of thing down in Geelong, or in Helsinki, for that matter. It is a product of long nights in a town with little to do, a northern sense of humor that revels in the absurd, a high city count in eccentrics, and a lot of vodka.”

Who will be the next chief conductor of the BBC Symphony after Leonard Slatkin departs? “One name on the orchestra’s shortlist is said to be Donald Runnicles, the Scottish conductor who now works largely in the US.”

Physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have “found a way to digitally map the grooves in warped or damaged shellac records and wax cylinders, and play them back using a sort of virtual needle — all with the same powerful microscope and computer technology they use to measure particle tracks. The ‘non-contact’ optical scanning method could also detect any scratches, or clicks and pops due to dust, and automatically filter them, allowing a digital rendition to sound as clear as the original performance.”

Last weekend, the Metropolitan Opera broadcast its final live performance of the season, the last time the series will carry a sponsorship credit for Texaco, which kept the opera on the air for more than six decades. And while the Met has found money to cover the cost of next season’s broadcasts, the long-term future of the wildly expensive series is still very much in jeopardy. Met chairwoman Beverly Sills is spearheading the effort to solicit donations for future seasons, and her basic strategy is a simple appeal to the warm, gauzy memories of all the moneyed folks who grew up listening to the Met.

Like that concert you just heard? Now you can take a recording of it home with you after the concert. “On May 21, new digital kiosks offering the tiny drives will be installed at Maxwell’s, a small indie-rock club in Hoboken, N.J. At $10 a pop for the recording, and $20 for the reusable, keychain drive, let the downloading begin. This is a tool that allows fans to take home and share some of the best independent music from small live venues around the country.”

The Cleveland Orchestra has declined an invitation to perform at the BBC Proms because its concerts would be webcast on a BBC website with no additional payment to the Cleveland musicians. Norman Lebrecht cannot believe his ears: “Open access is what makes the Proms a magnet for the world’s great orchestras who, after the formalities of their overlong seasons, feast upon its effervescent atmosphere like nomads at an oasis. The trade-off is that everyone does it on the cheap… We are not talking here of the poor and downtrodden of the musical earth. The basic wage in the Cleveland Orchestra is $97,090 per annum, twice the going rate for London musicians and for less than half the work.”

The gap between what orchestra musicians earn and what star soloists and conductors earn is wide. And causing some unhappiness in the ranks. “A typically eminent conductor earns, per concert, about a quarter as much as the typical full-time player earns all year. Given that most freelance orchestral contractors can expect as little as £75 per concert, the fees lavished on top conductors and soloists can rankle.”