Category: music

“Over a million Americans have already taken to the streets to protest President Bush’s insane war on Iraq, so there’s clearly an audience for musical dissent. It’s not like there’s a lack of other pressing issues to write about, either, with our civil liberties getting rolled back in the name of preserving freedom, and Bush and John Ashcroft attempting to return America to the God-fearing values of the ’50s — the 1650s, that is.”

Soprano Sumi Jo’s reviews in Opera Australia’s “Lucia” were good. She seemed happy, according to her New York agent. So why did she suddenly bolt from Australia before her final performance, without even telling the opera company’s management? “The hotel staff told us about a change in her reservation; that’s the first we heard of it. She didn’t let us or her personal management know, but we gather she left for Rome on doctor’s orders.”

One of the world’s best clarinet factories went up in flames this week. “The dawn blaze at the Leblanc factory in La Couture Boussey, in the Normandy region of France, incinerated 1,400 clarinets, along with the entire stock of spare clarinet fingering keys. The French factory, which has 37 employees, was founded under the name Ets. D. Noblet in 1750 when the flourishing of instrumental music at the court of King Louis XV created a demand for musical instruments.”

Downloading songs from pay services over the internet generally costs 99 cents or more. But though the sites have licenses to sell the music, and a way to get it to customers, there have been too few customers so far. So one of the services is slashing its prices to 49 centers per track. That’s below cost, says the company – but you’ve got to get the customers somehow. Look for increasing competition in the next few months as more companies try to compete.

“Why is starry-eyed romance so tied to music? Nothing touches people like a good love song. The love theme has been around from the birth of music in general. ‘It’s a timeless kind of a medium. It runs the gamut of emotion. There’s always a little sadness hidden in a love song because it reminds people of something that might not last’. The most-recorded song of all time, after all, is the lovelorn ode, ‘Yesterday,’ by Paul McCartney, reports the Guinness Book of World Records.”

Just in time for Valentine’s Day – What are the top ten most romantic albums ever recorded? The Telegraph’s pop music critics have their say… (Roberta Flack? Really?)

While London’s Royal Opera House seems to have steadied itself, The English National Opera is going in the other direction. Norman Lebrecht reports that dismay greeted ENO’s choice of a new director last week. “The most dispiriting aspect of his appointment is its wilful myopia. Nothing about him inspires faith that Sean Doran will do better than any of the bathroom warblers who are lining up to try for an ENO role in Channel Four’s gimmicky Operatunity contest. The idiocy of promoting an untested candidate from a provincial Australian ensemble was amply demonstrated by the fate of Ross Stretton at the ROH.”

The Annapolis (Maryland) City Council is considering a resolution which would chastise the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra for its dismissal last fall of music director Leslie Dunner. The firing made waves among musicians in the ASO, and the orchestra management never made public the reason behind it, leading to no small amount of speculation in the community. The issue that bothers the city council is that Dunner is black, and while no one is overtly crying racism, a number of councilors are hinting at it, much to the ASO’s dismay.

It’s so basic, you wonder why no one thought of it earlier. The recording industry has unveiled a system it says will make it easier for artists and record companies to be compensated for digital music purchased online. The system is called GRid (Global Release Identifier,) and it works much like a UPC code attached to each song, allowing the seller to track songs sold. All sides seem to be guardedly optimistic about the system, although privacy advocates worry that the GRid could be used to pursue consumers who buy a tagged song and then allow it to be traded on a song-swapping site.

Why does music at sports stadiums all sound the same wherever you go? “Turns out that the folks who make decisions about stadium music are less interested in crafting a unique, venue-specific soundscape than in giving the people what they want—and they are not too proud to steal. If fans in Sports Market A love a given song, you can bet that it’ll soon be pumping out of speakers in Sports Markets B, C, D, etc. Forget about regional music. These days, stadium music functions pretty much like mainstream radio—a combination of lowest common denominator hits and reliable standards, all played to death until they seem inescapable.”