Category: music

“Welcome to the death of music, or that genre of it we define as classical. For more than a century it has captured the hearts and minds of millions, inspired the building of great concert halls in hundreds of cities, sustained thousands of musicians and created a discography that seemed timeless and enduring in its appeal. Well, timeless and enduring until now. For, despite private patronage and lashings of public funds, concert performance and ticket sales are in free fall. Little wonder the latest attempts by Sir Brian McMaster, director of the Edinburgh Festival, to halt and reverse the decline in concert going are being anxiously watched round the world. For there is a growing fear that the decline in classical concert attendance now looks unstoppable.”

When fans thought that Pavarotti was singing his last performance at the Metropolitan Opera last year (before he canceled) they gladly paid as much as $1,875 per ticket to be there. Now the tenor says he’ll return to the Met next March. “My great friend, Joe Volpe, and I have been talking for some time now to try to reschedule the performances I unfortunately had to cancel last year. I’m so delighted to be returning to this great, great opera house to sing in ‘Tosca’.”

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, which has been facing choking deficits and cash-flow problems for much of the last two years, has opened negotiations for a new contract with its players by proposing that the musicians’ pay be slashed by $10,000 and that benefits be severely cut back. The PSO has cut costs already this year by reducing its cello section to ten players (twelve is standard,) and some musicians are already taking other auditions in anticipation of what many consider an inevitable downgrade in artistic quality. But the orchestra’s cash crunch is real: last year, then-executive director Gideon Toeplitz raised eyebrows across the industry when he threatened that the PSO would file for bankruptcy if community support did not increase.

You won’t see the Pittsburgh Symphony musicians screaming over management’s proposal to slash their salaries and cut benefits – at least, not yet. The musicians’ negotiating committee yesterday turned down the PSO’s proposal, but made a point of saying that they understand that the orchestra was only making a first proposal in what is expected to be a long negotiating process. Both sides will likely continue to tread carefully, at least in the near future.

“In an era when the publishers of such ephemera as comic books and trading cards routinely set aside a few thousand copies as prefabricated ‘collectors items,’ a spectacular rarity is set for auction at Sotheby’s in London tomorrow. It is nothing less than a near-complete manuscript of what may be the most celebrated work of music in the repertory — the Symphony No. 9 in D Minor by Ludwig van Beethoven.”

Take a big band sound, add banks of electronics, blend in sampled sound and a little rave culture, and you get an experiment in the old time. “By taking a dated musical style – big-band jazz – and marrying it with the kind of electronic processes usually reserved for cutting-edge dance music, Matthew Herbert has made the world’s first experimental yet traditional album. If the Institute of Contemporary Arts held a pensioners’ tea-and-modems morning, this would be its soundtrack.”

Why the fascination with the final moments of great composers? Do these accounts illuminate the music in some way? Not really. “The root, I suspect, is social rather than art-critical. It has something to do with the function that classical music fulfils for many listeners in a secular age, its surrogacy for a forsaken Christian faith. The mortal agonies of a great composer have come to represent the sufferings of a saviour figure, a ritual of veneration. We observe in awe, anticipating redemption.”

Recording execs are convinced that courts might approve a merger between recording giants AOL Time Warner and Bertelsman, even though the idea was rejected two years ago. “A combination of the labels would shrink the number of global record distributors from the current five, providing new muscle and cost-saving opportunity for some players in an ailing music industry — while potentially threatening others. But the executives believe that recent legal rulings and the industry’s weak condition would bolster their cause in persuading regulators, particularly in Europe, to greenlight a deal.”

Orchestras are not in the habit of telling conductors how to do their jobs – it’s supposed to be the other way around. But with Yakov Kreizberg stepping in at the last minute to fill in for the ailing Wolfgang Sawallisch on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s South American tour, the orchestra has taken the unusual step of asking the maestro to tone down his ‘antics’ on the podium, and to leave the tempos where Sawallisch put them. Kreizberg, by all accounts, has taken the chiding in stride, and Peter Dobrin says that the unusual talking-to seems to have done some good.

The recording industry is going after a website based in Spain, which claims that it has found a legal way to offer downloadable music without the consent of the labels which control its distribution. Puretunes, which plans to offer unlimited downloads for a much lower price than many comparable services, says that it will pay royalties directly to the artists, and will take advantage of a loophole in Spanish copyright law to bypass the corporate side of the industry. Not surprisingly, the industry has a very different interpretation of Spanish law.