Category: music

The US Congress has declared 2003 the “Year of the Blues.” “If hip-hop is ‘the black CNN,’ as Chuck D. famously suggested, blues music was a running news bulletin from the earliest days of radio. The blues, as the Congress noted, have documented the Great Depression, ‘race relations, pop culture and the migration of the United States from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrialized nation’.”

Melbourne’s Vintage Sound Association is into old recordings. Not CD’s. Nopt even LP’s. “The club, which has 20 members, meets once a month at the South Camberwell Tennis Club to play their old music on their old machines. Some use cylinders, which, before records, were the original sound source. Later examples, the gramophones, often feature the big conical horns, which in the vintage era acted as speakers. Some units have two horns as an early example of ‘stereo’.”

Think you know “Silent Night? You don’t know the “real” “Silent Night.” “The modern version comprises only the first two and the last of six original verses.” And there has been a minor musical revision. Now “the Silent Night Association, an Austrian-based appreciation society, has now released a CD containing all the words, sung in 15 languages, in time for Christmas. The music differs subtly in two bars but the change is barely noticeable.”

Rome’s first new concert hall in 70 years opens. “Designed by Genoese architect Renzo Piano, who also worked on the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the three concert halls, open-air arena and recording studios in 20 acres of parkland replace the city’s previous auditorium, the Augusteo, destroyed by dictator Benito Mussolini in 1934.”

Why do people constantly dump on classical music? Justin Davidson writes that “those who are most passionate about the art are also people with a strong allegiance to the past – often stronger, in fact, than their affection for the present. Connoisseurs believe in a golden age, when composers really knew how to write, performers knew how to play and music lovers knew how to listen. To members of this cult of bygones, John Adams is a puny figure hopping alongside the colossus of Beethoven, and the violinist Maxim Vengerov a flickering shade in the brilliance of Nathan Milstein. The present is degraded precisely because it can never be the past.”

World Music is hot. Yet the genre is so broad, defining it leads to all sorts of disagreements. “Such acute diversity can be bewildering. If you’ve ever thought that the term ‘world music’ is one of convenience, you are right. It was, according to Radio 3’s most sturdily-accented presenter, Andy Kershaw, coined by ‘six independent record companies in a room above a pub in Islington in 1986’.”

What is it about some songs that makes them stick in your head? And why is it that those songs tend to be the worst kind of songs, those awful songs you’d never ever admit you liked…

Those giant arena-size rock concerts – did they ever make sense? Now they seem like dinosaurs from another age. “One pictures thousands of minions working in warehouses on computer run sets, and one wonders why. The technology involved is both mind boggling and useless – unless some other use can be found for giant human gerbil-balls, in much the same manner that cell phones came of astronautry. Arena rock seems cheesy now even at its best, but one reason for the obsolescence is simply that it outpriced itself.”

“American composers have long maintained an impersonal veneer.” For much of the 20th Century they oozed technique – lots of grey matter spilled all over the pages of their scores. But “with compositional masks falling in recent years, there comes a crisis of style: What’s the musical language of the 21st-century heart?”