Category: music

Australia is a huge country with multiple cosmopolitan cities boasting thriving arts and music scenes. So why do so many touring orchestras find themselves playing to half-empty houses in Melbourne, Brisbane, and other Aussie cities? Some say that high ticket prices are to blame, while other “observers point out that the quality of some of the touring orchestras has not been absolutely first-class at a time when the Melbourne and Sydney symphonies are playing in top form, and that marketing for the touring groups was patchy.” Regardless of the cause, the slumping sales will probably mean that fewer touring orchestras will be stopping off Down Under.

The traditional Last Night at the BBC Proms went off without a hitch this weekend, as 6,000 people gathered to hear the BBC Symphony pump their way through such traditional Last Night tunes as ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Rule, Britannia.’ In a slight departure from the norm, intended to placate critics who dislike the ‘classical lite’ atmosphere of the annual show, a new work by a young British composer was premiered as well. The concert was broadcast nationwide on television and internationally on radio, and the BBC’s various orchestras performed their own concerts throughout the UK in conjunction with the Last Night celebrations in London.

With a federal mediator attempting to bring the Charlotte Symphony’s striking musicians and management closer together, two days of contract talks have apparently gone nowhere. Talks broke down this weekend after the orchestra pulled several conciliatory portions of their latest offer off the table, and reverted to a flat demand that the musicians accept pay and benefits cuts to make up a $650,000 deficit.

The recording industry seems to be hitching its objections to file-trading to the porn industry. “It said that peer-to-peer file-sharing – the technology used by Internet sites like Kazaa and Morpheus – was bad not only because citizens could share music without paying for it, but also because it was used to swap pornographic images. One odd thing here: If you tweak that sentiment just a little bit, it becomes: We join our friends the child pornographers in deploring file-sharing of protected works of art.”

“Mozart increases mental mass. Scientists revealed yesterday that members of a British symphony orchestra had more little grey cells than ordinary people in a part of the brain known as Broca’s area… [A researcher] examined the brains of musicians under the age of 50 and found that they had added to their grey matter. Then she looked at non-musicians under the 50, and found an age-related decline. Where musicians still played fortissimo, non-musicians were beginning a diminuendo.”

A federal mediator has stepped in, and talks are going on around the clock, but there is still no end in sight for the Charlotte Symphony musicians’ strike. This weekend’s season-opening concerts have been cancelled, and no one involved in the talks seems to think a breakthrough is near. At issue is the orchestra’s desire to cut back the number of paid weeks per year for which it contracts its musicians, in order to make up a $645,000 deficit. The musicians claim that the deficit, the orchestra’s first in seven years, is an aberration, and that no salary cuts should be necessary. Musicians in the Charlotte Symphony currently make $31,200 per year. The proposed cut would knock them back to $28,860.

The Montreal Symphony Orchestra opened its season this week without a music director (Charles Dutoit, who departed the post in a huff just shy of his 25th anniversary last year, has yet to be replaced,) and Arthur Kaptainis says that the lack of leadership and direction at the MSO is beginning to be alarming. The concert had the orchestra pushed to the very back of the stage to accomodate one short work in which a pair of dancers were featured, and the entire program had the effect of implying that the musicians were the least important part of the show. “The directors of the MSO (many present for an opening-night bash) should remember that it is possible to accumulate an artistic deficit.”

The recording industry was hoping that the 261 lawsuits it filed against file-swapping music fans last month might have a chilling effect on the whole online piracy problem. But in fact, the opposite seems to be true: according to one independent research firm, “the number of people using these file sharing services in the first 10 days of September is up more than 20 percent from the August average.” Of course, the industry will be going ahead with the lawsuits, regardless…

Carnegie Hall’s new hall allows it to expand its musical tastes. “The first thing is that when we present a series curated by musicians like Caetano Veloso or Emmylou Harris, you are not seeing those artists replacing the traditional recital or orchestral series that we do. We’re not sacrificing one for the other, we’re adding something new. But also, as audiences develop and change, I think you find people who love Emmylou Harris and also go to hear the Berlin Philharmonic.”

“Described by the architects as a mining operation as well as a design project, Carnegie Hall’s new performance space sits within a cavity carved out of Manhattan schist. Parts of the bedrock are exposed, actually, in backstage areas and in a public stairwell.”