Category: music

The Jacksonville [Florida] Symphony is in a dispute with its musicians. “The symphony says it has a $2.4 million deficit and has proposed shortening the symphony season by two weeks, cutting musicians’ salaries by 10 percent and suspending pension contributions and paid leave. The musicians say they just signed a five-year contract in February and expect the symphony to honor it.”

The US State Department wonders why the reporter from the Wall Street Journal who tried to get access to the Iraq National Symphony during its trip to Washington DC earlier this month, had so much trouble. “We arranged for Mr. Rahim to meet members of the orchestra at a restricted briefing on Monday afternoon. We arranged for his attendance at the open dress rehearsal. We invited him to join the reception for the orchestra held after the concert…”
Wall Street Journal writer Ayad Rahim responds: I had to work through an eventual 31 officials to get anywhere… “I only began to gain ‘access’ – what little there was of it – after my deadline had passed. That happened only because my repeated, fruitless efforts had become known to this paper’s editors and because their frustration had filtered back to the State Department.”

A concert hall already under construction in suburban Washington, D.C., and intended as the second home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, is in danger of having the plug pulled on its funding if the local county council does not approve an additional expenditure for cost overruns on the project. The council is reportedly “galled by the request for more money, given that the council agreed to approve its $44.6 million share of the cost only after explicitly writing into the funding bill that the council would not pay a penny more.”

WalMart is rolling out its own online music download service, with what it says are “hundreds of thousands” of songs available in Windows Media format. In typical WalMart style, the big draw is expected to be low prices: where many other download services are charging 99 cents a song, WalMart is charging 88 cents.

Unlike in the US, sales of recorded music have been growing in the UK. Why? Maybe it’s price cuts. “Average prices have continued to fall and reached a new low of £10.40 for the year ending in September, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said. It said prices of new albums had fallen by 7.6% since it began providing detailed records at the start of 2000.”

In New York City, famous performance spots abound, and countless bars, clubs, and watering holes can lay claim to having “launched” the career of a superstar or two. But few clubs have the lineage of the Bottom Line, which was recently ordered to close after falling behind in its rent payments to New York University, and few have the social cache of CBGB, which has played host to the cutting edge of the American punk movement for three decades. There are lessons in the contrast between the current fortunes of these two clubs, and the hardest one may be that, all too often, it isn’t enough to be legendary, or even good at what you do. You’ve got to be lucky, too.

“In smart discos, sweat-box bars and market-places across Africa, Congolese music is rampant. Local musicians can rarely compete. Even in Lagos, the proud home of high-life jazz, clubs echo with Congo’s trademark throbbing bass, tinging guitars and racing falsettos. And in Europe Congolese music has become almost synonymous with African music. Europeans call it soukous, after secousse, the French for “jolt” or “shake”. In Paris and Brussels, Congolese stars draw crowds of 20,000.” At home, though…

At a recent music industry conference in Aspen, “the divisiveness and panic in the room were evident” whenever conversation turned to the state of recorded music. The problem seems to be that, while most in the industry recognize that a major sea change in the way the public consumes recorded music is upon them, few are willing to hitch their wagon to a particular horse before knowing what the new industry standard will be. In the meantime, the CD market continues to tank, and the people for whom that particular piece of turf is sacred continue to fight like cornered rats to forestall the digital revolution.

Some avid players of Game Boys, are using the little electronic game consoles to compose and play music. The music is “surprisingly complex.” “The gizmos serve as musical notepads, the modern-day equivalents of Beethoven’s pen on paper. The group then sets up in smoky bars and other modest local concert venues to treat — or subject — their audiences to beeps, buzzes, clicks, recorded-speech snippets and other computer-age sounds, all strung together into assaults on the senses.”

“If most years are dispiriting for full-time opera companies because of the parlous state of their finances, against which they generally manage on stage to achieve minor miracles, this one was different; there was less talk of monetary problems (with certain exceptions) and far more of artistic disappointment, especially where the two London-based companies were concerned. It’s hard to think of more than a couple of productions at either the Royal Opera House or at the Coliseum (before ENO temporarily decamped to the Barbican to allow its home to be renovated) that lodge in the memory or could remotely merit a revival.”