Category: music

“Music sales in the US rose by more than 9% in the first three months of 2004 compared with the same period last year – signalling an end to a four-year dip. The 9.1% upturn in sales of CDs, music DVDs and legal downloads is a ray of light for an industry that has battled online piracy and new technology.”

Scottish Opera is planning to lay off 80 staff members in a desperate effort to avoid fiscal collapse, according to a union representing Scottish actors. The crisis managemant plan the union claims to have seen would cut across the entire organization, with dozens of musicians, crew members, and administrators losing their jobs, and “the entire 34-strong chorus [would be made] redundant.” Scottish Opera has already taken a £4 million advance on next year’s £7.5 million grant from the Scottish Arts Council, and general consensus has been that the company is severely underfunded. The company isn’t commenting on the layoff report.

Nationalism can be a dangerous thing, but a love of country and all that it stands for is the only thing that can lead to the development of a serious “national sound” among composers, says Robert Jones. Individuals like Copland and Bernstein aside, America has never really had its own tradition of classical music, and even works identified as distinctly “American” are often written by European composers like Dvorak. “America always seemed nervous about nationalism in music,” and Jones says that will have to change if anyone expects the U.S. to develop a compositional tradition as easily recognized as those of countries like France, Finland, and the Czech Republic.

The Fender Stratocaster may be the most famous instrument of the 20th century, and it turns 50 this year. From Les Paul to Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton, the guitar built with an eye to architecture and a sound like nothing anyone had ever heard before has helped define three generations of rock ‘n roll sound.

The debate over whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a talented but limited composer in the pocket of the Soviet leadership; or a secret dissident, hiding messages of anti-Stalinist revolt in his music, is unlikely to ever come to a satisfactory conclusion. But a new book by Solomon Volkov, whose earlier book Testimony reignited the Shostakovich debate a quarter-century ago, sheds some new light on the complicated relationship between Shostakovich and his chief antagonist (and chief sponsor,) Josef Stalin. Volkov divides the composer’s career into two periods: the brash, exploratory years before Shostakovich penned his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtnsk,” and the cautious, paranoid period after Stalin denounced “Lady Macbeth” as an anti-Soviet muddle.

Should the music critic look at a score or listen to a recording before attending a performance of a new work? Tim Mangan says yes: “Virtually any piece of serious classical music that a listener is not familiar with is ‘just an overwhelming event’ the first time he hears it. There’s so much going on that our ears can’t comprehend it in one gulp. And who knows whether, that first time we hear a piece, be it Brahms’ Third Symphony or Adams’ ‘Transmigration,’ it’s a good performance or bad?”

“It’s impossible for me in America. It’s very difficult to be a musician in America because the system has become one where people expect you to do all sorts of other things that take a tremendous amount of time. When they talked to me about renewing my contract, they said `We would like more time from you not necessarily to conduct, but to do community activities.’ They basically expect you to go and spend half your time explaining to people why it is important to have culture, to have music. Here in Berlin when you fight, you fight in order to have enough for projects you want to do.”

There are many recorded versions of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But a radical new interpretation by the Norwegian conceptual artist Leif Inge, which he calls “9 Beet Stretch,” “digitally elongates a recording of the symphony to make it last 24 hours. The piece slows symphonic time so that movement is barely perceptible. What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones; a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche. Yet the symphony remains somehow recognizable in spirit if not in form, its frozen strings fraught with tense, frowning Beethoven-ness.”

“Scottish Opera is in limbo, struggling on an already meagre budget and warned that it must pay back a £4 million advance and will receive nothing above its current annual £7.5 million. The most imaginative company in the world cannot survive on nothing, so it seems certain that unless it is thrown a lifeline quickly, Scottish Opera will sink.”

“Most of the music you will ever hear will be played by people you will never see and whose names you will neither know nor think to ask. It will be recorded in windowless rooms, witnessed sometimes only by an engineer or producer, the now-ancient technology of the overdub making the presence even of other musicians unnecessary. For every superstar singer or guitar heroine whose name adorns a T-shirt or tattoo, there are hundreds whose work is done anonymously, or as good as. Who play their part, collect their pay and go home.”