Category: music

The British-based EMI label has announced that it will lay off 1500 workers in Europe and the US, consolidate several of its record labels, and begin outsourcing much of its CD production to other companies, in a move which the company hopes will save it $91 million per year. EMI has had a somewhat troubled history in recent years, as it attempted to buy or merge with multiple other global music companies such as Bertelsmann and Warner Music, mergers which ultimately failed. The cost-cutting moves will actually cost EMI money in the short term, but may stabilize some long-term operations.

Raymond Gubbay’s new Savoy Opera is preparing to make its debut. But can the company succeed as London’s third opera house? “Their idea is to present accessible opera sung in English for the price of a West End show (highest ticket price £49.50, whereas at the Royal Opera the best seats for the most sought-after shows cost £170). They want to tempt in the sort of audience who might go to Holland Park Opera or Gubbay’s Albert Hall extravaganzas, but who might find the aura associated with Covent Garden or the Coliseum off-putting.”

Recording companies have been saying that digital piracy has killed their CD sales. But “researchers at two leading universities have issued a study countering the music industry’s central theme in its war on digital piracy, saying file sharing has little impact on CD sales. ‘We find that file sharing has only had a limited effect on record sales. The economic effect is also small. Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale’.”

Austin’s South by Southwest festival has put the city on the map as a center of live music. “Austin’s scene generates about $616 million annually, and 11,200 jobs are directly related to the city’s live music scene, according to a study by the Austin Music Commission.” So music fans in Denver are petitioning the city for “more visible promotion of its live music scene and touting figures that show its economic strength. However, the Mile High City has a long way to go to match Austin’s musical clout.”

Musicians have complained about the acoustics in London’s Barbican Theatre for years. “But a £7m refurbishment to improve the deadening acoustics has proved so successful that more of the best musicians in the world are now happy to appear, it was claimed yesterday. Twenty years after its first – and only – distressing performance at the Barbican, the Vienna Philharmonic returns next month.”

Ray Robinson, 71, has been appointed music director and manager of the Palm Beach Symphony. He “headed Palm Beach Atlantic University’s choral program for 14 years before semi-retiring last season. He also was a freelance music critic for the Palm Beach Daily News. Before that, he was dean of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, president of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., and a visiting fellow at Wolfson College at Cambridge University in England. He’s a violist and conductor, an expert on composers Felix Mendelssohn and Krzysztof Penderecki, and the author of 11 books on music.”

More and more bands are discovering that the internet is their friend and that digital downloading can help promote sales of recordings and concert tickets. “Whereas once the record industry sold 90 percent of its records to 15 percent of the U.S. population, digital distribution has paved the way for more people to participate in music than ever before, whether making, distributing or consuming it.”

“The music industry stands at an historic crossroads — almost every aspect of the way people consume and listen to popular music is changing, dwarfing even the seismic shift in the 1880s when music lovers turned from sheet music and player pianos to wax cylinders and later, in 1915, newfangled 78 rpm phonograph discs. The one thing all of the experts agree upon is that these changes — which are already under way — will be dramatic, quick and inevitable.”

“We are told all the time that the audience’s expectations for opera have changed because our society is visually oriented, educated by films and television, even by opera on television. We now expect opera to be theatrically vital. One problem with this view is that our visual society has not been well educated by films and television — media that even now often ignore the “visual” reality of the society they are supposed to reflect. People come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and types of behavior; they engage in passionate love affairs and die nobly or ignobly, regardless of their outward appearance. In a way, opera is a more honest art form than the movies, because people look the way they do rather than the way film fans expect heroes and villains to appear.”

Many conductors start out as other brands of musicians. It used to be that composer/conductors were common. There aren’t so many today. “Musicians who genuinely straddle that divide — whose talents and personal commitment are equally devoted to composing and conducting — have been the rare exceptions. Mahler was one, Leonard Bernstein another. Salonen is the pre-eminent case in our time. What it means, for him and for his audiences, is a constant, painful assessment of competing priorities. For a listener located outside Los Angeles, it’s hard to look at Salonen’s small catalog of compositions and not begrudge the time and artistic energy it takes to run the Philharmonic.”