Category: music

There was a time that the Philadelphia Orchestra dominated classical recording. Not anymore. Even projects that seem like naturals for the orchestra are going elsewhere. It’s not that recording companies are going out of their way to exclude the orchestra, writes David Patrick Stearns. But maybe the orchestra hasn’t made a strong enough case for itself as a candidate to record…

While small North American orchestras seem to be shutting down left and right foir lack of funds, the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland has come into something of a public windfall. The ensemble, which has been struggling financially, will receive a £1.69 million grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to help in its efforts to secure more reliable “core funding.” The grant is a 26% increase on what the orchestra had previously received from the council.

“The truth is that digital distribution is bad for artists for the same reason that it is bad for record companies (and good for fans): it makes too much music available. As content becomes increasingly ubiquitous, it loses value; just look at how few print publications are able to charge successfully for their online counterparts. While there are certainly some people who are willing to pay for digital music, few of them appear to be willing to pay that much for it.”

The way that we go to the opera, the theatre and the concert has hardly changed for centuries. The great majority of such attendance takes place in venues conceived on the model of churches. The performers do their thing at one end. We, the audience, sit silently in rows in the rest of the building and look at them doing it. This can be a difficult and even intimidating experience for those who are not used to it, especially in badly designed or unsuitable spaces. But you have only to attend a performance in a different kind of venue to see at once the possibilities for addressing the access problem in a different way.” The London Symphony has a new venue. “It is not just a huge step forward for this most dynamic of Britain’s orchestras, consolidating the LSO’s role in the vanguard of orchestral music in London. It is also a step down a path that other performing arts organisations of all kinds will surely have to follow eventually – if they have the funding – of changing the terms on which orchestras meet their audiences.”

The 49-year-old Savannah Symphony, stuck with a $1.3 million deficit, has canceled the rest of its season. “I think the community has spoken. Savannah residents desire a symphony orchestra, I think, but there’s been too much history with this organization as it stands today. The community sent us signals that [an orchestra] should start again with a new slate.”

The popular early-music group Anonymous 4 have decided to pack it in after 17 years. “Since forming in 1986 in New York ‘as an experiment’ in response to the lack of opportunities for woman to sing early music repertoire, the group have gone on to achieve great commercial success, clocking up nearly 1000 concerts internationally and selling over 1 million discs.”

Almost all popular music uses some form of electronic instrumentation. Not in classical music though. “The future of innovation in music seems almost surely to be in digitally created music whose origin is either purely electronic or in imitation of acoustical sounds, “rather than string instruments growing extra strings or things like that.”

Robert Craft’s relationship with Stravinsky draws fresh attention with the publication of a new Craft volume. Though the composer has been dead 30 years, the Craft continues to write of his friend, reviving old debates about where the composer ends and Craft begins…”The final Jamesian irony is that Robert Craft is able to write supremely well only as a ventriloquist, requiring no less than an authentic genius for his dummy.”

Did you buy a CD between 1995 and 2000? Even one? “As part of a settlement in a huge price-fixing lawsuit, the major labels and a few record retailers are bankrolling a $67.4 million fund, to be split among all the people who bought an album between 1995 and 2000. Exactly how much money will be determined by the number of people who send in applications. So far, 2.8 million claimants across the country have signed up. At that rate, less administrative costs, everyone gets about $16 or $17 apiece.” But time is running out…

Prokofiev was unquestionably one of the great composers of the 20th Century. But “there is something profoundly suspect about Western attitudes to this composer. Instead of subjecting him to continuous critical assessment, we repeat favourite works and shun the rest. Prokofiev makes us uneasy in ways that Ravel does not. He reminds us of things we would prefer to forget – first and foremost of our obeisance to Stalin. Yes, ours, not his.”