Category: music

“If the United Nations ever decided to put on a jazz festival, it might look something like the gloriously multicultural, border-defying event that shook this island for the past week.”

Why are audiences staying away from big-name orchestra performances in Edinburgh? Oh, the annual festival is popular, but the rest of the year, first-rate orchestras play before half-empty halls…

Many an otherwise good opera has been ruined by a dreadful libretto. “Why do composers ever assume that they can write their own words? There’s nothing which makes the heart sink, going into an opera, like the words ‘Music and libretto by …’ Very few good operas have ever been written to a composer’s own words…”

A new study measures the physical effect of studying music on the brain. “Among expert musicians, certain areas of the cortex are up to 5% larger than in people with little or no musical training, recent research shows. In musicians who started their training in early childhood, the neural bridge that links the brain’s hemispheres, called the corpus callosum, is up to 15% larger. A professional musician’s auditory cortex — the part of the brain associated with hearing — contains 130% more gray matter than that of non-musicians.”

Composers had always known that some keys and combinations of notes can manipulate an audience. But now researchers are actively studying how that manipulation works. Take the key of a piece of music, for example. “One chunk of the brain was responding when the melody was in G major or E minor and another part of the circuit was responding when it was in E major.”

The most-recorded song of all-time? The biggest-selling? That would be Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” “It has been recorded in Dutch, Yiddish, Japanese and – perhaps most surreal of all – Swahili. Its sales have topped 125 million worldwide and its place as the all-time top single has been challenged only once, not by the Beatles, not by Presley nor Sinatra, but by Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind 97’ tribute to Princess Diana.”

People ar still buying music. But sales are down this year. “Buyers have snatched up 597.4 million albums this year, compared with 669.7 million in the same period in 2001. The 11% drop follows last year’s dip of 2.5%, the first no-growth year since Nielsen SoundScan began tabulating sales data in 1991. After enjoying a decade of climbing sales, retailers were alarmed by the 2001 decrease and hoped the drop was temporary fallout from 9/11 and a weakening economy. Today they’d welcome such a benign stumble over this year’s sizable plunge, which can’t be dismissed as a fluke. The culprit?”

One year after Philadelphia’s dramatic new Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts made its debut, the jury is still out on whether it’s a success. On the plus side, attendance is generally good, and acoustic improvements are being gradually made. On the other hand, the acoustics are hardly what they should be, there are cosmetic problems everywhere, public access is much more limited than promised, and who could forget the sprinkler-system malfunction which doused the Philadelphia Orchestra with dirty water two weeks ago?

If there are two undeniable truths in the world of opera, they are: 1) Audiences can never get enough Puccini; and 2) Musicologists have had just about enough of him. Even as scholars began to (finally) embrace other Italian opera composers like Verdi and Donizetti a few decades back, Puccini was left behind, an afterthought in the study of “serious” opera. Now, a new study of the man and his work may finally drag the musicological community into line with the people who pack opera houses for the latest production of Tosca.

Next week, England’s ClassicFM, the station that proved that classical music can still draw huge listenership, launches a TV channel devoted to classical music videos. And while the channel is sure to draw fire for its reliance on short, lightweight works, the simple fact is that ClassicFM is the only current model for successful marketing of classical music on-air. So it probably wouldn’t hurt to trust them.