Category: music

London’s Royal Opera House is slashing the prices on 100 top price tickets for opera and ballet on Mondays, cutting their price to £10 each, thanks to a corporate sponsor. “It follows a similar scheme – also funded by the same company – at the National Theatre last year.”

The band Wilco’s new recording won’t be officially released until June 22. But last month copies of the new album hit the internet. Rather than get mad, “the band responded in a novel way. Instead of filing lawsuits or issuing cease-and-desist letters – a common practice in the piracy-crazed music industry – Wilco cooperated in setting up a Web site where downloaders could cleanse their consciences.” Since Friday, fans have donated $4000 to Wilco’s favorite charity.

Cellist Julian Lloyd Webber has “no sympathy for the shrill squeaks emanating from the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn’s violin section, whose players are demanding more euros than the rest of the orchestra because they play more notes… An undoubted compensation of orchestral playing is the companionship among the musicians, who have a camaraderie that soloists rarely experience. Ours is a world where ships often pass in the night but seldom dock in the same port.”

London’s Impreial Gardens nightclub was a breeding grounds for young black musicians, writers and producers. But then the club suddenly had to close when they land it was on was marked for redevlopment. “We were going to be the Motown of south London. All money raised by the club went to support artists, black record labels, writers and producers. We were part of a cluster of black business here and we were all pushed out. It seemed a bit like ethnic cleansing. They have found premises for the others but nothing suitable for us.”

Why do some musicians capture the imagination of the public, while others, perhaps just as gifted, do not? “Nathan Milstein, popular though he was, never became as big a celebrity as Heifetz, and the reason for this can be found in his personality. Unlike Heifetz, an introverted man with few passions outside of music, Milstein was both outgoing and wide-ranging in his cultural interests, and he embraced the act of public performance with an enthusiasm alien to Heifetz’s tightly wound nature.”

American composer Paul Moravec has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music for his “Tempest Fantasy.” Also nominated as finalists in this category were: Piano Concerto No. 3 by Peter Lieberson, and Cello Counterpoint by Steve Reich.

Let’s see – we’ve replaced musicians with “virtual orchestras” in theatre pits. And more and more movie scores are being synthesized. What’s next? Conductors. A robot has successfully(?) conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Japan. “The 58-centimetre-tall humanoid robot led the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra in a unique rendition of Beethoven’s 5th symphony during a concert held at the Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo on 15 March.”

Nashville’s country music songwriters are singing the blues these days. “Radio homogenization, corporate mergers and music piracy have made it tough for songwriters to earn a living. ‘We’ve lost more than half of America’s professional songwriters over the past decade. The ones staying alive have really had to adapt.”

The recording industry has been fighting music downloads as piracy, saying that the recording business is being hurt by downloads. But “what if the industry is wrong, and file sharing is not hurting record sales? It might seem counterintuitive, but that is the conclusion reached by two economists who released a draft last week of the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying. ‘Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates’.”

Who will succeed Marin Alsop as music director of the Colorado Symphony? “The search apparently has been whittled down to a quartet. Nothing official, but we’re banking on Roberto Minczuk, Jeffrey Kahane, Miguel Harth-Bedoya and David Lockington.”