Category: music

“Video games are proving to be a good partner for a struggling industry eager to find new ways to appeal to young people who would rather pirate music off the Internet than pay for it. Million-selling games are boosting sales, launching musical careers, and persuading skittish record executives that not all technology is bad for business.”

Clear Channel Communications, America’s largest concert presenter is getting set to sell recordings of live concerts to the fans who just paid to see the concert as soon as the show is finished. “It is almost an impulse buy. You walk home with a memento of the concert. You had a great feeling coming out of it and, for $20, you can put it on again anytime you want.”

There has been a theory among trumpet players that deep freezing their instruments improves the sound. But scientists report to the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Austin, Tex., that “scientific testing of cryogenically freezing 10 trumpets showed minimal differences when the instruments were thawed and played by six musicians.”

There has been a recent slew of concerts in New York in which the musicians brought along a video component to complement their performance. But is the move to add multimedia to the staid old classical concert form really a positive step? Allan Kozinn isn’t sure. “If there’s no compelling reason to do it beyond simply doing something new — and if it isn’t so thoroughly thought through that it becomes an organic part of the show… it can do more harm than good.”

Opera San Jose is just one of the thousands of California arts groups hit hard by recent budget cuts, which slashed the state’s per capita funding rate for the arts to the lowest of any state in the U.S. But the Silicon Valley-based opera company is scheduled to move into a new theater next year, and says it simply won’t be able to make ends meet without more money from the city. The group’s director “hopes the city will exempt the company from the new formula and instead give the opera a financial shot in the arm.” The city has promised to consider the request.

Canadian orchestras are slowly recovering from a dismal few years in which several orchestras folded or filed for bankruptcy, and nearly every orchestra ran at least one serious operating deficit. A new report says that, nationwide, orchestras posted a $1 million surplus this year, but also points out that massive structural deficits remain, and are not being paid down at a fast enough rate. Ticket sales are down, as well, with 39% fewer tickets to classical events sold last year than in the 1996-97 season. Unlike their American counterparts, however, Canadian orchestras have managed to increase both public and private subsidies over the last several years.

Writing about music in the mainstream press is in a bad way. So, Rob Young writes, the best music writers are now to be found webside – in blogs. “What they add up to is a fertile breeding ground for a new style of music writing – just when the trade needs it most. The ludic quality of music criticism merges with a serious approach to the subject rarely found in a mainstream that treats music as entertainment rather than art. Add encyclopaedic knowledge, genre-crossing frames of reference and a disregard for celebrity, and you have the key traits of the music blog.”

Moscow has a shiny new $200 million performing arts center – its first new concert hall in 100 years. “With the conductor and violinist Vladimir Spivakov as the center’s president, a rich array of events has taken shape. Yet behind the glass and metal exterior, a power struggle as harsh as the confrontation between Kremlin prosecutors and the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has unfolded, rooted in Spivakov’s acrimonious departure as music director and principal conductor of the Russian National Orchestra last year.”

Music executives are prodding acts to limit the number of tracks on their CDs in a bid to raise fans’ perceptions of the value of albums. ‘There’s been a tendency to overload CDs because the technology permits it. The final choice will always be the artist’s, but I feel — and consumer research bears it out — that the public thinks albums have too much filler’.”

Though there wee other high-appeal concerts in Philadelphia Sunday, Peter Dobrin naturally went to hear Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. “What’s more interesting at this point in the green relationship between orchestra and conductor – Rattle took his position a year ago – is that it’s still not clear whether their respective strengths will add up to anything resembling synergy. Berlin is a perfection machine; Rattle is a supremely inspiring musician with a somewhat less than perfect baton technique. Someday this might be a great match. So far it’s not, at least not consistently.”