Category: music

A new web site based in Canada is attempting to provide a much-needed resource for the classical music world: “a fully searchable Web site of home grown contemporary music. The slick, bilingual site, www.musiccentre.ca, includes comprehensive biographies and sound samples of about 580 composers, living and dead… Holding the country’s largest collection of Canadian classical works, the Toronto-based centre, around since 1959, has re-organized its library resources so the general public can access the materials. Previously the centre’s 15,000 scores were only available through five regional lending libraries.”

Less than a year after the Colorado Springs Symphony folded up shop and joined the ranks of defunct North American orchestras, a new ensemble made up of the same musicians has risen from the ashes and announced its first season. The Colorado Springs Philharmonic will play ten sets of classical concerts, and four sets of pops in 2003-04, and will perform under the baton of Lawrence Leighton Smith, the same conductor who led the old symphony. In another interesting twist, Philharmonic executive director Susan Greene is the same manager who was unceremoniously dismissed by the symphony board a year before its demise.

“After a hiatus of exactly 10 years, full-scale opera returned late last month to the Baths of Caracalla. The cream of Roman society put on their best suits and gowns for the occasion on July 24, reveling in the soft orange light that bathes the third-century baths after dusk, making the ruins one of opera’s most striking theaters.”

A Thai geneticist, a computer programmer and a composer have “written” a piece of music based on DNA genetic sequencing. “When I first heard my hepatitis song, all my hairs stood up. The song was amazingly beautiful and it perfectly fit with my (play about DNA).”

A new study of recording sales in the UK indicates that sales of classical music are falling as a percentage of total music sales. “More than a decade after the heyday of the Three Tenors, the new survey, compiled by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), appears to prove that the public’s brief 1990s flirtation with orchestral music is over. It found that classical CDs accounted for barely one in 20 of all the albums sold in the UK last year – compared to a high of one in 10 in 1990.”

For the Brooklyn-based opera company which found itself in a hurricane of bad publicity last week after announcing that it would use a computerized orchestra for an upcoming production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, things just keep getting worse. At least one singer has quit the production for fear of being blacklisted in the opera world, and an e-mail campaign by the American Federation of Musicians is causing untold headaches. But the opera’s director insists that he would hire a real orchestra if he had the budget, and can’t understand why the musicians’ union would stand in the way of the development of young opera singers.

In Germany, where orchestras are largely financed by public dollars, many orchestras are reeling from unprecedented budget cuts imposed by their host cities. “Thousands of towns and cities across Germany have been slashing discretionary spending as tax revenues have shrunk. Many are facing their worst financial crisis in 50 years. Relief could be at hand, however, in the shape of a tax reform package unveiled by Germany’s ruling coalition yesterday… The core of the reform is a recasting of the Gewerbesteuer, a tax on corporate profit set and levied by Germany’s 13,800 municipalities, and which, in most cases, constitutes their largest source of revenues.”

The executive director of the Louisville Orchestra has announced his resignation, just one month after the orchestra ended a bitter stalemate with its musicians and settled on a plan to avert bankruptcy. Tim King, a 44-year-old who has worked in the arts since 1981, insists that the decision to leave is his own, and came only in response to a job offer he couldn’t refuse. “A self-described passionate gardener, he’ll be going into sales at a nursery and landscaping company operated by former orchestra development director Michael Oppelt.”

The beleaguered Calgary Philharmonic, which very nearly became part of the list of defunct North American orchestras last year, is back in business, with a tough new CEO at the helm and a professed commitment to financial responsibility above all. In addition to hiring retired oil executive Mike Bregazzi to run the organization, the CPO is dramatically restructuring the role of its board, increasing its regional visibility, and introducing a flexible ticket-pricing plan which it hopes will draw new audience.

“Record labels these days are the stuff of great melodrama in the decline-of-Rome battles between petulant artists and the fading major brand names that print their work onto CDs. But music lovers these days know more about who built the blank CDs stacked in their ripping rooms than the name of the record company that puts out Queens of the Stone Age or Ashanti.”