Category: music

“The venerable tradition of American protest music still generates heat on the rally circuit, as Dylan’s constant reinvocation proves. Still, political music is marked by the same tension that always feeds pop music: the desire to connect to a legacy versus the impulse to try something new. The activist songbook includes major contributions from punk and hip-hop as well as folk-rock. Benefit concerts and albums have become part of the star-making machinery.”

The 7-year-old New West Symphony, which calls an LA suburb home, has an unusual problem – one fanned by its success. The orchestra has a budget of $2 million, and has run every year in the black. Its musicians are part-timers, professionals who for the most part make their livings playing in LA’s recording studios. The problem? If the orchestra gets bigger, it’ll lose its part-timers, and the quality of the players might decline. And yet, there is pressure to grow…

Los Angeles’ dramatic new Disney Hall, scheduled to open next October, is opening in a flurry of gala fundraising benefits expected to earn $3 million for the LA Philharmonic. “On the first night they’ll hear the tried-and-true classics. On the second, the new music of the 21st century. And on the third, we’ll honor the European composers who fled Nazi Germany to come to Hollywood and were hired by the film industry.”

San Francisco’s Davies Hall is “tuned” for every performance. The computer-controlled acoustical canopy that dangles over the stage looks like some huge constructivist sculpture and reflects sound back to the musicians and out to the audience. It’s composed of 59 slightly bowed 6-foot squares of Plexiglas – they collectively cover 3,400 square feet – whose height and angle are adjusted according to the size of the ensemble or to the piece being performed.”

For years, Miami’s Latin music scene was a one-man show. No longer. As Latin music has increasingly penetrated the mainstream US, a new generation of producers is wielding power.

A British TV show called “Faking It” picked a punk rocker out of a pub and spent four weeks teaching him how to conduct a symphony orchestra – the Royal Philharmonic. “His first hurdle was learning to read music: ‘I didn’t do that well at school. So at first I just saw little black dots. The experts said, ‘There’s no right way to conduct but there’s a wrong way.’ I found it incredibly confusing.”

The controversial renovation of La Scala Opera House has been further complicated by news that water under the theatre has risen 80 centimeters. “The proposed new stage tower will require foundations at least 18 metres deep, so the lowest four metres of the structure will be under water.”

Owners of a 1718 Stradivarius violin have loaned it to the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But only for two-and-a-half weeks. Then it’s back to the vault in which it lives. Why? The instrument is for sale, and it’s good publicity to get it played. But the instruments are so expensive – this one valued at about $3 million – that very few musicians could ever afford to play, let alone own one.

Make classical music “relevant”? “Hip”? “Glamorous”? The new Classic FM TV packages classical music into three-minute MTV-style videos, but far from making it attractive, it succeeds in “creating bland ‘easy listening’ versions that are impossible for any serious musician to listen to.”

A long lost blues opera by Lanston Hughes and James P. Johnson performed only three times in 1940 has been reconstructed and performed. “The music is a combination of jazz, swing, blues and ragtime, all set within a classical structure. At various points it recalls the work of Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin and Dvorak. Some of the numbers set spectators to tapping their fingers and toes in rhythm.”