Category: music

“Facing competition from Apple Computer’s iTunes service, Listen.com will lower the price to download songs from its Rhapsody music service by 20 cents to 79 cents, marking the latest move by paid music services to attract and retain new ears. For the price, listeners can download and burn from among more than 200,000 songs. Unlike users of Apple’s iTunes, who only pay 99 cents per song, Listen.com customers also pay a $10 a month subscription fee.” The news is significant, because it indicates that the public is interested enough in legal download services to make the price war necessary.

Last week, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Peter Dobrin reported that the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra had taken aside conductor Yakov Kreizberg, who had been called in at the last minute to replace Wolfgang Sawallisch on a major international tour, and asked him to cut down on the podium histrionics and stick with Sawallisch’s tempos. The orchestra’s top artistic executive agrees that the meeting took place, but insists that Dobrin overplayed the drama. “In our view, conversations between the concertmaster and conductor are a normal part of healthy music collaboration.”

The troubled Tower Records is looking for a buyer. “Tower has been particularly hard hit by the decline in sales of recorded music. For the six-month period ended January 31, Tower’s sales fell 8.2%, to $306.9 million, and the company had a loss from continuing operations of $33 million, compared to a loss of $10.7 million in the first half of fiscal 2002.”

“David Tilling, of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, thrust the baton through his hand while rehearsing Land of Hope and Glory, by Elgar. He finished conducting the piece but then collapsed. Some of his bandsmen feared he was having a heart attack. A few may even have been aware of a disturbing precedent: at a concert in a Parisian church in 1687, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully stabbed himself in the foot while conducting. Gangrene set in and killed him…”

When times are tough, how do you lure in audiences? “Two theories are doing the rounds. One says the only way to lure back the crowds is by going shamelessly populist. The other, unhelpfully, states the opposite: that you are most likely to prise open wallets when money is tight if you offer them something unusual, unrepeatable and unmissable. There can be no argument as to which camp the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra belongs in. In an amazing four-day festival in Birmingham from Thursday it offers (in conjunction with its sister ensemble, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group) no fewer than 18 big, bold, bracing blasts of contemporary music, most of them composed in the past five years.”

What does it take to move the San Francisco Symphony across Europe on its $1.8 million tour? “In between transatlantic flights on commercial airliners, the tour schedule includes six chartered flights, two train rides (including one on Eurostar, the new high-speed train that runs from London to Brussels through the Channel Tunnel) and three bus trips for short run-outs to cities such as Brighton and Dusseldorf. But that’s just the humans. Running in tandem, in two climate-controlled trucks, is the cargo – almost 11 tons of evening clothes, cellos and basses, trombones and bassoons and harps and cymbals.”

Britain has won five Eurovision Song Contests. So Britons are furious that their representative this year didn’t pick up a single vote. politics to blame? Maybe a “post-Iraqi backlash”? Or were viewers in Europe “engaging in political voting against a country out of step with the rest of Europe?” Maybe there an “element of vote-rigging going on, with geographical allies voting for each other.”

“We are still left with a bad song that was not as bad as some other songs, but nevertheless everyone liked the least. We are still left wondering why, with our thriving industry of schlock pop and so much prime-time telly given over to the creation of more of it, we can’t compete with Bosnia Herzogovina. I think the answer lies in the very timbre of our outrage. We know we can make good pop. Everyone else knows we can make good pop. But when it’s just for Europe, we don’t see why we should bother. We aim low, and we never field our biggest hitters.”

People who download music over the internet are said to be the reason that CD sales have declined in the past few years. “But a study released this month shows that people who download music are more than twice as likely to buy CDs as people who don’t download. That makes sense. People who spend hours – and it takes a lot of time – scanning the Internet for music to download are likely to be eager music fans, looking for a new kick, a bit of rare trivia or even a cut they heard on the radio and wanted to hear again.”

Manuela Hoelterhoff writes that the value of broadcasting opera every week throughout America is hard to calculate. “All I know is that I am not unique, and countless children must have listened to those opera broadcasts and gone on to become mathematicians, Supreme Court justices, stock brokers, teachers and captains of industry (if not, I guess, at ChevronTexaco).”