Category: music

Want to explore contemporary music, but don’t have the opportunity to catch it in a concert? The American Music Center has a service called NewMusicJukebox, and “this month it’s featuring an unusually intriguing webcast from Juilliard’s Focus 2003 Festival titled ‘Beyond the Rockies: A Tribute to Lou Harrison at 85’.”

“The British music industry is in the midst of yet another crisis. As ever, the wounds are mostly self-inflicted. Against a backdrop of falling sales, the industry has undermined the singles chart to the point where few know or care what the current Number One is. The short-termism that led to the explosion of manufactured pop acts is coming home to roost.”

What’s with all these pianists who can’t seem to play without humming along? Vocalising obviously helps with articulation – and is part of the profound relationship between piano-playing and singing, part of the alchemy whereby a series of hammer-blows on steel strings can be made to sound like bel canto. But humming can be even more than that. ‘When I play, I am making love to the audience,’ said Arthur Rubinstein; well into his 80s the Polish virtuoso maintained an aristocratic composure at the keyboard that excluded any audible manifestation of pleasure. But if pianists, especially more mature ones, start to hum, and if there is an amorous quality to that humming, should we be embarrassed?”

It’s amazing how much of American culture is traceable back to the blues. “Without the blues, we wouldn’t have jazz, rock, gospel, soul, R&B, country, or rap music – or even George Gershwin’s masterpiece, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (note the word “blue” in the title). The way we dance, dress, and speak, the music used to sell cars on TV – even our very concept of coolness – can be traced to the blues and its African roots.”

The financially-struggling St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has negotiated a pay cut with its musicians. As well, “in a fundamental shift modeled by some European orchestras, the orchestra is transferring responsibility for core artistic decisions away from the artistic director and into the hands of a new ‘artistic vision committee’.”

More and more hit recordings are featuring more than one performer. “In 1993, not a single tandem recording appeared among the 25 top sellers in the U.S. Five years back, there was just one such record in the top 10, and five in the top 25. Last year, two of the top 10 and four of the top 25 were recorded by multiple artists.” Recently though, “at least 10 of the Top 25 have paired performers — five in the Top 10 and three in the Top 5.”

The Florida West Coast Symphony wants to build a new home and had the city of Sarasota to donate land and parking for a 1,600-seat hall. And if the city won’t? Then the orchestra will move out of town. Oh, and PS, the city’s got only until Saturday to approve the deal…

So far music fans have downloaded 3 million songs on Apple’s new iTunes music store. “This is an impressive figure considering the limited access that music fans now have to the service. Less than 1 percent of the country’s home computers are Macintoshes that are compatible with the iTunes Music Store, and only a fraction of those have a broadband connection to the Internet.” But now there are complications. Hackers have figured out how to copy songs from one computer to another, and now Apple is disabling features…

Richard Cohen is a lifelong listener to weekly radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But the broadcast’s sponsor dropped the program after 63 years. “All the accounts of why ChevronTexaco decided to drop the Met mentioned that the company has come upon hard times. Its CEO, David J. O’Reilly, has taken a 45 percent pay cut, and the stock price has dropped. Still, the company made $1.132 billion last year; $7 million represents less than 1 percent of its profits. Put that way, its decision to drop the broadcasts is a bit harder to understand.”

“Leon Major, artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera since 1998, has stepped down from his position but will remain active with the company as a stage director… Throughout his tenure at the Lyric, Major commuted between Boston and Maryland, where he heads the Maryland Opera Studio at the University of Maryland, while maintaining an active schedule as guest stage director with many American and Canadian opera companies.”