Category: music

Musicians and management at the near-defunct Florida Philharmonic are reportedly still talking, in an effort to find some way of preserving or reinventing the ensemble. There isn’t a great deal of optimism at the moment, but orchestras in other communities have risen from the ashes, and some at the Florida Phil appear to think it can do the same. But any new orchestra would likely face the same problems – funding, haphazard management, and audience apathy – as the current group.

America’s orchestras are slipping away. “Nearly a dozen orchestras across the country have either closed or are in danger of doing so. This season’s first orchestral casualty was the San Jose Symphony, which shut down in November. The Tulsa Philharmonic, the Colorado Springs Symphony and the San Antonio Symphony followed. In February the 49-year-old Savannah Symphony Orchestra canceled the rest of its season. It was $1.3 million in debt, had gone through five executive directors in seven years and was unable to meet its payroll.”

Stanley Crouch’s last column in JazzTimes was blunt. In it he “accuses white critics of elevating white musicians ‘far beyond their abilities’ to ‘make themselves feel more comfortable about . . . evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.’ Crouch also claims that white writers, who were born in ‘middle-class china shops,’ ensure ‘the destruction of the Negro aesthetic’ by advancing musicians who can’t swing at the expense of those who can.” And with that, the magazine fired Crouch…

Until this year, Latin music sales had been growing in the US. Now it’s flatlinedor declining, just like the rest of the music industry. “All these economic problems – with the Internet, with radio – minimize the company’s efforts. The No. 1 effect is you don’t launch so many artists, or as many new artists. You have to lower your production budgets. Everything has to come down to the reality of the marketplace.”

Get the feeling that Top 40 songs are sounding more and more alike? Here might be one reason: computers. “Hit Song Science is a high-tech music analysis system that compares new songs to a massive database of chart-topping singles and predicts hit potential based on shared attributes. In other words, the more your song has in common with Usher’s ‘U Don’t Have To Call’ or Santana’s ‘Smooth,’ the better your prospects for stardom. All five of the major record companies – BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. – are using the service.”

So the Florida Philharmonic has slipped under the waves, the latest American orchestra casualty. “Blame for the philharmonic’s misfortunes can certainly be spread around. Uninspired, unmotivated, unprepared, unrealistic and sometimes simply petty administrators and board members would surely get their share; some myopic musicians who fanned adversarial labor relations over the years wouldn’t escape, either. (It’s not surprising that a disillusioned Judd departed a few seasons ago.) Ultimately, though, it’s the well-oiled in the community that have to take the heat, the folks who could have stepped up to the plate way back when the first deficits appeared. The arts don’t come cheap.”

Jerry Springer – The Opera has been getting glowing reviews. But Arnold Wesker writes that the praise isn’t deserved. “I have no religious sensibilities to offend but I do have an intelligence that can be offended. It’s not the poor black actor looking absurd in shit-filled diapers that offends, or the fat lady having no greater ambition than to pole-dance which so obviously is beyond her size and weight; it’s that in both the live Springer show and this celebration of it we are invited not to understand but either to laugh at them – which insults them – or, because they are all rather intimidatingly jolly about their offbeat desires, to laugh with them – which is patronising!”

Chicago classical music fans recall the time not so long ago when radio station WFMT was “the most cultured radio station in North America.” But “much of what made WFMT truly distinctive seems to be eroding in slow but perceptible degrees, a decline driven by the difficulties of making classical radio commercially viable but also by economic reverses suffered by the fine-arts station’s corporate parent, Window to the World Communications, which also owns and operates public broadcasting station WTTW-Channel 11. The Arbitron ratings evidence a decline of another sort…

“For most of the last two weeks, North Dakota’s major cities, and nooks and crannies all around, resonated to the strains of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington and its individual members. The visit was part of the orchestra’s American Residencies program, which has so far consisted of 11 tours to 12 different states over a dozen years.”