Category: music

Boston Baroque’s recordings with Telarc will never earn back the money it takes to make them. But there are other advantages: “The records have invigorated our audience, and the reception the records have earned — including three Grammy nominations — has changed us from a local into a national and international ensemble. The recordings have led to invitations to tour in Europe and in America. We have five weekends a year to say `Come and hear us,’ but the recordings can introduce us to people all the time. And the recordings have had a tremendous impact on the musicians. The intensity of the recording process is a lot different than rehearsing a concert and presenting it. And of course through recordings, the group can hear itself.”

Used to be that kids bought the most music. But “for the first time, people in their 40s are buying more albums than teenagers. According to recent figures from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the 12-to-19 age group accounted for 16.4% of album sales in 2002, a sharp fall on 2000 (22.1%), while 40- to-49-year-olds went the other way, rising from 16.5% to 19.1%. Buyers in their 50s (14.3%) are not far behind. Soon, half of albums will be bought by people who have passed their 40th birthday.”

Internet protests over Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” last week show that “there’s really no way to resolve the legal issues surrounding sampling. It’s a subjective thing: It makes sense for Vanilla Ice or P. Diddy to cough up some cash and a co-writing credit when they appropriate “Under Pressure” or “Every Breath You Take” more or less in bulk to build another song, for example, but does a single snare loop or sampled “Yeah!” from an ancient funk record deserve to be treated the same? Where do you draw the line?”

Sam Bergman on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra: “There are those who would say that it’s foolhardy to schedule back-to-back concerts in Scotland and Finland, that the odds of everything going right with the travel, the cargo, the instrument trunks, the time change, and the weather are just too slim. These cynics are unquestionably right, and we needed every ounce of good luck we could get today for this concert in Lahti to come off as planned…”

In the popular mythology of the blues, Robert Johnson has been credited with a pivotal role in creating the music. Yet a new book suggests that Johnson was really a minor figure, and that his “primacy was largely a creation of white fans and music critics of the 1960’s. “Very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.”

The Royal Academy of Music has bought the archive of papers, photos and memorabilia of the late Yehudi Menuhin. “The archive contains important musical manuscripts by many of the composers who worked with Menuhin, including music from his collaborations with Ravi Shankar and Stephane Grappelli. In addition to detailed correspondence with Edward Elgar, Bela Bartok and Benjamin Britten, the archive includes letters from such non-musical figures as Einstein and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.”

Miami Beach is hosting the 19th Winter Music Conference for thousands of dance music fans. “More than 3,000 deejays and musicians perform at some 250 events – some tied to the official event, but most of them not.”

There is ambivalence about the Chicago Symphony’s Daniel Barenboim stepping down as music director. “Unsettling questions remain to be answered. By allowing Barenboim to walk out the door – a musician with a unique combination of intellectual curiosity, profoundly creative engagement with the process of making music and wide involvement with the world beyond the podium – the CSO has redefined, for better or worse, the role of music director.”

For about a year, the Borromeo String Quartet has been recording all its live preformances and making them available for sale over the internet. “We had done enough recording that I had started to learn about the techniques and some of the issues involved. I began to carry around a little suitcase of equipment, a mobile recording unit, to take down our concerts because I thought it was too bad that so many just vanish into thin air. If something went wonderfully, we love to study just how and why it happened. It is also important for us to study what didn’t go so well.”

Along with many ArtsJournal readers, the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott has been following violist Sam Bergman’s RoadTrip blog. “There is something that is remarkably refreshing, given the sadly hamstrung public relations front that the professional orchestra community presents to the world. There are signs of intelligent life and unselfconscious candor. Bergman found a voice that spoke articulately from inside a world that has become all too reticent, nervous and polished in its nonmusical communication with the public. That his blog, which made the facts of a musician’s life fascinating, should be so successful suggests that the professional orchestral world has become so self-absorbed that it no longer knows what is interesting about its own microcosm.”