Category: music

There are fantasy baseball camps, fantasy auto-racing camps, even fantasy Broadway camps. Now there’s fantasy rock star camp. “Through Weekend Warriors, retailers around the country seek out and connect wannabe rock musicians in their area, provide them with gear and rehearsal space, and eventually help them put on a live performance at a local venue. The five-week program costs $95 per person and attracts as many as a hundred musicians a year. ‘What we give them is the equivalent of a catered experience of being in a band’.”

Deflating the recording industry’s claims that downloading is killing their business, recording sales in the UK have scored a record high. “After a dip in the first quarter of the year, sales hit a new peak of 228.3m at the end of June, almost 3% up on last year. The figure published yesterday by the British Phonographic Industry marks the fifth consecutive year that album sales have topped 200m.”

“For years record buyers have complained that CDs are overpriced and the music industry has responded by saying, as politely as possible, put up or shut up. Now, panicked by the pirates, they’ve finally been compelled to slash prices to a reasonable level and sales have reached an all-time high. Profits are down but that’s what happens when you stop charging £16.99 for an item that costs 50p to manufacture.”

A Chopin festival in Warsaw experiments with connections between the great Polish composer and jazz. “Because Polish musicians live and breathe Chopin’s music practically from the moment they first place their fingers on a piano or a fiddle, jazz artists such as violinist Maciej Strzelczyk and pianist Filip Wojciechowski were well equipped to radically reconceive themes from Chopin’s preludes, waltzes and etudes. To these artists, reworking a motif from a classic Chopin piano piece is akin to an American player riffing on the chord changes of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” — this indigenous music courses through their veins.”

Geoff Collinson is a French Horn player in Melbourne who had an idea to stage an international brass festival. With no experience running an organization, a tiny budget, and an artistic director who lives across the world in Switzerland, he managed to pull it all together.

A US Senate subcommittee will investigate the tactics of the Recording Industry Association of America’s to go after music downloaders. The committe will “look at not just the scope of that campaign but also the dangers that downloaders face by making their personal information available to others. Senator Norm Coleman said he would review legislation that would expand criminal penalties for downloading music.”

The way we get and consume music is changing. Fast. “We are now on the edge of an entertainment revolution. It’s all driven by technology, like the Internet 2.0. First, it established new ways of communication – e-mail and Web sites. The next wave will be about entertainment and its distribution. By year-end, it will be here.”

The core audience at the BBC’s Proms concerts come for reasons other than the music. “The origin of these summer traditions is a primal herd instinct, the urge to join with others in a festive act. When asked in a 2001 BBC survey why they chose to stand, most Prommers (38%) replied ‘because of who I was with.’ Others cited the ‘atmosphere’. These are herd reactions, innocent as chewing cud. But mass ritual can turn sinister when combined with feats of endurance that engender a sense of superiority – of being part of an elite that embraces pain.”

The audience for a Sydney Symphony concert was clapping between every movement of a Tchaikovsky symphony. As a joke, the conductor also began applauding, then bade the orchestra rise for a bow. “But rather than creating an embarrassed silence for Tchaikovsky’s tragic finale, the cheers swelled, the bravos grew, some took their coats and ran for trains, and it looked for a moment as though Tchaikovsky’s most tragic work had become his most optimistic, its hidden program, of which he spoke but which he never revealed, rewritten with a happy ending…”

“While today’s iconoclastic visual artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are hotly debated among art aficionados, in the world of music, contemporary classical composers inhabit a dissonant ghetto all their own. Few people listen to them, few critics review them and few people understand them. Western classical music as a whole makes up only 3.5 percent of the world’s total music market (contemporary works aren’t broken out separately). In 2002, classical-album sales were down 17 percent. Orchestras rarely feature contemporary works.”