Category: music

The San Antonio Symphony is out of money and says it won’t be able to pay musicians this week unless it raises $250,000 by Friday. “The 78-member orchestra was told during an emotional 10 a.m. meeting at the Majestic Theater that without private donations, paychecks won’t be issued Friday. The crisis could jeopardize future performances.”

The latest North American orchestra crisis appears to be heading for a flashpoint in south Texas, where the San Antonio Symphony board is preparing to make a presentation to its musicians today, laying out the cuts the board believes will be necessary to save the financially strapped ensemble. One board member insists that layoffs and payroll cuts are not on the table, but another is ominously quoted as saying, “I think there’s some people who feel, ‘Go ahead and let the symphony fail. It will come back as a smaller orchestra. San Antonio can’t afford this full-service orchestra.'”

A series of long-awaited and controversial payouts to musicians, composers, and music publishers has begun in Canada, using money generated by a tax on blank, recordable CDs. The tax was designed to provide a method for compensating music industry professionals for the effects of illegal music piracy. The payout began “right around the time the [industry] was appearing before the Canadian Copyright Board in Ottawa to ask for both significant increases in the levies it’s already been charging and an extension of the levy to computer hard drives, MP3 players, mobile phones and other media.”

Singing in choirs is the most popular performing arts activity in the U.S., according to a new study, with better than 28 million Americans (about 10% of the total population) singing in some sort of organized chorus. “The study found a link between early exposure to choral singing and adult participation in choruses. More than half of adult singers had grown up in a household that included a chorus member, and nearly 70 percent had first sung in elementary or middle school.”

San Francisco is losing its last club dedicated to jazz. Jazz at Pearl’s, home to local jazz musicians six nights a week for 13 years, has been unable to renew the lease and will shut its doors April 30. “People think this is a great cosmopolitan city. But it’s not. It used to be hip.”

Musicians of the Houston Symphony are pressing for a new contract and some serious changes in direction for the orchestra to put it on better financial ground. So Monday they voted to strike Sept. 1 if the orchestra is still playing under terms of the old contract that expired Oct. 5.

How hard can it be, playing music in the streets for money. Some of the pros say they can earn £100 in a day. So seven Guardian journalists take to London streets to see what they could earn playing music. For some it was a humbling experience. But for a features assistant who played harp…

Do symphonic music and politics mix? “To a great degree, the medium defeats itself. The sheer time, effort and expense required to compose, rehearse and perform a full-scale symphonic work militates against writing one as an immediate response to a specific political situation. Works assembled quickly to make a point tend to show it, and in the concert world ephemera — even well-meaning ephemera — slips into the mist moments after its premiere, taking its message with it.”

London’s English National Opera has had to start canceling performances after the company’s chorus voted to strike. Chrous members are protesting a plan to lay off a third of their number. “The savings they will make by making 20 choristers redundant for the current season will be as little as £120,000, because they will have to hire freelancers to make up the numbers. We do not believe that £120,000 is a make or break sum for an organisation that has an annual turnover of more than £30m.”

So how much does a hot new band earn from a hit recording? Let’s say this hypothetical hot band sells 500,000 albums at $16.98. That’s gross sales of $8,490,000. [Remember, of course, that this is a very hot band – only 128 of more than 30,000 records sold half a million recordings in 2002.] Well – after all the fees, commissions, fees, percentages, charges and expenses are deducted, the band comes home with $161,909 – split however many ways by band mambers. For a hit. Is this any way to run a business?