Category: music

So now the music industry is going to go after people who download big quantities of music. “The RIAA says somewhere out there is a person who downloaded 600 songs in a single day. That’s about 40 full CDs, retail value: $720. He or she is the one the RIAA is looking for – to make an example of them and put fans on notice that downloading is a prosecutable crime. The day of reckoning nears. Consumers must face the fact that they can’t get music for free forever. And the industry needs to understand that it never would have lost all those customers in the first place had it not been so consumed with greed.”

“Many acousticians agree that the safest way to ensure a good sound environment for orchestral music is to emulate the old, aristocratically modeled halls of 18th and 19th century Europe: a shoebox shape, with a proscenium arch and a horseshoe of ornate boxes to diffuse the sound. The current wave of concert halls, though, favors a ‘vineyard’ style, featuring terraced seats rising above the stage and arrayed around its flanks and rear. This arrangement is acoustically risky (though it has also produced wonderful results in the Philharmonie in Berlin), but socially desirable. It blurs visual borders between different sections of the house and brings each seat much closer to the stage than is possible in a traditional ‘shoebox,’ thereby creating a feeling of intimacy even in a very big room.”

While the Calgary Philharmonic is languishing, the Calgary Opera is blazing away, ready to stage a $1.3 million production of new original opera. “The opera is set in southwestern Alberta during Prohibition and is based on the true story of an Italian immigrant who becomes entangled in bootlegging and murder. The woman was eventually hanged in 1923. The music and English libretto are by Calgarians John Estacio and John Murrell, respectively.”

Under plans submitted this week to the Arts Council, the English National Opera would see the company shrink dramatically. “Under the proposal, the chorus would be cut by a third to 40 members, the orchestra by some 20 musicians, and production and administrative staff by 70. Big productions would rely on freelancers.”

Houston Symphony management says an agreement on a contract with the orchestra’s musicians can’t happen without wage cuts. “The symphony has a near-term financial crisis and a longer-term structural problem of recurring deficits. The society is projecting a deficit of $2.3 million on a $23 million budget, with orchestra costs making up about 50 percent of the budget, management said.”

“Ask the man on the street to define opera and you’re likely to get adjectives like grand, foreign, expensive. Ask a New York opera patron about opera beyond the Metropolitan and City Operas, and you might get a mention of the Amato Opera, the stalwart 107-seat theater on the Bowery that’s been putting on tiny productions of classic operas since 1948. But none of these quite covers the broad spectrum of indie opera companies that produce fully staged opera around New York City in living rooms, church basements and city parks.”

“Leaders of the Orange County Performing Arts Center [outside Los Angeles] are mulling large-scale borrowing, in the form of a bond issue, as a way to ensure completion of a $200-million concert hall in time for its scheduled opening in the fall of 2006. Fund-raising has been stalled at about $100 million for more than a year, but… bond issues often have been used by other nonprofit arts organizations, and incurring debt has been in OCPAC’s playbook of potential financing maneuvers since its capital campaign began in 1999.”

“Hungary’s National Library recovered Wednesday 39 original opera librettos from operas of the 18th-century Austrian composer Joseph Haydn that were believed to have been destroyed during World War II, officials said. Curators working for the government had bought the librettos from an antiquarian who had bought them from a private individual… Curators working for the ministry of national cultural heritage formally handed them over to the library where they will be ‘under lock and seal’ until they are digitally reproduced for research work.”

The musicians of the Houston Symphony have filed an official complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing their management of bargaining in bad faith, and of planning to impose new working conditions on the musicians by declaring an impasse a few weeks from now. The management wants to slash salaries and eliminate five string players outright in an effort to deal with years of financial problems, but the musicians insist that they should not be forced to bear the burden of management’s past mistakes. For a start, they’d like a look at the orchestra’s financial records, but so far, orchestra executives have refused to open the books.

Sales of CDs in Australia were down 5.5 percent last year. The Australian Record Industry Association “blamed several factors, including online and offline piracy, increased interest in DVDs and computer games, and tough economic conditions. The newest threat was backyard piracy, in which thousands of CDs were manufactured on home computers.”