Category: music

What do the heavens sound like? Music, report scientists – specifically a B flat — “a B flat 57 octaves lower than middle C. The ‘notes’ appear as pressure waves roiling and spreading as a result of outbursts from a supermassive black hole through a hot thin gas that fills the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 million light-years distant. They are 30,000 light-years across and have a period of oscillation of 10 million years. By comparison, the deepest, lowest notes that humans can hear have a period of about one-twentieth of a second.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra confirms a $50 million gift and another $26 million raised towards an endowmwnt. “Leonore Annenberg, the widow of philanthropist Walter H. Annenberg, has pledged $50 million to the ensemble, orchestra leaders acknowledged. The gift, first reported in The Inquirer two weeks ago, is believed by orchestra administrators to be the second largest ever made to an American orchestra. Also yesterday, the orchestra announced that it had gathered an additional $26 million in pledges to its endowment campaign, whose goal is $125 million. Orchestra officials said the new money would give the ensemble the resources to make its ambitions, often hobbled by financial ills, into reality.”

The recording industry is doing itself n o favors with its war on music file traders. “In its current action, the RIAA, which is claiming damages of thousands of dollars per download, may have the law on its side, but that will matter little in the end. Indeed, it’s far from clear whether the group’s legal threats will even have any, let alone much, impact on unauthorized file sharing. There’s no mass exodus [from file-sharing services], that’s safe to say. Ironically, usage this week and this month is up… More important, even if the RIAA is somehow successful in actually stamping out file sharing (which it won’t be), that doesn’t mean that CD sales will necessarily pick up. “Many of these individuals [who use file-sharing services] have gotten out of the habit of buying CDs. They think CDs are too expensive.”

The recording industry could have made itself sympathetic – all those people downloading and stealing music. But suing music lovers… and a 12-year-old girl no less… “Suddenly, the trade association – in its effort to squelch illegal music sharing over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Grokster – looked more like a schoolyard bully.”

“Tone-painting differs from musical expression in that it seeks tangibly to conjure physical things in tone. This idea has been around as long as music has. An ancient Greek story tells of a master of the aulos, the classical double-pipe instrument, who improvised a description of a battle so hair-raising that people were talking about it for the next 200 years.” Bach was the ultimate master of it, but Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner and Brahms were expert at painting scenes with music.

Music and politics don’t mix, do they? So why have music and politics found themselves so frequently intertwined? Jay Nordlinger enumerates political influences, then decrees that there’s nothing inherently political about music: “Music dwells in its own realm, unless it is freighted with words that constitute political baggage.”

Canada’s Royal Conservatory of Music has long set the standards for music instruction, helping educate generatations of young classical musicians. Now the RCM is widening its focus, offering world music as part of its curriculum. “The Conservatory is supposed to be the institution of Canadian national music, and we’ve caught up to the reality that there are huge numbers of people living in this country who were not raised in the Western classical-music tradition. We have to reflect the diversity.”

These days, you can walk into a WalMart and buy a CD full of classical music carefully chosen to pair perfectly with your Sunday brunch. Or your Saturday night date. Or a quiet dinner with friends. “All of this would be funny were it not for the wasting disease it represents. Call it silence deprivation. One of the reasons music tastes less good for a lot of us these days is that it increasingly lacks beginnings and ends. It is the blank spaces that surround music that give it shape — allow it to breathe. Music not framed by the absence of music really isn’t music. Nor is music at dinner. Works of Brahms are not well served when they accompany pork chops. It is not fair to the pork chops either.”

The “authentic performance” movement was once viewed as a rebellious collection of obsessives, at once fascinating and annoying, but nothing that threatened to invade the larger world of classical performance. But these days, historically-informed performance is the norm for most ensembles, and while you don’t see a symphony orchestra tuning its instruments down to play Mozart, the days of hacking through 18th-century music as if it had been composed by Gustav Mahler are over. Meanwhile, the true period purists, such as the Toronto-based Tafelmusik, continue to soldier on, devoted to their idealistic view of music in context.