Category: music

Jazz aficionados bow to no one in their ability to turn rapidly snobbish when confronted with a corner of the jazz world which does not square with their own vision of the genre. The infighting has reared its head in Toronto this month, with the International Association for Jazz Education holding its annual conference there. Upset at being shut out of the conference, a consortium of some of the city’s more innovative (read: non-mainstream) jazz musicians have organized their own gathering. That’s all well and good, says Carl Wilson, but the rhetoric coming out of the alternative gathering is a bit over the line. “We’re against music teachers now?”

The tension is continuing to build at the Colorado Springs Symphony, where the musicians have labeled their management’s talk of a bankruptcy filing as “blackmail,” and the music director has threatened to resign if Chapter 11 becomes reality. None of the involved parties denies that the CSS is in real fiscal trouble, but it’s a matter of perception: orchestra execs contend they are doing their best in a bad economy, while the musicians claim that management created the problem and is now trying to avoid culpability.

It has been a year since Canadian tenor Ben Heppner shocked a Toronto audience by cracking several notes and then calling a halt to his recital mid-aria. Heppner, long considered the most talented operatic tenor in a generation, has spent the last 12 months struggling to find out what it was that caused his voice to suddenly abandon him. He’s cagey about specifics, but the answer appears to have been found in the side effects from a medication he was taking. He is scheduled to return to New York’s Metropolitan Opera next month.

“A quarter century after its founding in New York’s South Bronx, the culture of beats, rhymes, and life is finding new devotees in classrooms, conferences, and faculty meetings coast-to-coast. Berkeley, Stanford, Michigan, Yale, Harvard, New York University, and M.I.T. have each boasted courses examining some aspect of the culture, while the prestigious annual American Studies and Modern Language Association conferences have featured similar panels. Some snicker that as long as Princeton theologian Cornel West doesn’t record a follow-up to his 2001 album, Sketches of My Culture, the academy will continue unfettered in its engagement of the global, billion-dollar culture.”

Deficits? What deficits? As most American orchestras are scrambling for the funds to cover their basic costs, the Boston Symphony Orchestra is unveiling a project which will see the complete overhaul and restoration of one of the country’s great organs, located at the BSO’s Symphony Hall. The restoration will cost $3 million (the cost includes a special endowment which will take care of furture maintenance) and should be complete in time for new music director James Levine’s debut with the orchestra in 2004.

In Canada blank CDs carry a 21 cent tax “collected from technology companies to reimburse the music industry for losses incurred by music copying and swapping.” Now the industry wants to increase the fee to 59 cents. There are also proposals to slap a fee on devices which record media. But there is growing opposition – “Since 1999, the CPCC has collected more than CN$28 million in copyright compensation fees. It expects to collect more than CN$100 million in levies next year.” And yet, critics point out that the music industry hasn’t paid a penny to musicians…

Yet another small North American orchestra is on the verge of bankruptcy. The Colorado Springs Symphony says it needs $217,000 to survive more than another week, and is demanding steep pay cuts from its musicians, who already earn less than $13,000 per year. The musicians, for their part, claim that orchestra management has been grossly incompetent in running the organization, and accuse the board president, whose resignation they demanded in September, of trying to turn the CSS into a “pro-am community group.”

More and more music fans seem reluctant to go to the record store, let alone to concerts, if CD and concert ticket sales are any indication. “CD sales fell last year by almost 11 per cent in the United States and about 6 per cent in Australia as Internet users continued to swap songs for free. Concert sales were also down except among baby boomers who thought nothing of paying high prices to see dinosaur acts.”

The recording industry is acknowledging that, despite its costly and protracted legal crusade to rid the world of audio and video piracy, there will always be music available illegally somewhere online. And in what appears to be a bit of a policy shift, the RIAA’s president is saying that “Our aim is not to completely eliminate music piracy or illegal peer-to-peer services altogether.” But none of this means that file-sharing sites will see any short-term relief from the legal beating they’ve been taking.

Patrons of the Vienna State Opera are getting increasingly unruly. “Police have had to step in after arguments over stolen seats exploded into fisticuffs. Other causes of conflict include bouffant hair styles that block people’s views and ringing mobile phones. A police spokesman told the Kurier newspaper: ‘It is becoming increasingly brutal. In the past few months we have had to intervene more and more. Before Christmas it was particularly bad’.”