Category: music

“Like their counterparts at book and video stores, record clerks shape our experience of culture as decidedly as any critic, curator or culture-industry executive. They’re street-level tastemakers, part of a breed that’s entered pop mythology. But despite these glamorous associations, serious clerks have become an endangered species. The Internet, with outfits like book and CD merchant Amazon and DVD service Netflix, is put- ting stores, which offer the joy of browsing, serendipity and human contact, out of business.”

Gone are the days of experimenting with sound just for its own sake and calling it music. Now dissonance has to mean something. “Our generation was made to feel we had to come to grips with 12-tone music. We had a psychic investment in it. I have to say my students today don’t feel any such obligation. Back then we would have considered them yahoos. But my students have a lot of honesty.”

Orchestra musicians are said to be at risk of hearing damage. “The legal limit of sound exposure is 90 decibels in the UK but the sound of a symphony orchestra playing a big classical piece at treble forte has been measured at 98dB. Orchestras are now preparing for an EU directive which will reduce the maximum sound level to 85dB, a drop of 20%. A report from the Association of British Orchestras showed that as well as deafness, players could suffer from damaged frequency discrimination, tinnitus or diplacusis (in which the pitch of a single tone is heard as two different pitches by the two ears).”

The big arena pop music shows are dwindling. Rather, the number of bands that can fill an arena are shrinking. So “arenas around the country are reacting to a changing marketplace by shrinking themselves into more intimate, theater-style setups while hoping to lure the plethora of midsized acts who can only draw between 5,000 and 8,000 spectators per show.”

Music giants Warner and Universal have been fined $2 million in Australia for trying to coerce retailers into not selling budget CD’s. “The commission originally launched legal action after the companies first threatened then refused to supply four Australian retailers that stocked so-called parallel-imported CDs.”

As Chicago looks to building a better jazz festival, it could do worse than look to Montreal for a blueprint. “Twenty-four years ago, a small group of intrepid Canadian jazz promoters took a chance on staging a weekend-long mini-fest, hoping that a few listeners might show up. Approximately 12,000 did, and today the Montreal International Jazz Festival has grown into the largest, most intelligently programmed jazz soiree in the world. Its $12.7 million (U.S.) budget and 500-concert lineup easily outpace any American counterpart.”

Times are bad at Dallas-Fort Worth’s only classical music station. “Ratings have dropped to the point where WRR is no longer among Dallas-Fort Worth’s top 20 stations. ‘We’ve hit a wall in the last 18 months’.”

“Much as local listeners may grouse, some of the problems are built into WRR’s commercial format, which has to make room for the advertisements that pay the bills. Similar artistic concerns can be raised with classical-music stations in plenty of other markets. From coast to coast, classical broadcasting just isn’t what it was 30 years ago, in what now looks like a golden age. Classical radio has been hit by the double whammy of a general economic slowdown and a major rewrite of the laws governing the U.S. radio industry.”

“For the past few years, the music industry has been awash in gloom and doom. The grim chorus is now as familiar to the public as any top 40 hit: Piracy has gutted profits, CD sales are going steadily south for the first time since the format was introduced in the 1980s, corporate conglomeration has stultified any art in the business of recording and concerts. All of that is true, and in private even the titans of the business express fears that probably echo the anxious mutterings of railroad barons in the days when Model T’s began rolling down the line. But here is the funny thing lost in the histrionics: Today may be the very best time to be a music fan, especially one looking for a connection to a favorite artist or guidance and access to the exotic or rare.”

“Disco helped transform the DJ into a creative personality, and seeded the recombinant mentality that runs riot through hip-hop. It shifted hit-making power away from radio, and participated in the advent of technologies that have since invaded almost all forms of popular music, such as drum machines and audio loops. History is written by the victors, and the popular image of disco has been shaped by those who hated everything it stood for.”