Category: music

The recording industry is talking merger again. In this shrinking market, the savings that might be squeezed from a merger offer a lifeline. In the past, European regulators have been an obstacle, repeatedly blocking mergers among the big five record companies—Vivendi’s Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI, AOL Time Warner’s Warner Music, and Bertelsmann’s BMG—which between them control 70% of the global recorded-music market. In 2000, they blocked a merger of Warner and EMI by imposing heavy divestment conditions. They stopped EMI marrying BMG even before a formal proposal was tabled.” But with the industry’s current woes, the merger proposition might get a more sympathetic hearing.

The Houston Symphony said Monday that “the organization is dealing with a ‘flat-out crisis’ in its finances and the 97 musicians need to accept an average 7.4 percent pay cut. The players have until Saturday to decide or risk having the society impose the cut, which it has authority to do under U.S. labor law. Musicians still would have the right to strike.”

Everyone’s focusing on Norah Jones, who won big at the Grammys last week. “Sure, listeners worldwide love her, scooping up 6 million copies of her debut album, ‘Come Away With Me.’ Yes, the album has been on The Billboard 200 chart for 52 weeks. And fine, Grammy voters awarded her best new artist, best pop vocal album, album of the year, record of the year and song of the year honors.” So why are critics taking pot shots at her?

A lost Beethoven oboe concerto got a performance this weekend. “Two Dutch Beethoven enthusiasts have pieced together the musical clues, put them into 18th-century orchestral context and reconstructed the second movement of the only oboe concerto Beethoven ever wrote. The slow, melodic Largo movement of the Oboe Concerto in F Major was performed Saturday night in Rotterdam and billed as a ‘world premiere’ – even though the full concerto was performed at least once before, 210 years ago.”

The closing of the new-music label CRI in January changed the classical music landscape. “CRI, for many listeners, was not just an entree into new music but appealed to an anarchic way of listening: adventurously, without expectations, and individually, as an explorer of sound unfettered by what authorities (critics, professors, pompous friends) dictate. Young listeners, tired of whatever music they were weaned on, could find music on CRI that was, by virtue of being the forgotten avant-garde of 20 years before, far more foreign and fascinating than the newest of the new.”

“It now costs about $1 million a week to send an orchestra on an international tour – maybe more. A million dollars might do if you’re talking about a standard 100-player orchestra. But some orchestras need more.” And the presenter of an orchestra is guaranteed to lose money too. “If we sell every seat in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, we are guaranteed to lose up to $50,000 per concert. However, if it’s a really special orchestra, our losses will go up dramatically. It’s quite a business.”

So you have a song you’ve written. So you hire pros to finish it up and record it. “The American Song-Poem Anthology: Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush” collects 28 mind-bendingly strange and very funny songs paid for by amateur lyricists and recorded by hard-up professional singers and musicians. ‘It’s the only scam I know of where each transaction is a unique work of art. Of course the work of art isn’t always great. These are vanity books set to music. But that’s what makes it so interesting. You have these very talented musicians working very rapidly to fulfill a quota of so many songs per hour, and sometimes the results transcend the limitations of the form’.”

Tour-only CDs are catching on with indie-label musicians and their fans. They’re ‘low-concept, short-production-run discs typically sold only at concerts and usually recorded live or in the artist’s home-studio. Tour discs might contain early versions of songs that will make it onto future label releases, unedited recordings of live shows, or a selection of what will ultimately turn out to be rareties. For musicians it’s a “chance to raise a little bit of extra cash while they’re out on the road, the opportunity to experiment musically in the presence of a friendly audience, or simply a way to provide music without worrying about whether it’s the best artistic or career move.”

Prokofiev’s legacy has been marred by contradictions. “He produced some of the sprightliest, most ingenious and most enduringly popular music of the 20th century. Yet Prokofiev’s career was also, in the brisk summation of music historian Francis Maes, ‘a succession of misjudgments,’ marked by flawed calculations on the artistic, personal and political fronts.”

What will it mean if the San Antonio Symphony goes out of business for lack of money? “A symphony orchestra is like the canary in the mine. If the bird stops singing, it’s a good bet the air isn’t safe for anybody to breathe. To be blunt, if the San Antonio Symphony goes silent, you’d be well advised to update your résumé. Appropriately valuing the symphony means rejecting the big lie — that’s what it is — that San Antonio is too poor and lowbrow to afford a luxury like a symphony orchestra. The issue isn’t money. The issue is values.”