Category: music

If some technophiles have their way, paper-based sheet music may soon be a thing of the past in the symphony orchestra. The technology for digital sheet music exists, and ArtsJournal blogger Drew McManus wonders if the only thing holding orchestras back from embracing it is their usual tendency to cling to tradition. After all, paper-based scores break down from heavy use, and must be painstakingly updated and edited by hand, whereas a set of virtual parts could be instantly changed at a musician’s or librarian’s will. And just imagine: no more awkward page turns or out of print works! Still, orchestra librarians, who have arguably the most to gain or lose from such a transition, remain skeptical that the technology will catch on.

You would think that, the more valuable your musical instrument, the tighter you would make your death grip on its case whenever you had occasion to transport the thing. But even great musicians can be distracted, and this week, world-renowned violinist Gidon Kremer, preoccupied with a colleague’s cancellation of an upcoming tour, stood up and walked off a train in Baltimore, leaving behind his nearly 300-year-old Guarneri del Gesu, valued at $3 million. The violin was recovered in Washington by Amtrak officials, and transported north to Baltimore in time for Kremer’s next performance.

“At a cost of £282,000 in lost ticket sales, English National Opera was forced yesterday to swallow its pride and cancel all performances of its re-opening show, Nixon in China. The Coliseum, its London base, will now open after its £41m rebuild on February 21, a date already postponed by a fortnight, for an as yet undefined ‘special event’ – which may just be a grand party with a few songs from the stage. The theatre will then close again and the first performances of The Rhinegold, the opening of the first new production in English of Wagner’s Ring cycle in 30 years, will probably not happen until early March.”

The London Symphony Orchestra turns 100 this year, a good long run for an ensemble with the LSO’s lively history. “The orchestra was founded as Britain’s first self-ruling symphonic institution, and its players, who choose their principal conductor and guest conductors, have been notorious for a snarkiness that has caused more than one eminent maestro to turn tail and run.” The LSO has always been ranked among the top orchestras in the world, but Charles Michener believes that they never truly ascended to greatness until just recently, when they chose Sir Colin Davis as their latest principal conductor.

When bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff takes the stage at Lincoln Center tonight for a live national television broadcast with the New York Philharmonic, his appearance will be the first thing most viewers will notice, and yet, the announcer will offer not a single word of explanation. Quasthoff, a thalidomide baby, has vestigial arms and stunted legs, and there was a time in his career when he was willing, even eager, to discuss it. But these days, having long since established himself as a top vocalist, he prefers to let his music speak for itself, even if it sends a few thousand TV viewers scrambling for their search engines to dig up his story.

The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra has a beautiful new concert hall, which features state of the art acoustics, 2,000 “vineyard-style” seats, and a built-in connection to public transit. One caveat: the hall isn’t actually in Tokyo, but in Kawazaki City, a suburb across the Tama River from Tokyo. The TSO will not, of course, be changing its name to match its new digs.

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is not the only orchestra in Australia’s second-largest city, but it very nearly was. Orchestra Victoria, a smaller ensemble which plays in the pit for local ballet and opera companies, and has struggled mightily in recent years, was at risk of folding or being swallowed up by the MSO when its supporters decided to try a new direction in order to save the ensemble. The result is something almost unheard of in the professional music world: an orchestra which performs free concerts, backed by local civic and charitable organizations, and which brings music to its audience, rather than expecting the audience to come to them.

The re-opening of the London Coliseum following a 4-year, £41 million renovation will take place at the end of February, and despite some last-minute technical glitches, “advance word is that the project will prove a big success, restoring the original kitschy splendours of Frank Matcham’s 1904 architecture.” But Rupert Christiansen writes that even the most successful renovation imaginable will not make the Coliseum a truly great opera house, and London has yet to make good on any of the plans devised over the years to erect one. Still, new opera houses are a tough sell with the public these days, so the Coliseum may be as good as Londoners are ever going to get.

“Exactly how bad a year did the music industry have in 2003? It depends who’s asking. According to Nielsen Soundscan, American labels sold 687 million units (including 19.2 million paid downloads) last year—a drop of less than 1 percent from 2002. A widely cited survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that file sharing has plummeted since the Recording Industry Association of America started threatening traders with lawsuits… Of course, it may be more correct to say that half as many Internet users are willing to tell a pollster that they download music—these days, the first rule of File Club is you do not talk about File Club.”

“At 11 a.m. today, in a midtown Manhattan music studio, a handful of record industry veterans will huddle around a reel of tape they say is an original master from the historic 1954 recording debut of Elvis Presley. Then, after a brief introduction, the tape will be chopped to pieces.” Why would anyone do such a thing to an undeniable piece of American musical history? For the merchandising money, of course. The bits of tape will be mounted on handsome plaques and sold for $495 apiece to the type of memorabilia-obsessed cretins who honestly believe that a mangled piece of magnetic tape is more valuable than the music which used to be on it.