Category: music

Just how do you learn to play a Pierre Boulez score? “The leaps are awkward. The spacings of the chords are often large and dense, and there are many, many notes on every single page. As with lots of contemporary music, the patterns, the pitches are nothing like what we grew up practicing. The scores are the kind of music that someone who doesn’t really read music would say [are just] full of black dots and circles. The page is covered with specks.”

In this weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest, Britain’s entry scored no points. None. Nada. Zip. “An estimated 150 million viewers across the length and breadth of the continent witnessed this national humiliation. They not only watched it; they conspired to bring it about through telephone voting. One German newspaper was quick to grasp the true significance of what had occurred: ‘England, motherland of pop, in last place!’ This is what is known in English as schadenfreude.”

Colleges are cracking down on students who download music. At Colorado State University, “four or five times a day, college computing administrators receive a message from recording-industry download police giving the specific computer, song and time of a rogue copy made by a student in campus housing. They must pass the message on to a dorm rules enforcer, who in turn must unplug the computer in question and scold the owner that trading in copyrighted songs over the Internet is against the law. Strike two means a formal meeting with a disciplinary officer. Strike three at CSU means the student is denied access to the Internet as long as the wrongdoer remains in campus housing, for the rest of the student’s college career.”

” ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’ couldn’t be a bigger London success if you dipped it in chocolate and threw it to the lesbians, as one of its few reprintable lyrics suggests. What happened, exactly? This: The world now believes America is Jerry Springer, and Americans are Jerry’s guests. The world believed it long before there was a ‘Jerry Springer Show,’ in fact; the show merely solidified that belief, giving justifiable anti-Americanism a name and a face – that of Springer’s mild, jaded, half-smile of effrontery.”

Melbourne has a lively music scene. “But it’s a scene that is in danger of dying, according to some venue owners around town. The pub proprietors say that as house and apartment prices in the inner city have soared, home owners’ expectations have changed. The new, more affluent residents have important jobs, peaceful lifestyles to live. They don’t want to be kept awake at night by guitars and drums. Their complaints about noise to councils and liquor-licensing bodies are increasingly being taken seriously.”

Turkey’s Sertab Erener has won this year’s Eurovision song contest with the song ‘Every Way That I Can.’Belgium’s Urban Trad came in second and Russia’s Tatu in third. Erener is one of Turkey’s most popular singers, with album sales of over four million.

Denver could use a good chamber orchestra, writes Marc Shulgold. Most of the pieces are in place to create one. All it takes is a little money. “Who doesn’t like Bach, Handel and Vivaldi? Who wouldn’t enjoy a Mozart or Haydn symphony played as originally conceived? What’s not to like in those sumptuous string-orchestra pieces by Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Grieg and Dvorak? Particularly when they’re played with professional polish?”

Robert Spano finally makes his New York Philharmonic debut. The Philharmonic has been “catching up with the younger generation of American conductors lately, perhaps with too great a sense of dutiful deliberation, and Mr. Spano’s debut lets it check off another name on its list. But there is also a sense that the orchestra is scouting out talent for its eventual search for its next music director — a process that would have to involve establishing relationships with the potential candidates. Mr. Spano’s name, along with David Robertson’s and Alan Gilbert’s, has been mentioned as a possibility, although mostly in the context of critics’ wish lists, not by the orchestra itself.”

US visa rules in effect since 9/11 mean that Cuban artists nominated for Grammys will not be able to attend or perform in the Grammy ceremony. “The new rules mean that, with only six weeks between the announcement of the Latin Grammy nominations on July 22 and the Sept. 3 show, it will be virtually impossible for any Cuban artist to get a visa in time.”

Now that ChevronTexaco has bailed out of a 63-year sponsorship of Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, and “with classical-music institutions facing financial difficulties and dwindling audiences across the continent, is opera on the radio an idea whose time has passed? Does the Met still have the influence to attract the interest of large corporations? Does opera still have the cachet and prestige it once did? These questions will be answered in the coming year.”