Category: music

London’s Almeida Theatre is embarking on the Genesis Project, commissioning new operas with the hope of reinventing the form for the 21st Century. “Genesis is trying to kick opera into the 21st century and give it a wider appeal to people like director Jean-Frédéric Messier, founder of the Montreal theatre company Momentum, and a man who is more likely to be found listening to Frank Zappa than Puccini. ‘Maybe opera does have a future if it can become a free open space where people can try anything’.”

Charles Rosen explains: “For the modern sensibility, the public performance is the final realisation of the work of music. In spite of the rich tradition of private and semiprivate music making in the centuries before our own, it is with the presentation in public that the performance of a work comes completely into its own, attains its full existence. We must rephrase the question “for whom does one play in public?”: the odd aesthetic objectivity, real or mythical, demands the form “for what does one play?” One plays for the music.”

A new survey reports that music downloaders actually buy more music than non-downloaders… “A total of 91 per cent of file-sharers download individual tracks, but more than two-thirds go on to buy the album, with even the heaviest downloaders saying they like to own real CDs. Only half of people who download music illegally from the internet believe they are doing something morally wrong. Almost half of the people who responded to the survey were “heavy downloaders” who obtained more than 100 tracks. However, surprisingly, 34 per cent of them said they were buying more music than ever before.”

Is the accordion making a comeback after being left in the closet by rock ‘n roll? “There’s a new age of accordion players now. It used to be mainly traditional German and Polish stuff, but people have really started doing more rock ‘n’ roll and swing.”

Willy Pritts owns nearly 150 acres of open land in Pennsylvania, and thought he’d like to start holding concerts there. But his property isn’t zoned for such events, so local officials told him he’d have to scrap his plans. But Pritts is a resourceful fellow. He turned right around and incorporated as the Church of Universal Love and Music, which is – surprise! – “committed to spiritual growth through music.” County officials are not amused, nor are some of Pritts’s neighbors, who claim that the church’s “services” can be heard for miles around.

Since the near-demise of the vinyl LP, consumers and critics alike have lamented the concomitant death of the art of the album cover. But the connection between the contents of an album and its packaging may be making a comeback. “Computer graphics are making album covers — some of them, anyway — all the more intriguing, even in the age of the criminally scaled- down cover art of CDs. An album cover has no business not being a work of art.” Still, with single-song downloads seeming to be the wave of the future, how can album art possibly adapt?

The record industry is apparently not yet tired of its seemingly unending quest to rid the world of already-defunct file-trading services. The latest already-dead victim: Puretunes, an online service that offered users unlimited song downloads for a flat fee. Puretunes, which was based in Madrid, lasted about three weeks, then shut down without explanation, but the industry wants blood, anyway, suing the owners of the service in a Washington court.

The global market for illicit copies of CDs has exploded, according to a new report from the record industry, and “the illegal music market is now worth $4.6 billion globally.” New technologies have made it possible – and simple – to copy not only the contents of a traditional CD, but the cover art and liner notes as well, and the industry estimates that, for the first time, the number of illegal CDs in existence has topped a billion. According to the report, two of every five CDs sold are illegal copies, often without the knowledge of the buyer, and there is no end in sight.

Laptop jamming – it’s musicians getting together in public, plugging their laptops into a sound system and creating “a kind of electronic music using new sounds and ambient textures. People can just pick up and do it just using the software. Laptop music may have an aggressive beat that sounds warped and filtered, or the atmospheric outer-space effect of ambient music; like electronica, it borrows samples from many different styles of music. When a group starts playing, the sound can be jarringly cacophonous because it takes a while for the performers to get in sync with one another.”