Category: music

A widely reported story that the rock group Metallica was suing a little-known Canadian band for trademark violation over the use of the chords E and F (in that order) has turned out to be an elaborate hoax by a Canadian satirist and aspiring musician. Erik Ashley got the story (very realistically masquerading as a news item on MTV’s web site) past dozens of radio news directors, the online news source Ananova, and (sigh) not one, but two ArtsJournal editors. The beauty of the hoax, of course, is that the story is preposterous, yet, given Metallica’s litigious history, entirely plausible as well. No word on whether Metallica plans to sue Ashley for defamation.

A new study by the National Endowment for the Arts finds that audiences for live classical music events grew slightly in the last ten years, but that a slightly smaller percentage of the public attended concerts than in 1992. “At 49, classical music audiences have the highest median age of any of the categories in the survey… Classical and opera audiences have also become more educated. About 85 percent of concertgoers had at least a partial college education in 2002, up from 77 percent in 1992.”

“Presenting a new opera always comes with higher costs and higher risks than showcasing the tried-and-true. Even though the opera combines the familiar history of China’s Cultural Revolution with fictionalized events, Madame Mao remains an unknown quantity. The production, which employs eight dancers and elaborate costumes, has a budget of $1.5 million, half again as much as the Santa Fe Opera average.”

One of the biggest challenges of programming an orchestra’s season is finding a reliable way to gauge the interest’s of a local audience. Even in an industry so dominated by a “standard repertoire,” the tastes of concertgoers vary widely from city to city, and what goes over brilliantly in New York may well flop 100 miles down the road in Philadelphia. “Theories abound about what formulates and maintains local taste – theories nearly as disputable as they are defendable. The collective consciousness of any community isn’t all that collective and is constantly shifting. The theory that seems to carry the most weight is ethnicity.”

Jiang Qing led the type of life so dramatically implausible, so full of power and corruption and disgrace and misery, that it could only ever be fully realized on the operatic stage. The wife of Mao Zedong, who was known in China as the White-Boned Demon, was already memorialized in song by John Adams in his opera, Nixon in China, but now, composer Bright Sheng has made her the title character in his latest work, Madame Mao, which premieres this weekend in Santa Fe. Sheng’s opera presents Jiang Qing as a conflicted and multifaceted woman, to the degree that she is actually portrayed by two different singers representing the two distinct stages of her life.

Even in our post-religious society, music is frequently described with the sort of reverence generally reserved for prayer, says composer James MacMillan. Of course, the ties between religion and music are long and well-documented, but isn’t there a more fundamental reason why we view serious music with such awe? “It is not only theologians who see a wider context for the discussion of music. The English composer and agnostic Michael Tippett several times made the bold claim that there was a connection between music and compassion. This is fascinating since that was precisely the belief of the medieval music guilds of Europe, which venerated Job as the patron saint of music before Saint Cecilia came along.”

Next year, Australia will stage its first ever performance of the complete operatic cycle of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the southern city of Adelaide. The Ring Cycle is not just a lot of music to perform in a short time period, it is arguably the most massive physical production any opera company could ever attempt to stage. “The size of the backdrops… is so vast and their technical demands so complex that they are being worked on in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Technical expertise has been brought in from… the University of Adelaide and United Utilities Australia, a major water company. They are being designed by the team that constructed the cauldron that launched the 2000 Sydney Olympics.”

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been mired in financial quicksand for more than a year, is asking a municipal funding agency to nearly double the amount it contributes to the orchestra. The Allegheny Regional Asset District gave the orchestra $725,000 last fiscal year, on a request for $900,000. This year, the PSO says it needs $1.5 million, which will likely be a hard sell at a time when states across the U.S. are strapped for cash themselves.

The world probably isn’t in desperate need of a bunch of new kinds of musical instrument, but sometimes necessity is the enemy of invention, and the participants in a Massachusetts residency sponsored by the Bang On A Can folks aren’t letting a lack of public clamor for their work discourage them. Among the new instruments now on display at Mass MOCA is the whirlycopter, which looks like “a cross between a helicopter and an electric chair,” yet sounds “like an Orthodox choir, chanting somewhere over in the next valley.” The idea, of course, is to make new music more accessible and, dare we say it, fun, as well as to free up the musical imaginations of the participants.

Mike Greenberg isn’t predicting a rebirth for the bankrupt San Antonio Symphony just yet, but he’s encouraged by the involvement of the city’s mayor, and the work of a new task force charged with developing new strategies for orchestral success in South Texas. “In 1994, a similar task force… worked for several months and produced a report that said essentially nothing of value. The 1994 report set cost and revenue goals, most of which the symphony achieved in the short term, but failed to address the fundamentals of the orchestra’s program and its relationship with the larger community. The current task force, it seems, intends to avoid that mistake.”