Category: music

In Europe, where recent arts tradition has the state responsible for funding most of the cost of highculture, a shift is taking place. “Opera, the most expensive of art forms, is increasingly turning the clock back a couple of centuries and looking to individuals for patronage. Corporate sponsorship is becoming elusive and is likely to remain so at least until the next boom economy. At Covent Garden, about half the annual contributions from well-wishers now come from private patrons…”

Violinist Nigel Kennedy still swears up a storm, even if his punker affectations have been worn off. “Many critics have forgiven me and think I’m a good boy now because I’m middle of the road compared to people like Vanessa Mae and Bond – at least I didn’t put drum’n’bass behind Vivaldi”.

Why is music – pleasurable to be sure, but hardly essential to life – so ubiquitous to every culture? “Archaeologists have found evidence of musical activity dating back at least 50,000 years. Even babies as well as some animals, such as birds, whales and monkeys, have a built-in sense of tone and rhythm, according to a set of six papers on the origin and function of music in the July edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. ‘Every culture we’ve ever looked at has music of some sort. But why that is so is a puzzle’.”

“Norah Jones has replaced Diana Krall as the artist jazz critics love to hate. But if that bothers Jones – who will give a sold-out concert Tuesday evening at the Fox Theatre – she can take comfort in the fact that being a jazz pariah is nothing new. Traditionally, critics and fans have turned their backs on artists who pull off the trick of clicking with the masses. Over the decades, the list of performers whose artistic credibility has been questioned because of their commercial success has included…”

Putting your stamp on Beethoven’s nine symphonies has traditionally been the great conductor’s calling card. It happens less these days, but Simon Rattle is the star of the day and he’s got a new set of recordings of the symphonies. Tim Page reports that “this would hardly be my first (or, for that matter, my 10th) choice for a complete Beethoven. Rattle has attempted to meld historically informed performance practice with old-fashioned orchestral grandeur, which means that the tempos tend to be on the quick side while the sonorities are full and lush. So far, so good. But Rattle places such an emphasis on drama and ferocity that many of the gentler and more expansive qualities of Beethoven’s art are lost.”

The Glyndebourne Festival in the late 90s had fallen upon considerable disrepeair. “Now, with a new, young leadership team in place, the future of Glyndebourne looks generally bright. Such a popular and excellent festival is not likely to self-destruct. Still, whether the new administration can find a way back to what now looks like a golden age of a decade ago, or whether in the name of fiscal sobriety it will shy away from innovation, remains to be seen.”

Recording labels have generally been ruthless in dropping artists that haven’t sold as well as expected. Now the tables are being turned. “These days, with the entire music biz in flux, a growing number of major-label artists, from Pearl Jam to Natalie Merchant to Jimmy Buffett, are biting the hand that doesn’t feed them enough. They’re finding that they can start their own record labels and do just fine outside the big-label structure, that going independent and using technology to their advantage can pay off both financially and creatively.”

America’s national chain of House of Blues music clubs has been booking fewer actual blues acts these days in its clubs. Last month at the Boston HOB, “of the 29 acts that headlined the Cambridge House of Blues, only four are artists that make their living moanin’ the blues.” That’s a far cry from a decade ago. So is blues dying as a popular artform?

Pop concert attendance is up 24 percent for the first half of 2003, and baby boomer artists account for half the tickets sold. “Fans bought 13.1 million concert tickets to the top 50 concert tours from January to June, compared to 10.6 million sold during the same period last year, according to Pollstar, the industry trade magazine. Gross receipts were up 26 percent to $678 million, up from $538 million in 2001.”

Finland sounds like a musical Utopia. And certainly Finnish musicians are making their mark internationally. So what nurtures such a positive musical environment? The country has “30 state-funded orchestras in the country, with as much as 90% of their income coming from the public purse. This extraordinary provision is for a total population of five million, less than that of London.”