Category: music

“In the trickle-down economics of the music industry, the travails of the Big 5 major labels – who have suffered steeply declining sales for the last three years – are having an impact on the smaller bands, record companies and media who make up the rock and rap underground. The idea of the Big 5 multinationals as viable distributors of music becomes a less likely scenario every year; a new business model that is emerging sees the big record companies as glorified marketing companies, expert at spending money to get consumers to spend even more money.”

Some 400 pianists applied to compete in the San Antonio International Piano Competition. “Of those, only 38 were able to meet a new requirement that applicants submit a recording of themselves playing with an orchestra.” Organizers were dismayed to hear so many excellent pianists were unable to provide a tape of them performing with orchestra.

A movement of a Beethoven string quartet, written in the composer’s hand, is coming up for auction. Earlier this year a manuscript copy of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony sold for $3.47 million. “Unlike that manuscript, which was prepared by a copyist but had Beethoven’s corrections and comments on most of its pages, the quartet movement is entirely in Beethoven’s hand. Sotheby’s says it expects the manuscript to bring between $1.6 million and $2.5 million.”

Western European orchestral music has a big following in China. But until this month, Beethoven’s string quartets had never been performed as a complete set before. “The fact that it has taken this long for Beethoven’s quartets to be given this kind of hearing in a country where western orchestral music has built up an established, if still relatively small, audience may seem surprising. Why should the popularity of western chamber music lag that of western orchestral music?”

According to a new study, young rock musicians are more liable to discourage drug use than encourage it. “The research, published by the University of Texas at Austin, explodes the conventional wisdom that popular music encourages teenagers to abuse drugs. The author, John Markert of Cumberland University, Tennessee, says that although there has always been a generally hostile attitude towards heroin and other hard drugs, teenage listeners today ‘are being exposed to more negative images of marijuana and LSD than older listeners’.”

At 68, Luciano Pavarotti doesn’t always sound so good, writes Richard Dyer. “But he sounds amazingly steady and solid on the new album – it is hard to think of any previous tenor who could sound this good at Pavarotti’s age. Most of the songs are appealing, and Pavarotti lavishes his incomparable diction and emotional generosity on them, and his high C is still in working order.”

More and more music lovers are getting fed up with the recording industry’s tactics of protecting their business. Some are organizing a boycott of CD sales for the month of Decemeber. “Angry music fans see the recording industry’s tactics for dealing with declining CD sales as punishing the wrong people – music lovers.”

“As spotlights raked the billowing exterior of architect Frank Gehry’s $274-million edifice, a glittering lineup of politicians, Hollywood players, captains of industry and cultural savants filed up a red-carpeted stairway and into the dramatically sculpted 2,265-seat hall, which has already drawn ecstatic reviews from architecture critics across the country.”

Mark Swed writes that Disney Hall is “everything and more than we might have hoped for. In this enchanted space, music can take on meaningful new excitement even in an age when many art forms are satisfied with oversaturated stimulation.”

Nicolai Ouroussoff writes that Disney Hall lives up to extravagant expectations. “What makes the building so moving as a work of architecture is its ability to express a deeper creative conflict: the recognition that ideal beauty rarely exists in an imperfect world. It is this tension — and the delicacy with which Gehry resolves it — that makes Disney Hall such a powerful work of social commentary. That he could accomplish this despite a tortured construction process that dragged out over 16 years is a minor miracle. Its success affirms both Gehry’s place as America’s greatest living architectural talent and Los Angeles’ growing cultural maturity.”