Category: music

There is to be a “World Idol” music competition. One wonders what it will be like though, based on the “Australian Idol” experience. The “biggest problem with Australian Idol: all those talented young people performing as if they were country and western singers straight off a Qantas jet from Nashville. Even Beatles songs were Americanised. Sacrilege! In the context of the debate over the proposed free-trade agreement with the US, in which Australia may have to sacrifice its right to set local content quotas on TV for such things as Australian drama, it really grated.”

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is laying off staff and will shortly be dismissing five members of the orchestra itself, in a desperate effort to get its books in balance. The ASO’s problems are not unfamiliar to other Australian orchestras: since orchestras went to a system of private funding, known as “corporatisation,” nearly every orchestra involved has struggled financially.

EMI had wanted to merger with Warner. But it shouldn’t feel too bad the deal won’t happen. “The truth is that Warner is being bought by a music industry wannabe responsible for one of the worst deals of the 1990s – the sale of Seagram, the Bronfman family’s drinks and entertainment firm, to Jean-Marie Messier’s Vivendi.”

Some of the bigger orchestral instruments are so unpopular with young Britons, that there’s a big shortage of players opening up. “It seems that the tuba, bassoon, double bass and trombone are too ugly and expensive for a new generation of teenagers who, if they like classical music at all, prefer the charms of the flute and clarinet. The result, according to the some of the country’s leading instrumentalists, is that Britain’s bass line is in danger of fading out.”

“At a time when the ‘MP3 generation’ is getting its tracks for free from the internet, fortysomething music fans are beginning to dominate sales. According to current trends, the over-40s will account for more than 50 per cent of album sales in Britain within five years.”

The sounds of silence will soon reign supreme in Boston’s subway tunnels and station stops. Well, except for the screeching trains and squawking public address systems, of course. The city has banned street musicians from using amplification or playing electronic keyboards or brass instruments on Boston’s underground platforms. “The rules are sure to transform Boston’s true underground music scene, which up to this point has been one of the nation’s least regulated. In New York and Atlanta, musicians must audition and sign up for slots; Toronto singers pay a $114 fee; in London, musicians need licenses to croon to commuters ‘minding the gap.’ And in Washington, D.C., they’re banned altogether.”

Ticket sales at the Metropolitan Opera haven’t been great in recent years during the weeks following the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. So the Met has announced that it will be taking a two-week break in the middle of its season, beginning in January 2004. “This will be the first midseason break since the Met began in 1883,” and it may not be the only change the company makes to its schedule. Executive director Joseph Volpe says that the Met is also considering replacing its Monday night performances with Sunday matinees.

For years, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has been begging for a concert hall of its own, with the sort of acoustics that turn a good orchestra into a great one. Last year, the MSO finally got its wish, when the provincial government agreed to fund a $300 million complex including a concert hall and music conservatory. But the promise of funding was made by the Parti Quebecois, which is no longer in power, and this week, the ruling Liberals announced that the price tag for the MSO project is just too high, and that it plans to seek private donations to bolster government funds. Opposition leaders are voicing concern about the dangerous precedent that could be set by moving towards an American-style system of private arts funding.

“Music publishers Boosey and Hawkes, home to the estates of Stravinsky, Britten, Strauss, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, is to be bought by the venture capitalists HgCapital – meaning it will remain independent, at least for now.”

Pop concerts have employed jumbo video screens at performances for years. This year the Vancouver Symphony is trying them out – “four remote-controlled video cameras strategically positioned in the hall, used to “simulcast” performances on screens measuring 2.2 by 2.7 metres, to the left and right of the stage.”