Category: music

It used to be that music followed some sort of stylistic order of the day. Listeners might not agree with it, but at least there was some sort of guiding aesthetic at work. Today, there’s no sense of direction. “A decade of hard listening has produced little evidence of a shared culture, let alone a common trajectory. What is disorienting is the smorgasbord of opposites – past and future, tonal and atonal, control and freedom – that these and other contemporary works collectively represent.”

A group of Microsoft software engineers has concluded that digital anti-piracy measures are ultimately futile. They presented a paper this weekend that states that “the steady spread of file-swapping systems and improvements in their organisation will eventually make them impossible to shut down. They also conclude that the gradual spread of CD and DVD burners will help thwart any attempts to control what the public can do with the music they buy.”

Metropolitan Opera fan John Patterson started a website called Metmaniac.com to “celebrate and annotate nearly 70 years of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. It featured nearly complete lists of broadcasts from the 1930s to the present, but the lists were not linked to anything. It also provided a message board for opera lovers to discuss shows and buy, sell and trade tickets.” But last week, the Met sent Patterson a cease-and-desist order, which shut the site down. The company claims “the name MetManiac and the contents of the site violated their trademarks and copyrights.”

The UK’s Classic FM plans to launch a 24-hour classical music video channel. “The channel, to be launched towards the end of next month, will feature wall-to-wall video clips of prominent classical music artists and movie soundtracks. Unlike other culture-oriented TV channels, there will be no documentaries or concerts. ‘The manner and style we are adopting is of pop music TV’.”

At 80 years old, composer Lukas Foss still commutes weekly from New York to Boston to teach. “Twenty years ago we had this club, the avant garde, and that’s no longer really very functional. Now any style is OK. There was a time when you had to be a `12-tone’ composer to be considered Now that’s not the case. Minimal, aleatoric, 12-tone, these are all just techniques.”

A new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger has sparked angry boos. The staging, by one of Germany’s most progressive directors, includes an “on-stage disruption that breaks the score at a crucial moment and leads to an additional scene of dialogue.” At one point, “the music grinds to a halt, and the cast start a debate on what constitutes ‘German and genuine’. If you are a Wagnerite, this is blasphemy.”

A new medical study reports that “the same neural clusters that process the seductive pleasures of sex, chocolate and even hard drugs also fire up for music. There is also persuasive evidence that the brain tends to prune these neural circuits for maximum pleasure the way a gardener cuts unproductive branches to make a rose bush bloom. Music, it seems, may make the brain bloom best because it literally electrifies, at lightning speed, a web of nerve paths in both hemispheres of our cerebral cortex that connect the neural clusters processing musical pitch, rhythm, harmony, melody, short term memory, long term memory, and emotions.”

CD sales are down because of pirating? Oh really? Maybe the downdraft is because most of the pop music out there isn’t very good. “There was a time when the release of an album was an event, and you got a lovingly prepared, carefully compiled collection of songs that contained only a couple of instances of the drummer being given his head.” Nowadays? Oh puh-lease!

A newly immigrated music professor only a few weeks on the job in Israel, finds an important manuscript of Mahler’s First Symphony. It’s not the final version that made it into print, but it reveals much about the composer’s thinking process in composing the work.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is a firmly establisheed orchestra, but its move into the new Gehry-designed Disney Hall next season will transform its existence. “Overall in 2003-04, the Philharmonic will present almost 50% more programming than in the past. It plans nine world premieres, a season record for the orchestra. It will present two major international orchestras, and a stellar lineup of guest conductors including Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnányi, Valery Gergiev and Charles Dutoit. It will unveil five new music series from Baroque concerts to jazz and world music programs, and launch partnerships with such organizations as CalArts, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Getty Research Institute.” And oh, want to get in on opening ceremonies? It’ll cost you as much as $5,000.