Category: music

For the third time in the last 15 years, the musicians and staff of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra have agreed to temporary furloughs and pay cuts in an effort to help the organization stabilize a precarious financial situation. The deal is somewhat complex, as negotiations to redo the musicians’ contract were focused on enabling the DSO to save money in the short term without sacrificing its position as one of the top American orchestras in the long term. Over the next two seasons, the musicians will accept several weeks of furlough and allow four open positions in the orchestra to go unfilled, but will be guaranteed a return to a competitive pay scale in the 2005-06 season.

The embattled Harlem Boys Choir announced yesterday that it has a plan to respond to its board’s demand that founder Walter Turnbull be dismissed in the wake of abuse allegations, but the choir’s proposal does not appear to include the full severing of Turnbull’s ties to the organization. The New York City Department of Education will review the plan, but has already called for Turnbull’s firing.

Like countless other arts organizations, the San Francisco Opera is going through some tough economic times. Unlike many other orchestras and opera companies, the company is refusing to hit the panic button, even after budgetary concerns forced it to trim the number of operas it would present in 2003-04. Berlioz’s massive “Les Troyens” was postponed several years to save the company $1 million, but “although much of the season’s repertoire is comparatively traditional, seven of the nine productions are new to the company,” including a daring (and not terribly accessible) 1978 opera by György Ligeti.

In what is likely to be a controversial move within the classical music industry, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra will “rebrand” itself this week, with the assistance of a top UK marketing firm. The ‘new’ Philharmonia will stress accessibility (think Classic FM as opposed to BBC Radio 3) and attempt to attract “the type of people [who are] currently visiting Tate Modern,” and to do so without alienating its core audience. The orchestra will also look at ways to begin offering downloadable music online, and generally make a concerted push to pique the interest of a younger, more technologically savvy demographic.

The Harlem Boys Choir is in crisis, with a $30 million lawsuit alleging sexual and physical abuse at the hands of trusted employees threatening to tear the organization apart, and the choir’s founder under pressure to step down. But Walter Turnbull insists that he did nothing wrong, and cannot imagine the choir, which has changed the lives of countless underprivileged kids, going on without him. Moreover, he is still incredulous that an employee with whom he trusted his choir of young boys implicitly could have turned out to be a child molester.

A weeklong conference on the music and legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach is going on in Toronto, and William Littler finds himself wondering what it is about Bach that continues to so fascinate and inspire musicians, audiences, and scholars across the generations. “Perhaps it is the very ability of Bach’s music to survive a variety of approaches that provides a clue to its universality. As [conductor Helmuth] Rilling put it, a bad performance of Bach is still Bach, but a bad performance of Handel isn’t very good.”

This weekend, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra will perform for the pope in Vatican City, the first American orchestra to do so. But the honor of being part of such an event is only part of what makes this trip so important to the PSO, says Andrew Druckenbrod. “It is crucial for the future of this organization that it is able to put itself on the big map as it has with this Vatican affair, even if it means the slight subordination of the music to the ‘event.'”

Musicians are becoming increasingly agitated by the plague of ringing cell phones and beeping watches in the concert hall, but composer Gavin Bryars takes a more zen-like view of the uninvited chirps, beeps, and squawks. Having once endured the humiliation of having his own phone ring (with a tone he himself had composed) during a performance of his own music, Bryars has come to accept the unscheduled interruptions as nothing more than spontaneous extensions of the concertgoing experience, and sometimes, as legitimate musical enhancements.

The deposed conductor of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony is hoping that a citizens group will find a way to pressure the orchestra to rehire him. “Speaking yesterday from his home in Berlin, Martin Fischer-Dieskau said it’s his ambition to ‘be able to say what’s happened has been only an interruption in the orchestra’s inexorable way to greater achievement. But I can’t, at least not for the time being.”

The fastest growing segment of the music business? Ring tones for phones. “Sales of mobile-phone ring tones, those tiny song recordings programmed into millions of cell phones around the world, jumped 40 percent in the past year to $3.5 billion, according to a study released Tuesday. The worldwide sale of ring tones, which started as a marketing gimmick for music labels and mobile phone companies, is roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the $32.2 billion global music market.”