Category: music

A new study suggests that music fans are beginning to buy music legally online. But they’re more likely to buy CDs online than to individual tracks. And still, by far, the free music swapping services remain the most popular music sites.

The manuscript of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sold for £2.133 million this week. So why is this music so valuable? “The work preoccupied the 19th century, and that is because it seems endlessly suggestive, to raise musical possibilities which even it could not entirely fulfil.”

Is jazz critic Stanley Crouch right about racism and jazz critics? The issure recently got him fired from JazzTimes. “The real scandal in jazz criticism isn’t race – it’s bad writing. Jazz, which arose at the same time as that other revolutionary twentieth-century art, film, has failed to generate a comparable body of criticism. Most jazz magazines are only slightly more readable than airline glossies, and serve roughly the same purpose. Whatever one thinks of Crouch’s views, he is one of the few jazz critics worthy of the name. And this, sadly, is another reason why he no longer belongs in the pages of JazzTimes.”

The chairman of the board of the now-bankrupt Florida Philharmonic says he’s proud of the efforts his board made to save the orchestra. He said “the high-profile plea for donors to come forward to save the Philharmonic netted only $770,000, far short of the $4.5 million necessary to see the orchestra through the 2003-04 season. That amount was barely a fraction of the original $20 million requested as a sign of the community’s willingness to support the orchestra. ‘We didn’t even get close to that figure, which made a bankruptcy filing inevitable’.”

“Gay and lesbian subtexts frequently hover beneath the surface of opera. The singer’s sex may not be the same as the sex of the character he or she is playing, while cross-dressing within plots can lead to erotic mayhem. That there should be a disparity in the way gay and straight composers have had to approach erotic subjects is ultimately a sad reflection on the normative proscriptions that have dogged social history and continue to do so. Yet opera also asserts a communality of experience that both contains and bypasses gender and sexual orientation.”

Singer Andrea Bocelli Andrea Bocelli was the big winner at this year’s Classical Brit Awards, beating out the quartet Bond.

It is difficult to overstate the impact that the national broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera have had over the years on musicians, opera fans, and the general public. But with ChevronTexaco having pulled its sponsorship of the series, the Met is left with the unappetizing task of trying to find someone else willing to shell out $7 million or so every year for the privilege of having its name set before a few million opera lovers. The devastating blow comes as the Met is at the absolute top of its artistic game, says David Patrick Stearns, and the prospect of depriving the nation’s airwaves of the series is unthinkable.

Finding a source of reliable constructive criticism can be difficult when you’re a musician waiting for your big break. After all, what friend or relation would dare to crush the dream of a lousy wannabe rock star who truly believes they’ll be on MTV someday? Enter garageband.com, burster of delusional bubbles: “Once an Internet darling bent on shaking the foundations of the crusty old music industry, Garageband is home to over 325,000 musicians and new-music hunters who review original songs in an ongoing round-robin tournament.”

Members of two prominent American rock bands have joined consumer groups and media watchdogs in blasting the FCC’s plan to further relax rules on media ownership in the U.S. Mike Mills of R.E.M. and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam described the effect that media consolidation has already had on the American music scene as catastrophic, and said that the continuing domination of radio, advertising, and ticket distribution by mega-companies like Clear Channel “makes it very threatening for any band that wants to make statements contrary to the proper American way of doing things.”

It has been suggested that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is the most significant work of Western music ever composed, and even today, most people on the street could hum you a bar or two of the ‘Ode to Joy’ if you asked. But the 9th is a huge score which represents something far more significant than a single pretty melody – it was one of those pieces that broke through old taboos, advanced composition into a new phase, and inspired (and intimidated) a generation of younger composers. Still, when the only known working manuscript of the 9th hit the block at Sotheby’s this week, bidding went slowly, with the score eventually selling for £2.133 million to an anonymous phone bidder. Sotheby’s had hoped for more, but the sum was one of the highest ever paid for such a work.