Category: music

As writers, musicians, and pundits around the world bemoan the lack of public appreciation for new music, five couples in Minnesota are doing something about it. For 13 years, each couple has contributed $2000 per year to a pool of money which is eventually used to commission a carefully selected composer to write a specific piece of music. The rights to the piece revert to the composer immediately following the first performance, but the club members continue to seek new performance opportunities for “their” composers. Needless to say, composers are thrilled with the club.

The cello is showing up a lot more in popular music. “Unlike guitar or drums, the cello in popular music is definitely a visitor from another place, and comes wrapped in a cloak of romance and serious purpose.”

Earlier this year the Milwaukee Symphony predicted it would have a $2.5 million deficit. Instead, the orchestra finished $874,000 in the red. “The gap closed because musicians gave back 21/2 weeks of work and pay, several office staff positions were eliminated, other staffers agreed to wage cuts and the symphony negotiated fee cuts with many guest artists. The symphony’s accumulated debt now stands at $5 million, $1.37 million of it run up in the last two seasons.”

“The 55 members of the Iraqi group will be joined by about 45 musicians from the National Symphony and they will perform as a single, joint orchestra. Iraqi conductor Mohammed Amin Ezzat and NSO conductor Leonard Slatkin will take turns leading the mixed group. Their Dec. 9 concert will include works by Beethoven and Bizet as well as two pieces of contemporary Iraqi music for a full symphony orchestra, augmented by six Kurdish folk instruments.”

German conductor Ingo Metzmacher is quitting as music director of Hamburg, and the move is seen as a pulling away oif commitment to contemporary music. “Just as William Forsythe took Frankfurt to the cutting edge of dance, so Metzmacher turned Hamburg into one of the most musically progressive cities in Europe. He introduced avant-garde 20th-century works into his concert programmes and scrapped the traditional New Year’s Eve performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in favour of a hugely successful series of concerts entitled Who’s Afraid of 20th-Century Music? Under his control, the Opera developed an international reputation for its radical redefinition of opera as hard-hitting music theatre.”

Scott Cantrell writes that while Disney is good, Dallas’ Meyerson Hall still sounds the best of the new American concert halls. “Most of the 19th- and early 20th-century concert halls regularly cited as best for symphonic music – the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Symphony Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York – are variations on a shoebox shape. Their acoustics tend to be described as ‘warm’ and ‘rich,’ but with ample clarity. ‘Full-bodied’ and ‘spacious’ weren’t adjectives that came immediately to mind at the opening of Disney Hall. What wasn’t there was the lower-midrange depth and visceral bass that you get in the great old halls.”

“The recording industry, it seems, doesn’t hate absolutely everything about illicit music downloading. Despite their legal blitzkrieg to stop online song-swapping, many music labels are benefiting from — and paying for — intelligence on the latest trends in Internet trading… One company, Beverly Hills-based BigChampagne, began mining such data from popular peer-to-peer networks in 2000 and has built a thriving business selling it to recording labels.”

Only a few months after a crippling strike in which the musicians of the Houston Symphony Orchestra called for the resignation of their orchestra president and much of the board, the HSO has announced that it ran a whopping $3.56 million deficit for the 2002-03 season. Slumping ticket sales and decreasing donations have a lot to do with the fiscal problem, but the HSO has also had to contend with the costs of severe flood damage to its concert hall in recent years. The orchestra acknowledges that the deficit is as large as it’s ever been, but says that its long-range plan calls for surpluses by the 2005-06 season.

“Record labels have long been accused of stealing musicians’ copyrights as soon as the ink is dry on the contract. Now, one small independent label in Great Britain is doing the opposite: It’s giving the rights to the artists — and anyone else who wants to use the music, too. Loca Records wants to foster experimentation and freedom in music by building a stable of free music which can be shared, remixed and manipulated by anyone… The music is available for free in MP3 format, but the company sells its CDs and vinyl in retail stores throughout Europe.”

So promoter Raymond Gubbay is going to present opera in London’s West End, and many are skeptical. But Gubbay has a formula, and the formula is a winner. “Hire a prestigious hall, get together a band of highly experienced musicians, give them music to play that they and the rest of the civilised world all know backwards, allot on that basis minimal rehearsal time, engage young, inexpensive soloists eager for the experience or desperate for the work, ditto conductor, dress the whole thing up with a fancy title (preferably printed in rampant italics to give it that classy look), and sit back and wait for Mr and Mrs Average from the Home Counties or suburban Averageville to buy their tickets in their droves. One can easily sneer at all of this, of course, but it works as far as the balance-sheet is concerned. Gubbay will not promote anything if he risks losing so much as a shirt-button. He’s a businessman, not an altruist.”