Category: music

Opera continues to stretch as an artform. How about a “not-so-underground music world that lives the boundary-less, non-hierarchical ethic of communal musicmaking, an ethic that some classical opera composers might hold up as an ideal but have rarely put into practice with any success. ‘Nitrate Hymnal’ is described by the Washington Performing Arts Society as multimedia, interactive, post-punk, hybrid and several other things as well, which adds up to: You have to see it to know what it’s about.”

The Chicago Symphony is looking for a new Chief Executive. “Desirable as it would be to land the top administrative post at one of the world’s great orchestras, the playing field of available candidates is surprisingly narrow. If you look at other major organizations like ours around the world, there just aren’t many people who really have the qualifications, experience and leadership abilities to do something like this.”

When the Colorado Springs Symphony filed for bankruptcy last week, Lawrence Leighton-Smith, the group’s music director, quit, as he had said he would. But the orchestra says it won’t accept his resignation, and that he is obligated to stay on by terms of his contract. Meanwhile, the orchestra has refused to distribute parts to its players for next weekend’s concerts while musicians have refused to sign a cost-cutting agreement. Kind of difficult to have a concert without music scores.

So far, recording companies’ main strategy to fight digital copying is to sue file trading companies and try to develop copy protection. But this is the wrong track. “In the past they have sold a physical product, like a CD. In the shift to an electronic, globalised world, why spend money putting digital information on a CD when almost everybody has access to these digital bits through broadband networks? The goal should not be to sell one million CDs but have one billion people download and pay one cent every time they listen.
What they would be better off doing is enticing the customer to become a loyal evangelist of their product rather than p—ing them off by cutting off their free product.”

Yeah, there are gloomy stories about symphony orchestras these days. But “as we enter this new age of musical anxiety, let’s not lose sight of the many signs of health in the orchestra world – the surprisingly widespread commitment to developing new repertoire, the sense of ownership listeners feel, the renewed awareness of the value of arts education. We’ve been down this road many times before: expansion, contraction, repeat. So let’s equip ourselves for the coming neurotic convulsions by shooting down some oft-recited but mistaken beliefs.”

“The extent to which musicians from a particular ethnicity involve themselves with Western producers and Western tastes has sometimes led to hysterical fear, fear in the musical realm akin to that of the anti-globalization forces in the political and economic realms. The fear is of the obliteration of the world’s indigenous peoples, languages, economic and political independence, culture and, yes, music. All that will remain will be a faceless, gray, corporate anonymity, McDonald’s meets Orwell in the land of synth-pop. Except, at least in music, it hasn’t worked that way at all.”

The British government says it is trying to simplify the process for allowing live music to be played in pubs. So why are musicians and club owners fighting the idea and saying it will result in fewer places where live music can be heard?

In response to a tighter economy, more and more opera companies are turing away from adventurous fare and returning to audience favorites. “You have to consider what the public wants, because they have every opportunity to choose not to go. This isn’t a court theater – this is populist entertainment. We’re trying to appeal to a broad general public.”

“I think we’re on the threshold of a renaissance in Prokofiev’s reputation. Five years after his death, there was a Prokofiev memorial evening at the Moscow Conservatory where they spoke of his work only in superlatives. After that, his reputation came to be overshadowed somewhat by that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Now it’s coming to be understood that Prokofiev and Shostakovich were equally important; that if Shostakovich was Michelangelo, Prokofiev was Leonardo da Vinci.”

So the Vienna Philharmonic has hired its first woman player. Britain has little to be smug about on this issue. “A random sample of five British symphony orchestras suggests that gender ratios vary wildly: the Hallé and the BBC Symphony may not do badly (the Hallé has 45 men and 38 women; the BBCSO 55 men, 37 women), but orchestras such as the London Philharmonic and Bournemouth Symphony trail, splitting at 52-23 and 45-26 respectively. And the London Symphony Orchestra, widely regarded as being the country’s most successful, has 77 male members to 22 female. When you start looking at how many women occupy principal positions within the sections, the disparity looks even greater.”