Category: music

Deep in the heart of Texas, there are those still hoping for a savior to step forward and save the bankrupt San Antonio Symphony. To be sure, the city has no shortage of billionaires who could make the SAS solvent again in the blink of an eye, but it’s fairly clear that none of them are going to help, says Mike Greenberg. So why isn’t anyone looking at realistic options instead of waiting for a miracle? “There’s only one real answer for the symphony: It has to make more money by doing more of what it does well: making music… To build a future, the symphony needs a hammer in the hand, not a rabbit in a hat.”

The Colorado Music Festival is not sitting around waiting for the financial woes that are plaguing so many classical music organizations to hit them, too. Rather, the Boulder-based organization is joining forces with other arts groups to offer their audience new reasons to keep streaming through the turnstiles. A collaboration with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival will find actors roaming the grounds on select nights. A local group specializing in music education is on board to assist with a new children’s program. And for every concert it plays, the CMF will utilize a new orchestral ‘scorecard’ which invites the audience to follow along with key themes as the orchestra plays them.

“An unprecedented grant will speed the tempo of the new Colorado Springs Philharmonic’s march toward solvency – if the orchestra can raise $650,000 in four months. A quartet of regional foundations… have joined forces to offer a 2-to-1 challenge grant of $325,000, orchestra officials announced Tuesday. It’s the largest grant in the history of the former Colorado Springs Symphony, which went bankrupt earlier this year, then re-formed as the Colorado Springs Philharmonic.”

With many large American orchestras facing multi-million dollar deficits, bloated budgets, and uncertain futures, the Dallas Symphony is continuing to be a model of fiscal sanity, without compromising artistic integrity. The DSO “came within $150,000 of balancing its $21 million budget for the 2002-03 fiscal year. That’s a big improvement over the $847,000 deficit during 2001-02– and a considerable achievement in a year marked by bankruptcies, multimillion-dollar deficits and contract rollbacks for other orchestras.” The news isn’t all good – ticket sales in Dallas are down again – but in the current economic climate, the DSO has to be considered a major success story.

San Diego Symphony president Douglas Gerhart has resigned from that position, saying that his candidacy for the top job in Pittsburgh had become a distraction. The financially embattled Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra isn’t returning phone calls on the subject, but it’s possible that Gerhart has already been hired. The San Diego prez first surfaced as a leading candidate for the PSO job two weeks ago, based on his record of service with orchestras attempting to navigate dire economic straits.

The Recording Industry Association of America wants to go after music file-swappers and fine them – demanding $150,000 from each. “The organisation says it wants to track down the heaviest users of song-swapping services, and then sue them for thousands of dollars in damages. ‘We’re going to begin taking names and preparing lawsuits against peer-to-peer network users who are illegally making available a substantial number of music files to millions of other computer users’.”

With the recording industry threatening to begin suing the biggest file-swappers, millions of users of file trading services like Kazaa and Morpheus are wondering just how many downloads qualifies as lawsuit-worthy. And that, of course, is exactly what the RIAA wants. “The intent is to scare everyone from prototypical pirates who share hundreds of ripped CDs through T-1 lines to teens who trade a handful of pop tunes. Still, the heaviest sharers are a distinct bunch relatively easy to pick out in a crowd.”

The legendary Vanguard Classics label is being resurrected. “Artemis Classics, a division of Artemis Records, will begin releasing both Vanguard’s printed catalogue as well as previously unreleased material from this autumn. In addition, Artemis will also be working with a handful of young artists, including violinist Gil Shaham, cellist Matt Haimovitz and composer Michael Hersh.”

Are cracks beginning to appear in the marriage between the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall? Carnegie officials are looking forward: “People think that we are simply going to graft the current Philharmonic schedule on top of the Carnegie Hall schedule. The opportunity here is to create a merged institution that is forward-thinking. We are looking at new ways of presentation and new types of scheduling.” Forward-thinking. Sounds good. “Except that the Philharmonic, however splendid an orchestra, has not been forward-thinking since the 1970’s.”

“In ever-evolving forms, hip-hop rules planet Earth, or at least the global entertainment economy from Japan to Cuba. But is there something deeper going on than the flash of 50 Cent’s platinum chains and Eminem’s silver tongue? Where is hip-hop’s artistic vanguard, its intelligentsia? Wasn’t this $1.6 billion-a-year industry once rooted in resistance?”