Category: music

Monday April 30

A COPYRIGHT STATE OF MIND: When the New York Times Magazine put together a time capsule to show people in the year 3000 what life in 2000 was like, they natually wanted to include music. But there isn’t any music in the capsule. Why? The recording industry wouldn’t give copyright permission. Wired 04/30/01

UNEASY RELATIONSHIPS: “Even orchestras which commission one new piece per season or less love to trumpet their supposed forward-thinking ways, in the vague hope that such brief bursts of enthusiasm will make up for nearly a century of deep ambivalence towards modern composition.” But the relationships between composers, conductors and musicians is often uneasy or ambivalent. Sequenza/21 04/27/01

GETTING OUT THE AUDIENCE: There was a time when tickets to Hartford’s visiting orchestra series were so prized they were handed down from generation to generation. Lately that hasn’t been the case, and even when the acclaimed Concertgbegouw Orchestra recently appeared, it filled only about a third of the house. Now a music lover has decided to do something very personal about the situation. Hartford Courant 04/29/01

CHANGING CELLIST: The storied Guarneri String Quartet makes its first change in personnel (after 37 years) next week when cellist David Soyer steps aside and Peter Wiley joins the group. Gramophone 04/27/01

HAPPY IT UP: Director Franco Zefirelli is making a movie bio of Maria Callas. But he doesn’t like the way she died. So he’s rewriting her untimely end to make it happier. Nando Times (AP) 04/29/01

Sunday April 29

CLASSICAL MUSIC’S PROBLEM? “Mainstream music lovers are said to be indifferent or openly hostile to contemporary music. As long as classical music is perceived to be in the preservation business, it should come as no surprise that potential new audiences, who are instinctively drawn to new works in other fields, dismiss classical music as dated and irrelevant.” The New York Times 04/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday April 27

TOO SEXY FOR MY MUSIC… At the British Classical Brit awards, a controversy about sexing up classical music to sell it. Should the girl group Bond, with their skimpy clothes and popped-up music be part of the show? More traditional musicians object. The Independent (UK) 04/27/01

PRICES ON DEMAND: Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall experiments with price/demand tickets. If a concert is selling well, the price of a ticket goes up. “When tickets first went on sale for an Oscar Peterson concert, the best seat in the house was selling for $125. Because tickets have been selling well, that price has gone up to $150.” CBC 04/26/01

(NEW) LIFE BEGINS AT 90? Composer Elliott Carter is still going strong at the age of 92. “Even now Carter’s stature is more thoroughly appreciated in Europe than it is in his native US, where he has always been regarded with some suspicion. His music has always demanded concentration and never provided easy, ephemeral rewards.” The Guardian (UK) 04/27/01

MISSING TRIO: The classical music world has lost three important figures in the past few weeks – conductors Giuseppe Sinopoli and Peter Maag, and educator/composer Robert Starer. Boston Globe 04/27/01

Thursday April 26

DSO SUBSCRIBERS INCREASE: Auto sales may be down in Detroit, but the Detroit Symphony is having a record-breaking year for subscription tickets. In fact, it’s the third year in a row that DSO subscription sales have set a record. “If we can get someone to attend once a month, that person is really involved. We’re a part of their life, and they’re very likely to stay with us.” The Detroit News 04/25/01

PASTORAL IMAGES IN CONCERT: This year, for the first time, an American – Leonard Slatkin – will conduct the Last Night of the BBC Proms. There’s an unplanned irony to the Proms season this year: The theme is pastoral, in celebration of the countryside. It was chosen before the current hoof-and-mouth crisis hit the island. BBC 04/26/01

MUSIC OR NOISE? YOUR BRAIN KNOWS: The same part of your brain that distinguishes between logical sentences and nonsense also can identify a false chord sequence – even if you have no musical training. “It raises the possibility that language and musical ability appeared at the same time in human evolution.” New Scientist 04/23/01

EXUBERANCE AND DISCIPLINE: The once-stale The London Symphony Orchestra has become London’s most secure musical organization. How do they do it? Their urbane conductor, Sir Colin Davis, says “We want to show what we are, a group of virtuoso musicians who get audiences involved by our own enjoyment of the music.” The New York Times 04/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

BIG BAD INDUSTRY: Recording companies are suing again. “By threatening to take a group of academics to court as violators of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they publish a research paper on computer security, the industry has not only re-enforced its public image as a bully, it has enhanced the mythic perception of that law as the weapon of choice for media corporations trying to keeping the public in line.” Inside.com 04/25/01

Wednesday April 25

BATON DEATH MARCH: When Giuseppe Sinopoli suffered a heart attack on the podium this week in Berlin, and subsequently died, he became the latest in a long line of famous conductors to have expired while waving the stick. Why does this happen to the maestros? Apparently, as a breed, they just don’t take care of themselves. The Daily Telegraph (London) 04/25/01

MERGER MUDDLE: The proposed merger between the EMI and Bertelsmann music companies is close to collapse. Once considered a done deal, the merger ran into trouble when the companies began trying to figure out a way to actually make money from the joining. BBC 04/25/01

NAPSTER BEATING: The courts may have ruled against Napster, but college students are still finding ways to get music files. And colleges are having difficulty coping with the high bandwidth music file trading is demanding of their servers. Chronicle of Higher Education 04/23/01

THE NEW TENOR: José Cura is the next Placido Domingo, and if you don’t believe it, just ask him. The feisty and self-promoting Argentine has been building his reputation for years, and now, as the Three Tenors start to fade from public view, Cura is more than ready to assume the mantle of the new operatic superstar. National Post (Canada) 04/25/01

Tuesday April 24

PAGING TIPPER GORE: A new report to be issued today by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is expected to savage the music industry for its failure to curb the marketing of ultra-violent culture to children. The report notes that the film and video game industries have taken steps to alleviate the problem, and the FTC wants the major record labels to do the same. BBC 04/24/01

PLAYING WITH BACH: Some classical music purists object to director Peter Sellars’ stagings of a couple of Bach cantatas. But maybe experiments such as these are exactly what are needed to reinvigorate the art form. New Statesman 04/22/01

DEATH OF AN ORCHESTRA: Philharmonia Hungarica, an orchestra founded in Germany by Hungarian refugees, has disbanded after more than forty years. The ensemble was renowned for its complete recording of Haydn symphonies in the 1970s, but fell on hard times earlier this year when the state support it had relied on was withdrawn. Andante 04/24/01

REDEFINING “CUTTING EDGE”: When John Corigliano won the Pulitzer Prize for his “Symphony No. 2” last week, a number of questions were raised about the piece, the composer, and the state of composition. The winning work is a rewrite of an earlier work, which apparently did not merit any similar recognition. The composer has been accused of playing to audiences while ignoring “serious” musical convention. But what good is convention if no one wants to hear it? Philadelphia Inquirer 04/24/01

YEAH, BUT CAN THEY PLAY “DON JUAN”? Richard Lair is the conductor of the world’s first and (one hopes) only orchestra made up entirely of elephants. They have a new CD. It is getting good reviews. Seriously. Philadelphia Inquirer 04/23/01

Monday April 23

THINGS GO BETTER WITH COKE? Opera Australia wanted to cash in on some sponsorship dollars for its production of Donizetti’s Elixir of Love. So it decided some strategic product placement was in order – Coke became the “elixir” of the title. No big bucks were forthcoming, though. The Age (Melbourne) 04/23/01

RESPONSIBILITY OF THE NEW: What do orchestras owe to audiences when they present new music? New music often requires repeated hearings before it can be appreciated. Should performers expect audiences to put in that work? Sequenza/21 04/18/01

NOT KIDS PLAY: Children’s performers may be big with their fans. But sustaining a career doing kids fare is a tiring struggle. The New York Times 04/23/01 (one-time registration required)

THE DANGERS OF STARTING ON TOP: Child prodigies are a staple of music; they are also one of its biggest mysteries. The late Yehudi Menuhin, for instance, dazzled the world as a teen-ager 70 years ago; he then spent the rest of his life being compared – often unfavorably – to his younger self. (RealAudio commentary, requires free RealAudio player.) NPR 04/18/01

RETHINKING GERSHWIN’S BIG ‘FAILURE‘: “It’s about black people so whites won’t see it, it’s written by whites so blacks won’t see it, and it’s opera, so nobody will see it.” The Opera Company of Philadelphia mounts a production of Porgy and Bess which tries to overcome that clichéd analysis. Philadelphia Inquirer 04/22/01

Sunday April 22

SINOPOLI DIES: Italian conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli died after suffering a heart attack and collapsing on stage during a performance of Verdi’s Aida at Berlin’s prestigious Deutsche Oper opera house. He was 54. USAToday (AP) 04/21/01

THE INDUSTRY LIVES: If classical music is dying, the final spasms sure are taking a long time to subside. Despite the unending parade of doomsayers, New York has an almost-embarrassing wealth of concert experiences to choose from. The past year alone has seen a constant procession of classical superstars that would put most of Europe’s cultural capitals to shame. The New York Times 04/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

ARTS-GRANT-IN-RESIDENCE? Nowadays almost every orchestra runs some sort of composer-in-residence program. But are such programs really useful to composers, or are they about getting money from arts councils? The Guardian (UK) 04/21/01

EL PASO STRIKES: Players of the El Paso (Texas) Symphony are on strike. It’s the first musicians’ strike in the orchestra’s 70 year history. El Paso Times 04/21/01

THE PERFECT COMBO? Classical music certainly isn’t lacking for star power. Soprano Renee Fleming and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet are younger marquee names, touring together for the first time, and their combination of youthful exuberance and talent are creating buzz in classical circles. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/21/01

SO WHO WON? “For two years in a row, the Academy Award for best film score has gone to a classical composer: first John Corigliano for The Red Violin, then Tan Dun for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While cynics claim that this is the film industry’s way of advertising its high-art pretensions, Hollywood may really be ahead of New York in acknowledging that the opposition between film music and concert music is a phantom of the last century.” The New York Times 04/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HAVING IT ALL: “Summarizing the work of a composer as vigorously curious as Aurelio de la Vega is not easy. Serialism and pantonality, Cuban dance rhythms and chance operations, graphic notation and electronic tape, all have interested De la Vega, and have come together in a powerful and idiosyncratic musical personality.” Los Angeles Times 04/22/01

Friday April 20

ISRAEL COURT ASKED TO BAN WAGNER: The Berlin Staatskapelle Orchester, with Israeli Daniel Barenboim conducting, will perform at a music festival in Israel this summer. On the program, an excerpt from Wagner’s Die Valkiere. But the Simon Wiesenthal Center, citing Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his admiration by Hitler, has asked Israel’s Supreme Court to bar the performance, or to block funding to the festival. Nando Times (AP) 04/19/01

Thursday April 19

NOT TO OVERSTATE, BUT… Itzhak Perlman on the importance of Jascha Heifetz to the art of playing the violin: “I realised that everything in the history of violin playing could be divided into BH and AH: Before Heifetz and After Heifetz.” The Guardian (UK) 04/19/01

IN SEARCH OF ACOUSTICS: “Ever since World War II, cities from Paris to London, from Toronto to New York, have fallen victim to multimillion-dollar concert halls that embody the latest “advances” in acoustic science yet sound little better than transistor radios. But could architectural acoustics at long last be coming of age? Has one expert finally discovered, as one of his colleagues has claimed, the ‘Rosetta stone’ of pure sound?” Lingua Franca 04/01

WHAT, JOHN CAGE WASN’T SEXY? Classical music is sexy again, apparently. To judge from the coverage the stodgy old stuff has been getting recently in Vogue and other high fashion mags, the new reliance on melody and accessible sound has made composers and performers of new music more desirable subjects for the mass media. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/19/01

WHINE, WHINE, WHINE: Sales of cassettes and singles have taken a dive in the U.S., and guess who the industry is blaming? You got it: Napster and all its free-music-swapping buddies. You’d think the end of Western Civilization was upon us… BBC 04/19/01

POWER TO THE PICCOLO: The traditional way of managing orchestras has been top down – a strong leader who decides everything. But for orchestras to survive, some believe the orchestra as an institution has to become more democratic. And some orchestras are finding success with this approach. CBC 04/18/01

COURTING THE PUBLIC: “[T]he most seductive myth of modern opera is that of the New Audience, [which] is supposed to save the medium from becoming entirely a museum of its past… Tapestry New Opera Works is about to discover whether its most ambitious attempt to conjure the New Audience is a success or failure.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/19/01

SAY IT AIN’T SO: A new study to be published in Britain’s Journal of the Royal Medical Society makes a startling and, for music snobs everywhere, disturbing assertion: The Mozart Effect – the idea that listening to Mozart improves cognitive skills in children – apparently works with the music of new age sensation Yanni as well. [first item] The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 04/19/01

MUSICAL MISERY: You knew it had to happen eventually – some disgruntled Red Sox fan would acquire the ability to put “The Curse of the Bambino” on stage, and do so, with all the hand-wringing and hopeless pessimism that define baseball’s most loyal fan base. Well, it’s happened, but the author is (gasp) from New York. Boston Herald 04/19/01

Wednesday April 18

SOUND THE REVOLUTION: “Either the opera houses of the future will succeed in rejuvenating and restructuring themselves, or else we had better close them down, with a few fortunate exceptions that we can then cherish as museums of lyric drama. At present they are almost all museums. Despite the current debate, and contrary to appearances, most opera houses suffer from the same malaise.” Culturekiosque 04/18/01

E-WORD OF MOUTH: The saviour of classical music recording might be the internet, as release of a recording of Mahler suggests. A somewhat obscure performance, promoted by Mahler cognoscenti on the web has made it a roaring success. The Telegraph (London) 04/18/01

AT LAST, A PULITZER FOR CORIGLIANO: Every year John Corigliano worked up a nice level of rage in April, assuming he would be passed over again for the Pulitzer Prize. This year, they surprised him and gave him the award. What makes the Pulitzer special? “In concert music, it is the highest honor a composer can get.” (RealAudio interview, requires free RealAudio player.) NPR 04/17/01

MILES DAVIS, SOMEWHAT DIMINISHED: Miles Davis was once “the coolest black musician on the planet.” Then along came Jimi Hendrix. And jazz-rock fusion. “At the end of his life, he was playing tunes by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson, which was either a triumph of anti-snobbery or the effect of looking at the Billboard charts for too long.” The New Statesman 04/16/01

Tuesday April 17

‘FRAID OF THE NEW: Why is it so difficult to get contemporary classical music performed? “Where contemporary music is concerned, we deny ourselves context and continuity: we label it difficult but its difficulties stem from our unwillingness to engage with it. It is a vicious circle that only we, the prospective audience, can break.” The Guardian (UK) 04/17/01

COUNTERING CONVENTION: Countertenors are the hot new thing in classical music, and Canadian Daniel Taylor is one of the rising young stars of the Age of the Falsetto. “[B]ecause the countertenor sound all but disappeared after the last castrato died in the early 20th century, its resurgence has thrown up a novelty in a field of music that can go decades without anything new happening.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/17/01

Monday April 16

TOP TENOR: “In a world short of big tenor voices, Cura has become the first choice of any major opera house trying to cast Otello, Manon Lescaut, Il trovatore, indeed almost any 19th-century Italian opera. In the seven years since he won Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition, he has gone from being an unknown to an operatic superstar whose name sells CDs, whose face provokes the sighs of a devoted fan club, whose voice fills stadiums.” The Telegraph (London) 04/16/01

HOPING FOR NUN-BER ONE: A group of British nuns have scored a hit on the UK Classical Music charts with their first recording of chants. BBC 04/16/01

Sunday April 15

THAT AMERICAN PROBLEM: Why don’t American orchestras play American music? “American orchestras would have you believe that recent American music is inferior to recent European music, which is patently untrue. Orchestras, being the Eurocentric entities that they are, naturally gravitate to composers from abroad. The fact that most American orchestras are led by European conductors doesn’t help.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 04/15/01

PRICED OUT: The price of tickets to pop concerts has gotten so high, whole segments of music fans are priced out of the experience. The Rolling Stones at $300 a pop? So much for music of rebellion… San Jose Mercury News 04/15/01

WORLD OF JAZZ: Jazz doesn’t just belong to America. “Many varieties of ethnic music are in the process of making themselves known to jazz. Thanks to jazz, musicians from Brooklyn to Capetown and Shanghai, no longer divided by their own individual ethnicities, are able to communicate with each other. More and more non-Americans are studying it.” Culturekiosque 01/15/01

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MUSIC? A “laughter choir” has been started . It “has already released a CD, starts by trying to render a known piece of music by going ‘ha, ha, ha’ until the inanity of what they are doing strikes one of them who then dissolves into real laughter. Sooner or later, the rest follow suit as Thomas Draeger attempts to ‘conduct’ them and shape the laughter into something resembling music.” The Guardian (London) 04/15/01

Friday April 13

PRAGUE IN PERIL: The Prague Philharmonic has a long and proud history. But since the Velvet Revolution, the orchestra has suffered – problematic leadership, outdated ways and attitudes, and some scrappy playing. “Without a strong artistic vision for the future, orchestral standards will continue to decline. Without the resources to solve its material crises, the orchestra will continue to ignore long-term issues.” Financial Times 04/13/01

THE CONDUCTING COMPOSER PROBLEM: Should composers be allowed to conduct? The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is touring Sweden and composer James MacMillan is conducting. And apparently not well. “Many rank-and-file players were just plain angry. It was their debut tour of Sweden and, if first impressions count, then they were worried about the impressions of the SCO’s standard that audiences, promoters, and professional peers might be taking away.” Glasgow Herald 04/13/01

WING WAITING: Despite the fact the world’s most-established orchestras seem to have taken a conservative turn in their recent choices for music directors, a crop of impressive young conductors is on the way up and ought to be given some opportunities. The Economist 04/132/01

Thursday April 12

WHEN IT RAINS… “Napster’s legal troubles could be about to get a whole lot worse, as thousands of music publishers could enter into a class-action suit against the file-trading company. Independent musicians, however, are still shut out of the litigation.” Wired 04/12/01

STRIKE MAY NOT HAPPEN: The staff of London’s Royal Opera House voted to strike last weekend. But new talks scheduled for the coming weeks may avert a work stoppage. BBC 04/12/01

SEIJI’S LAST HURRAH: The average tenure for a music director of a major American orchestra these days is around 7 years. Seiji Ozawa has been in Boston for four times that long, and will lead yet one more year of concerts with the BSO before departing for the Vienna State Opera. The schedule for that final season is out, and it speaks volumes about Seiji’s tenure, the present rebuilding state of the ensemble, and the continued search for a worthy successor. Boston Herald 04/12/01

DON’T TELL HIM HE’S OLD: Alfred Brendel is 70, and he’s sick of hearing about it. The finest pianist of a generation, beloved by audiences, orchestras, and critics alike, is not content to allow his septuagenarianism to mark the decline of his career. He is performing more than ever, and recently released a book of essays. And yes, he is still notoriously fussy about the instruments he plays on. Ottawa Citizen 04/12/01

TRYING TO SELL QUALITY: A new country record label based in Austin, arguably the independent music capital of the U.S., is taking an unconventional approach to their business: Lost Highway Records will be attempting to make money without pop crossovers or “classic” hits that were in vogue twenty years ago. The label’s CEO is lining up artists who have been unable to fit into Nashville’s increasingly narrow pigeonholes, and hoping that the audience will respond to quality, sans hype. Dallas Morning News 04/12/01

MUSIC CRITICISM, OLD SCHOOL: With classical music in seemingly constant danger of disappearing completely, most North American music critics have slipped into the role of cheerleaders, with even negative reviews carrying an apologetic tone. So it can be startling to come across lines like this in a review: “The…production of Mozart’s Idomeneo…is the most stunningly awful professional opera production I’ve ever seen…[I]f Canadians weren’t so damned polite, boos would have forced the curtain down after 20 minutes.” National Post (Canada) 04/12/01

HOW ABOUT “SPINAL TAP” IN IMAX? Imax films, the giant screen movie format employed to great effect in science museums across the country, are expanding beyond the usual landscape adventure format. A new documentary captures the excitement of a sold-out concert in digital clarity, and creates a worthy successor to the great rockumentaries of the past. Chicago Tribune 04/12/01

Wednesday April 11

WHAT THE HALL? It’s London’s Royal Festival Hall’s 50th birthday this year, so there’s a celebration. But “the hall, as it stands, is a national embarrassment and an international joke. The acoustics are inferior, the comfort minimal and the ambience enveloped in a perma-pong of daylong kitchen smells. No one feels much affection for the amenity – least of all its performers, who complain pitifully of cramped dressing-rooms, often uncleaned. So what’s to jubilate?” The Telegraph (London) 04/11/01

NEW PIANO DESIGN: A $140,000 Australian piano built with a “revolutionary” new design is out of testing and ready for export… Sydney Morning Herald 04/11/01

NAPSTER ULTIMATUM: Over the past few weeks, since a Federal US court ordered Napster to filter out copyrighted music, the file trader has said it’s been struggling to comply. Yesterday the judge lost patience. Make it work, she said. “If you can’t, maybe the system needs to be shut down.” Wired 04/11/01

THE LINDA RONSTADT SYNDROME: Whatever it is, former female pop and rock singers – particularly in Canada – are returning to old standards. And audiences are lining up to hear them. “In general, people hunger for melody. You listen to computerized, formulaic stuff, and the human heart and ear will seek melodies – kids hear this music now, and to them, it’s new and fresh.” Globe and Mail (Toronto) 04/10/01

Tuesday April 10

LET THE WINNER TAKE ALL: There is a sense of relief – almost euphoria – after settling the battle for control of the Bayreuth Festival. In truth, little has really changed, but by wresting control of the festival away from Wolfgang Wagner, an important step has been taken. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/10/01

FAMILY FEUD: We’ve been reading for weeks about the family Wagner’s battles for control of the storied Bayreuth Festival. Here’s the dirt on the family background. Financial Times 04/10/01

FAMILY FEUD, PART II: Promoter and manager Jonathan Shalit, who sued Welsh sensation Charlotte Church and her family after being pushed out of the loop of the young soprano’s blossoming career, is smarting over a last-minute rewrite of her autobiography. The original draft credited Shalit with making Church the international superstar she now is, but the new version barely even mentions him. New York Post 04/10/01

MASTER OF THE CHAMBER: No other type of classical music inspires as much devotion and passionate advocacy among its practitioners as chamber music. The heroes of the chamber world are not only world-class musicians, but dedicated teachers and promoters of their art. Canada’s Andrew Dawes is one of these, and those musicians who have been gathered into chamber music’s fold by his example remain, years later, in awe of his skills. Ottawa Citizen 04/10/01

PAVAROTTI.COM: “Opera star Luciano Pavarotti will mark the 40th anniversary of his stage debut with a performance to be broadcast on the internet later this month. The show, from the Modena Opera House, northern Italy, will launch his new website. He also announced that he will only continue singing for another ‘couple of years’.” BBC 04/09/01

WHAT, NO “HILARY & JACKIE”? The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is diversifying, adding a seven-film mini-festival centering around classical music to the usual hoopla that surrounds the main event. Films to be screened include “Song of Love,” “Song Without End,” “A Song to Remember,” and “Gosh, What a Neat Song!” (Okay, we made that last one up.) Dallas Morning News 04/10/01

BUENA VISTA MUSICIAN DIES: A member of the Buena Vista Social Club band has died after collapsing onstage with a heart attack in Switzerland. BBC 04/09/01

MERGER HAS INDIES WORRIED: “Many independent music labels are questioning their futures after Monday’s announcement of Universal Music Group’s plan to acquire EMusic for approximately $23 million. Independent labels signed long-term deals with EMusic that gave the digital music company exclusive rights to sell downloads from their catalogs. Those exclusive contracts are expected to carry over to Universal once the deal closes, which could cause a rift with independent musicians.” Wired 04/10/01

Monday April 9

NEW CARNEGIE HALL DIRECTOR TAKES OVER: Its autocratic (and much disliked) executive director out of the way, Carnegie Hall welcomes its new leader, and attempts to soothe. “An institution that is 110 years old and has been as successful as Carnegie Hall is a lot larger than any one person’s vision.” The New York Times 04/09/01 (one-time registration required)

WILL JAZZ SURVIVE? “The very term ‘jazz’ has become a metaphor for racial polarization, stirring up heated debates among musicians, journalists and historians. Some of these questions about race and where jazz comes from are interesting and provocative, but ultimately if the music is to survive, we’ve got to let it just speak for itself.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 04/09/01

CONDUCTOR MARISS JANSONS is pessimistic. “I feel that the world is going in the wrong direction. Although the material side of life may be getting better, we are neglecting the spiritual side, including art and music. Political leaders should regard it as an obligation to introduce young people to the arts. Instead, they talk about the subject as a luxury or entertainment – take it or leave it.” Financial Times 04/09/01

Sunday April 8

LIKE PLAYING CENTER FIELD FOR THE YANKEES: The Chicago Symphony’s brass section is legendary, so when the orchestra recently had to choose a new principal trumpet, the process was rigorous… Chicago Tribune 04/08/01

• LEGEND RETIRES: After 53 years, Bud Herseth – one of the architects of the Chicago Symphony’s brass section – is retiring as principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony. Chicago Tribune 04/08/01

THE SOUND OF MUSIC: For all the calculations, acoustics is more art than science. “Scale models and computer simulations can demonstrate the motion of sound waves, yet relatively few modern concert halls have stunning sound. Virtual reality cannot replicate the visceral sensation of sitting in a space and hearing it resound with real, unamplified music. Yasuhisa Toyota has spent 10 years working on the sound for LA’s new Disney Concert Hall. Los Angeles Times 04/08/01

CONSIDERING STRAVINSKY: Was Igor Stravinsky the most influential composer of the 20th Century? Thirty years after his death, his music appears to have the staying power… Dallas Morning News 04/08/01

OPERA STRIKE: Workers at London’s Royal Opera House have voted to go on strike… The Independent (London) 04/07/01

Friday April 6

THE LITTLE OPERA COMPANY THAT COULD: How many opera companies commission and stage a new opera every year, and then see those operas performed all over the world? The only one we know of is in a small town in Canada. Granted, it’s a series aimed at children, but even so…. Ottawa Citizen (CP) 04/05/01

PAY-TO-PLAY: Now that the fun has been sued out of Napster, music companies of all stripes are jumping into the online music business. Just in the last week several big players have entered the pay-to-play business, each with their own variation on paid downloads. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/06/01

CANADIANS LOVE THEIR (FREE) MUSIC: So where are all those Napster users coming from? No. 1 is Canada and Spain. “On-line surfers in Canada and Spain spent an average of 6.3 days in February visiting the Napster site to download or upload digital music files, according to research firm Jupiter. They were ahead of Napster users in the United States, Argentina and Germany, who spent an average 6.1 days, 6 days and 5.9 days, respectively. The global average was 5.9 days.” Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/06/01

LONGEST MUSIC: Composer Roberst Rich has recorded (on a high-capacity DVD) what he says is the longest piece of music ever. It lasts 7 hours, and “the work is designed to be played at such a level that the listener falls asleep as it begins, and then experiences it during the various stages of sleep. Rich notes that ‘You can listen to Somnium in your sleep with a small pair of headphones, although these can become uncomfortable if you try to sleep on your side’.” Gramophone 04/05/01

Thursday April 5

WHAT HAPPENED TO JAZZ: “From the early forties to the late sixties, jazz strode confidently into the future, constantly revolutionising itself. The center, meanwhile, could not hold. Jazz as jazz died. Some of the best new jazz releases are actually old releases remastered and repackaged. Specialist publications aside, the only place where jazz commands extensive media attention is on the obituary pages, when living legends die.” Feed 04/04/01

WHAT’S THE MUSICIANS’ INTEREST? Surprise surprise – musicians tell the US Congress that record company lawsuits over Napster have not served musicians’ interests, and that the legal actions bring more money to the companies, but do little to promote musicians to a wider audience. The Age (Melbourne) 04/05/01

• NAPSTER USE UP: “Napster saw traffic surge in the last week of March, even as the Internet site scrambled to block trade in copyrighted material, a study said on Wednesday.” Wired 04/04/01
• SAYING GNO TO GNUTELLA: The recording industry, flush from its bloody victory over Napster, is now turning its attention to Gnutella, a loosely-structured file-sharing service where piracy is reportedly rampant. But stopping the swapping may be harder even than it was with Napster. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 04/05/01

BILLY BUDD COMES OUT: Critics have long speculated about the homoerotic subtexts of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” When Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forster, both gay men, created an opera from the story, however, the idea of a gay Billy was largely ignored by conservative opera companies and their audiences. The Canadian Opera Company’s new production meets the controversy head-on. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 04/05/01

CROSSING THE LAST BOUNDARY: Bela Fleck is the kind of musician who drives people like Wynton Marsalis up the wall. Not content to stick with one style of music, the legendary banjo virtuoso, who has won Grammys for jazz, country, and pop (some for the same album!), is now embarking on his most ambitious crossover to date: an album of classical banjo arrangements. San Jose Mercury News (from the Hartford Courant) 04/05/01

MAINSTREAM MUSIC ONLINE: Music channel MTV begins selling music online with the cooperation of major recording labels, in one swoop becoming the internet’s biggest music presence. Wired 04/04/01

DEATH OF A SALESMAN: Not so very long ago, America’s top orchestral musicians were paid on a scale little better than waiters, and their working hours were determined solely by the men standing on the podium. It took many a devoted advocate to sell the industry on the desirability and prudence of paying and treating musicians as the highly-trained artists they are. One such advocate died on Saturday. Philip Sipser was 82. The New York Times 04/05/01 (one-times registration required)

Wednesday April 4

IN THE ARTISTS’ INTEREST: The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Tuesday into online copyright issues, both music and publishing. Artists themselves testified that musicians’ interests – namely that they get paid for their work no matter what – are getting obscured by the larger economic battle between the recording industry and Napster. “As [we] sit here, there is a Ping-Pong game going on over our head about business models on the Internet when we do not know how our intellectual property is going to be protected.” Washington Post (Reuters) 04/04/01

NAPSTER WEIGHS IN: Napster weighed in with its own plea to legislate a compulsory license for music distributed over the Internet. “Both sides came well prepared…Napster rallied hundreds of young fans with free T-shirts and concert tickets, while the recording industry unveiled an anti-Napster Web site at www.nofreelunchster.com.” ABC News (Reuters) 4/03/01

• TAKING UP THE CAUSE: “Long-time foes of the recording industry, the Consumer Electronics Association and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, are preparing to clash with the music labels over consumer rights issues and unfair business practices…They believe the recording industry has too much of a competitive advantage in the distribution of digital music.” Wired 04/04/01
• JUMPING THE GUN: The recording industry’s plan to launch a new online music subscription service with RealNetworks seems to have overlooked one whopping issue: such a service would have to negotiate with artists for the rights to distribute their work, or they could find themselves shut down before they start. Inside.com 04/04/01

SOAP STYLE: The Wagner family drama over who will direct the Bayreuth Festival is playing out in unfortunately soap-operatic proportions. “It has reached the point where art and media have become reliant on soap values to capture our flickering attention. Millions in Germany and around the world who will never visit Bayreuth or watch a Wagner opera, start to finish, now follow the family feud as avidly as they watched Big Brother.” The Telegraph (London) 4/04/01

HOPING FOR A MIRACLE: Pro Coro Canada, one of only three professional choirs in all of Canada, is on the verge of bankruptcy, and is appealing to federal and provincial government sources for relief. The choir is scheduled to move into Edmonton’s brand new Winspear Centre for Music next season. CBC 04/03/01

NEW NAME, NEW DIGS: The Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia, widely considered to be one of America’s finest chamber orchestras, is getting a new name, The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, to go along with it’s beautiful new home in the Regional Performing Arts Center that opens this fall. The ensemble will also be bringing in a higher caliber of soloists and guest conductors. Philadelphia Inquirer 04/02/01

A NOT-SO-WARM WELCOME: Opera star Montserrat Caballe, widely acknowledged to be Spain’s greatest living soprano, has finally won her battle to become one of the first women to join the 150-year-old all-male Cercle del Liceu club at Barcelona’s Liceu opera house. Although she had sung on their stages more than 100 times in the past 30 years, her applications had been repeatedly rejected – until the club was forced to comply with Spain’s equal opportunity laws. BBC 4/04/01

THE POWER OF CLOSED DOORS: Members of the Metropolitan Opera Club, who have access to a private on-site clubroom reached via a secret elevator, are quarreling with the Met’s management over plans to open the club to more members and do away with its 108-year-old black-tie dress code. “That is a part of who we are, and it makes us who we are. Life has become so informal that it’s one of the last bastions of decorum and style.” New York Times 4/04/01 (one-time registration required)

FINALLY, SOME RESPECT: Female composers have been making great strides in the classical music world in the last decade. Case in point: New Jersey’s Melinda Wagner, who has watched her Pulitzer Prize-winning flute concerto take on a life of its own, even as she moves on to her next high-profile commission. Philadelphia Inquirer 04/03/01

CHOICE COMES TO THE CLIBURN: The Van Cliburn competition has announced that contestants will now have their choice of four pieces of new music to fulfill the contest’s contemporary requirement. In past years, a single work had been commissioned, and was required of all players. The change is popular with contestants and composers. Dallas Morning News 04/04/01

ROBESON REDUX: The son of famed opera star and blacklisted activist Paul Robeson has penned a new biography of his father, and the first reviews are in. The younger Robeson had originally commissioned an official biography more than a decade ago, but he was furious at the result, and withdrew his support for its publication as an “authorized” biography. Boston Globe 04/04/01

Tuesday April 3

EVERYWHERE BUT HOME: The music of Astor Piazolla is a hit worldwide. Everywhere, that is, but his native Argentina. “Piazzolla’s approach was rejected by tango purists who couldn’t understand his phrasings and Mozartian harmonies, who felt that he was betraying the spirit of the Argentina’s greatest musical contribution to the world.” Sequenza/21 04/02/01

ACTING OUT: Peter Sellars takes on Bach’s Cantatas, having the performers act as well as sing them. “Nobody sleeps through a Sellars show. True, a lot of purists can’t bear to sit through one either. But at this stage in its history, classical music doesn’t need more purists. What it badly needs is people who can communicate its meaning, its power and its glory to multitudes.” The Times (London) 04/03/01

ROYAL OPERA CHIEF MOVES IN: Former BBC exec Tony Hall has taken over direction of London’s Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. First order of business? Dealing with a threatened strike by backstage workers that could close the place down. BBC 03/02/01

LIKE A VIRGIN… Many services broadcast music on the Internet, but now Radio Free Virgin is going a step beyond. It provides a free download program with which you can record the music on your computer hard drives. Is it copyright infringement? If you keep the copy for your own use, probably not. If you share it with someone else… actually, no one seems to know just yet. Inside 04/02/01

REAL MUSIC, REAL MONEY: RealNetworks, whose RealPlayer is an Internet standard, joins AOL, EMI, and Bertelsmann in a subscription-based music service on the web. The joint venture includes three major record labels – EMI, BMG, and Warner – so there shouldn’t be any of those nuisance lawsuits to worry about… BBC 04/03/01

Monday April 2

BAYREUTH STILL UNCERTAIN: So now that Wagner’s granddaughter has been named the next director of Bayreuth, is the issue of succession and continuity settled? Maybe not… Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04/02/01

IS NEW MUSIC BROKEN? No, but “we as an industry have lost a whole generation of listeners with our cynical attempts to tell the audience that it is their responsibility to make the sounds they hear from our instruments palatable to their uncultured ears. We will not ever get this generation back, and we are in danger of losing their children’s generation as well, unless we change our tune, and fast.” Sequenza/21 04/02/01

REINVENTING OPERA: “From Venice to Berlin, Europe’s opera houses are facing shrinking federal budgets, crumbling infrastructures, an aging core audience and accusations of elitism—not to mention the rapid incursion of mass media. In an effort to remain relevant—and solvent—European opera companies are being forced to radically overhaul everything from their repertoires to their management to their financial backing.” Newsweek 04/02/01

WHAT OPERA LOOKS LIKE IN ATLANTA: “In the short history of the Atlanta Opera – anywhere from 15 to 20 years, depending upon whom you ask – the company has enjoyed extraordinary growth. In the past six years alone, attendance and budget have shot up more than 150 percent. More than 47,000 people attended its 12 performances at the Fox last year. The company’s annual budget has climbed almost 150 percent in six years, to $4.8 million a year.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution 04/01/01

DEATH OF MODERN JAZZ: John Lewis, founder of the Modern Jazz Quartet, died at the age of 80. Washington Post 04/02/01

MOZART, MD: Researchers have discovered that playing Mozart can be therapeutic for some patients. “Short bursts of Mozart’s Sonata K448 have been found to decrease epileptic attacks.” BBC 04/02/01

(P)OPERA STAR: “Because Charlotte Church is both MTV and PBS, she has found herself at the center of a debate that’s heating up in the classical music world: Is she the industry’s savior or its worst nightmare? Will her huge sales finance all the serious musicians whose low profiles challenge the patience of the recording industry? Or will her concessions to popular taste degrade the standards of an entire genre?” New York Times Magazine 04/01/01 (one-time registration required for access)

• SELECTIVE MEMORY: Singer Charlotte Church is still a teenager, but she’s putting out an autobiography. Make that a selective autobiography. All mentions of Jonathan Shalit, the agent/promoter who discovered and built her career have been expunged. Last year Shalit and Church split under unpleasant circumstances. BBC 04/02/01

Sunday April 1

WAGNER OUT: The board of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual celebration of Wagner’s music, says Wolfgang Wagner must hand over to his estranged daughter Eva. If King Wolfgang, 81, refuses to leave the fabulous theatre built for his grandfather Richard, Eva can evict him. The Independent (London) 03/31/01

SIMPLY THE BEST: Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache insisted on more rehearsals than anyone else. He was legendarily finnicky and he refused to make recordings. But “in the past four years, however, CDs of his live performances have been appearing, proving him to be, quite simply, the most revelatory conductor of the later 20th century.” The Telegraph (London) 03/31/01

MADE IN CHINA: Some of the most prominent composers on the new music scene today are from China. But their music is better known and more widely heard in Europe and America than back home. The New York Times 04/01/01 (one-time registration required)

• NEW GENERATION: “A generation of Chinese-born composers has established a major and diversified presence on the American musical scene. They are by no means the first wave of immigrants to have done so. But perhaps not since the various infusions of African influences has a sizable contingent steeped in an idiom so far removed from Euro-American norms achieved such prominence.” The New York Times 04/01/01 (one-time registration required)

Friday March 30

JAILED FOR LA FENICE ARSON: Two electricians have been convicted of setting Venice’s La Fenice opera house on fire in 1996. “Enrico Carella and his cousin, Massimiliano Marchetti, are believed to have set the building ablaze because their company was facing heavy fines over delays in repair work.” BBC 03/30/01

PAYING THE ARTISTS: Music stars are banding together to fight the music industry. In the wake of debates about Napster and who gets paid for what they’ve suddenly realized what a bad deal they’re getting from the recording companies. “Should these artists prevail, their collective bargaining efforts would radically rewrite the economics of the music business in the same way that unionizing actors and baseball players revolutionized the film and sports industries.” Los Angeles Times 03/29/01

WAGNER V WAGNER: Board members of the famed Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth have intervened in a rancorous dispute among members of the Wagner family and ordered the festival’s 81-year-old director, Wolfgang Wagner, to cede the post to his estranged daughter and the composer’s great-granddaughter, Eva Wagner-Pasquier. Mr. Wagner has insisted for many months that his only fit successor is his wife, and has already pledged to disregard his termination. New York Times (AP) 3/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

APPEARANCES COUNT: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram evidently didn’t like the negative review of a Boston concert by Van Cliburn written by a freelancer the paper had hired. So a few days later the paper printed another review – a positive one – by Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer. Isn’t that the same Dyer who’s a judge at this May’s Cliburn Competition? Boston Globe 03/29/01

LADY SOUL GOES CLASSICAL: Two years after stepping in for an ill Pavarotti to give an unrehearsed performance of Nessun Dorma at the Grammy awards, Aretha Franklin has announced plans to record her first classical album later this year. “I hope to record Nessun Dorma. I just love Puccini.” BBC 3/29/01

SUMMER FESTS ON HOLD: With one festival already on hold, many of the rest of England’s popular summer festivals are in jeopardy of being canceled, due to fears of spreading the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. “Million pound losses through cancellations and possible bankruptcy ride on the Government’s ability to tackle the epidemic.” The Times (London) 3/30/01

Thursday March 29

THINK OF IT AS CLASSICAL KARAOKE: A jacket wired to a computer is helping music students learn to conduct. Sensors in the jacket read the student’s movements and transmit that information to the computer, which correspondingly controls a synthesizer output. “[J]ust like the real thing, the cyber-orchestra only plays well if it’s conducted properly, with the conductor’s right arm signalling volume and the left arm beating time.” New Scientist 03/28/01

BOSTON REBUILDS: Okay, so maybe on the face of it, it’s just an appointment of a new oboe player. But the Boston Symphony’s choice of John Ferrillo as its new principal oboe signifies to some observers a desire by the orchestra to rebuild its ranks and reputation as a first-class ensemble. Ferrillo, comes from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra where he has held the principal’s job since 1986. Boston Globe 03/28/01

FOOT-AND-MOUTH THREATENS FESTIVALS: England’s foot-and-mouth disease outbreak is threatening a number of this summer’s largest music and dance festivals. One has already been postponed, and the fates of several more are currently up in the air. BBC 3/28/01

HOW DO YOU GET TO CARNEGIE HALL? After interviewing 100 candidates, Carnegie Hall has chosen Robert J. Harth, longtime chief executive of the Aspen Music Festival and School, to head Carnegie Hall. Carnegie’s current director is making an early retreat after a controversial tenure. New York Times 3/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Wednesday March 28

WILL SING FOR FOOD: Romania’s National Opera never downsized from its Communist-era bloat of the 80s. Now the company is in financial crisis – its director has resigned and the company is facing big money woes. The company’s 702 employees have been asked to return meal vouchers. Ottawa Citizen (AP) 03/28/01

LA SCALA STRIKE: Musicians strike at La Scala, shutting down a performance of Falstaff. Nando Times (AP) 03/28/01

LOOKING GLASS: This summer’s Lincoln Center Festival will focus on the music of Philip Glass. Nando Times (AP) 03/27/01

RECORDING INDUSTRY VS NAPSTER – ROUND 436: It’s beginning to feel like something from a Dickens novel – interminable legal wrangling which benefits no one but the lawyers. Latest move: Napster, claims the Recording Industry Association of America “is failing to fully comply with an injunction to screen copyright music from its song-swap network.” Nando Times (AP) 03/27/01

• SOME DAY IT MAY ALL JUST FADE AWAY: A study by a web research company reports that Napster has lost a quarter of its users, now that it is [or is not, depending on whose story you believe] filtering access to copyrighted material. Maybe they can’t find what they’re looking for any more. Or maybe they’ve already copied it. ZDNet 03/27/01
• THE MILLION GEEK MARCH? Demonstrations are a way of life in Washington. Still, something new may be in the offing. Napster is trying to mobilize its supporters to attend teach-ins and a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “First, however, Napster has to get past the U.S. Capitol Police, who lack any sense of humor about protests – geek or other. The police say that any gathering of 20 or more people that wants to walk from Union Station to Capitol Hill must take a number and stand in line.” Wired 03/28/01

Tuesday March 27

THE BOCELLI PHENOMENON: So what is it about Andrea Bocelli that can inspire such rock-star-like adulation in the public and such revulsion in critics? As the blind tenor kicks off his first U.S. tour, two critics try to understand it all: “It’s not that he’s a bad opera singer; he’s just a really good wedding singer. If you think about him in those terms, the appeal is obvious.” Philadelphia Inquirer 03/27/01

LOCKING IT UP: The recording industry is preparing to debut a new system of copyright protection which would make it impossible to “rip” tracks from a CD into digital MP3 files. However, the system would also make the discs unplayable on many CD players, which might not go over well with consumers. Inside.com 03/27/01

SHOCK OF THE NEW: Why are English opera companies so reluctant to stage new operas? The Times (London) 03/27/01

MAKING MUSIC THE HARD WAY: Some of the most original and well-received new music being written today is coming from Chinese composers who have mastered the technique of blending Eastern and Western musical traditions. One possible explanation for the public interest is that many Chinese composers have overcome tremendous obstacles to be allowed to practice their art, and their work reflects that struggle. New York Times 03/27/01 (one-time registration required for access)

BAIL-OUT ISN’T ENOUGH: Last week the Scottish government bailed out the financially troubled Scottish National Opera with a £5 million grant. But an internal government report says that an even bigger grant was needed to get the company solvent again. “We came to the general conclusion that Scottish Opera is underfunded and there was no getting around that fact. If one tries to put off addressing that, the same problems will occur again and again.”  Sunday Times 03/25/01

• GOVERNMENT TO SCOTTISH OPERA – LIVE WITHIN YOUR MEANS: “We are happy to support publicly funded arts, from traditional Scottish arts and music to opera, but there has to be a balance. When it comes to Scottish Opera, if it cannot survive on the £6.5 million a year it receives from the taxpayer, we cannot afford it. That is the harsh reality.” The Observer 03/25/01

RETRACTION OF THE WEAK: The Vienna State Opera takes back some of the disparaging things it said last week about the Vienna Boys Choir. Gramophone 03/26/01

• Previously: VIENNA DISCORD: Vienna State Opera on why it’s abandoning the famed Vienna Boys Choir: “We can no longer have a situation where we invite the choir to rehearse, train a boy for a certain part and then find on opening night he has been flown off to sing in Tokyo and another boy has taken his place.” The Scotsman 03/20/01

WHITHER JAZZ? As a new generation of jazz artists comes of age, and the last one begins to slip into the role of veterans, several of the best have begun to break out of the mold of “traditional” jazz. The future may be something like the fusion efforts of the 1970s, or possibly more new-wave, a la Bela Fleck, but it will definitely be different. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 03/27/01

THE NEW CALYPSO: “While calypso has always been a means for Trinidadians to critique the political elite, some singers are crossing a longstanding boundary and using their songs to advocate for the political parties.” Christian Science Monitor 03/27/01

Monday March 26

DOUBLE ANNIVERSARY: Two of Great Britain’s finest concert halls are celebrating anniversaries this year. The Royal Festival Hall, which anchors the South Bank arts complex, turns 50 in 2001, and the Royal Albert Hall, which has played host to the world-famous BBC Proms since 1941, is 130. BBC 03/26/01

NO. 3 WITH A BULLET: A group of English nuns recorded a disk of Latin chants and it’s shot up the UK music charts. “The album reached number three in just a week, and is also in the top 100 in the pop charts. Under the slogan “Get the nuns to number one”, the canonnesses have a marketing budget equivalent to a Madonna campaign.” The Independent (London) 03/23/01

Sunday March 25

MAYBE THEY’RE AFRAID OF THE BURNING RIVER: Cleveland is exceedingly proud of its orchestra, and rightly so. The Cleveland Orchestra is arguably the finest orchestra in the U.S. at the moment, and has ranked among the world’s greatest for decades. But despite the enthusiasm the local ensemble generates, outside orchestras rarely make stops at Severance Hall, leaving the city’s primary critic wondering how Clevelanders know that their band is best? The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/25/01

WHY JAZZ IS DYING? “Jazz in the jazz club is too often a plain bore. And an expensive one at that. The fact that the clubs are inhospitable to younger people may be one reason they’re having such a difficult time surviving.” Newsweek 03/15/01

MAKING OPERA MAKE SENSE: In this age of period performances and constant nostalgia movements, it is curious that a large percentage of critics and musicians continue to be virulently opposed to opera being performed in any language other than the original. The practice of translating opera lyrics into the local dialect is as old as the hills, and even with supertitles now an option, there is still a place for it. The New York Times 03/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)

NAPSTER HITS BACK: Napster has filed court documents claiming that the recording industry is intentionally making it difficult for them to filter copyrighted music. “While Napster engineers have added 200,000 musicians along with 1.2 million file names into its filter, the…industry has sent over incomplete lists of artists and songs that leave Napster to sort through hundreds of thousands of files.” Wired 03/23/01

Friday March 23

SILENCING THE GREAT VIOLINS: Violins aren’t just musical instruments, they’re also – unfortunately for musicians – art. Increasingly, only banks and investors can afford to own them. Are musicians just out of luck? Arts Journal 03/23/01

TRYING TO REBUILD A CLASSIC: In 1996, Venice’s famed La Fenice opera house burned, and despite promises that it would be swiftly rebuilt, five years have passed, and the company that occupied the theatre is still performing in a tent on the riverbank. Now the mayor has delayed the restoration yet again, amid questions over the bidding process and the cost. BBC 03/23/01

PARIS SUCKS. BY PIERRE BOULEZ: Paris is a great place for museums, for dance and opera and theatre. But music? “Paris has lousy venues for orchestral music. ‘Paris has a worldwide reputation for cultural excellence and money is poured into the opera, theatre and museums,’ says composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. “Classical music gets a raw deal. There isn’t much interest among government leaders for our musical heritage, never mind contemporary compositions’.” The Guardian (London) 03/23/01

THE WHINING CONTINUES: The recording industry plans to file a complaint in federal court next week that Napster is not adequately complying with the court’s order to filter copyrighted material. Napster says they’re doing their best, and that the lists of songs provided to them are “riddled with errors.” BBC 03/22/01

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU: The recording industry has been threatening to attack online music piracy (Napster-style swapping) “at the source,” meaning the user doing the downloading, rather than the company facilitating it. A new report claims to have screen shots of an unobtrusive program that tracks the movements of individual users who are illegally transferring copyrighted material. The Register 03/22/01

MUSIC FOR REAL PEOPLE: Seeing a classical music performance has become ridiculously expensive in recent years, and more and more concertgoers are disenchanted with the remote sameness of most traditional classical concerts. But there is serious music to be had elsewhere, and churches have become adept at taking up the slack. Not only do many churches present professional-quality programs, but they are generally more likely to embrace the music of minority groups that are often priced out of the concert hall. New York Times 3/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HOW TO WRITE A HIT: Composer Joan Tower is quite well-known within the walls of the music world for her forays into multiple styles of composition, and her enthusiasm for the profession. But audiences might never have heard of her, had it not been for the title of a 1987 work. Tower confesses that she doesn’t think it’s a very good piece, but like it or not, “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” has become a phenomenon, and a huge hit for most orchestras that perform it. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/23/01

THE REAL CROSSOVER ARTIST: When Hong Kong was preparing to be reunited with China, officials wanted a Grand Musical Event for the occasion. They turned to Chinese composer Tan Dun, who has showed a unique flair for the interweaving of musical styles, and an enthusiasm for large-scale works. Next Monday night, Tan could walk off with three Oscars for a recent film score, and “[he] couldn’t be more delighted.” Boston Herald 03/23/01

ORPHEUS IN THE BOARD ROOM: The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is one of the most respected ensembles of its kind, not only for the quality of performance they regularly achieve, but for their unmatched skill at “leaderless” communication. (Orpheus has no conductor.) That skill is of great interest to the business world, and a new book and series of seminars delve into the “Orpheus Model.” The Christian Science Monitor 03/23/01

TRYING TO KEEP UP: Ken Burns’s recent PBS documentary on the history of jazz sent record sales for the genre soaring. But most of the albums being sold are big-name, big-label recordings that “Jazz” drew heavily on, and smaller jazz labels worry that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in exploring what else is out there.One Chicago company typifies the role of the small record label trying to get listeners interested in its stable of musicians. Los Angeles Times 03/23/01

Thursday March 22

THE WOMAN CONDUCTOR: Marin Alsop is arguably one of today’s most prominent women conductors. “Alsop claims to have reached this important stage in her career without ever noticing any bias against her because of her sex. ‘My success is probably due to the fact that I’ve never interpreted any rejection as gender-based’.” The Telegraph (London) 03/22/01

• Previously: WHERE ARE ALL THE WOMEN? “Conducting is a competitive field, but some say that for women, it seems bitterly so. America’s best-known female conductors have little to show for decades of effort. None of the 27 American orchestras with the largest budgets has appointed a woman music director, and many insiders expect a woman president to be sworn in long before a female takes the helm of one of America’s top orchestras.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 03/17/01

A QUESTION OF MARKETING? Philadelphia’s new $265 million performing arts center is opening in December. The first season features a lineup of local and touring orchestras, theatre troupes, and other performers. But the Philadelphia Orchestra, the main tenant of the RPAC (and the reason for its construction) asked not to be included in the wave of promotional material released yesterday. Philadelphia Inquirer 03/22/01

LA BOCELLI TOURS: Andrea Bocelli, the blind Italian tenor has overcome the disdain (and sometimes outright hostility) of music critics to become an arena-size sensation. He’s starting his fifth U.S. tour, accompanied by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. But although he speaks confidently of his abilities and shrugs off the criticisms, Bocelli will be skipping New York, just as he has avoided the world’s other operatic centers. Nando Times 03/22/01

THE WAGNER PROBLEM: “How can we enjoy the output of artists whose personal lives or private beliefs are reprehensible? To say that private behavior shouldn’t affect public estimation is noble but naive: It does affect it, no matter how much we might wish it didn’t. We can’t unlearn what we already know. ” Chicago Tribune 03/22/01

PACIFIC SYMPHONY GETS A BOOST: “The Santa Ana-based Pacific Symphony has been awarded a $1.3-million grant from the newly formed Hal and Jeanette Segerstrom Family Foundation, orchestra officials said Wednesday. The grant, the first to be made by the foundation, will be given over five years. Funds will underwrite the 20 classical subscription concerts presented yearly at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.” Los Angeles Times 03/22/01

FAMOUS LETTERS: London’ s Royal Philharmonic Society has a collection of composers’ scores and letters (including one by a dying Beethoven, promising a 10th symphony). Now the RPS is selling its collection to bring in money to commission new music and set up an education programme, and there are fears the collection will leave the country. The Independent (London) 03/22/01

BUT IT’S REALLLLLY HARD! Napster is complaining that complying with the court order to block all access to copyrighted material on its song-swapping service is turning out to be, well, every bit as difficult as everyone had expected it to be. The recording industry is, understandably, not terribly sympathetic. Wired 03/21/01

Wednesday March 21

CUTTING CONTEMPORARY: Berlin’s Music Biennale is where serious new music comes to be heard. This year “all 22 concerts were well attended. Many were sold out, and on three occasions there were dramatic scenes at the box office when customers were turned away. One performance began with a half-hour delay to allow more chairs to be brought in. Contemporary music performances are hardly the usual venue for such brouhaha.” So why are German cost-cutters canceling the festival? Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/21/01

NEW AGE FESTIVAL: The controversial Gerard Mortier is leaving the toney Salzburg Festival to start up a new enterprise in rural Germany. “A world apart from the elite refinement of Salzburg, the Ruhr Festival will reflect the proletarian ecology in dance, rock and sports-related events alongside opera and classical music. ‘I have to consider how to make the culture belong to the people.’ Although his plans for 2003 are still sketchy, it sounds like one of the brightest arts ideas for years, and one that will assuredly shed glamour on the grimy region.” The Telegraph (London) 03/21/01

Tuesday March 20

THE NEXT FREE MUSIC: It works like this: “There are thousands of streaming-audio radio stations online at any given moment. You tell the BitBop tuner what band or song you want to listen to and the software searches for stations that are either playing your song at that very moment or likely to do so soon. The BitBop Tuner will not only play the song for you immediately, but will also make a permanent copy of it on your hard drive.” Salon 03/20/01

BONDING: British composer Monty Norman was awarded £30,000 in libel damages for a Sunday Times story that said he did not write the theme for the James Bond films. Norman claimed the story trashed his career. The Guardian (London) 03/20/01

VIENNA DISCORD: Vienna State Opera on why it’s abandoning the famed Vienna Boys Choir: “We can no longer have a situation where we invite the choir to rehearse, train a boy for a certain part and then find on opening night he has been flown off to sing in Tokyo and another boy has taken his place.” The Scotsman 03/20/01

WATER MUSIC: Just as a rehearsal was to get underway, a water pipe bursts over the heads of the musicians of the Boise Philharmonic. “It was a downpour of black, filthy water. One of our musicians was wearing a white sweater, and she looked like a Dalmation after the downpour.” Idaho Stateman 03/19/01

THE NEW QUIET: Pop music is changing. “It feels like a sea change. The new quiet is music of serene melodies and smoldering seductions, of desolate scenes and less-is-more orchestrations. It rarely gets agitated, and it makes few Limp Bizkit-style “pay attention” demands on listeners. It buries its provocations beneath oceans of calm. It is the work of artists who, in rethinking much of the architecture of pop, have come to value sleekness over density, restraint over vented rage, single lines over thick layers, European cool over American heat.” Philadelphia Inquirer 03/20/01

BETWEEN THE GRAMMIES AND THE OSCARS, there’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No cute name for the award yet. This year’s winners included Paul Simon, Michael Jackson, Queen, Aerosmith, RiTchie Valens, and Steely Dan. (Didn’t they just win something?) The Nando Times (AP) 03/19/01

Monday March 19

MET REJOINS LINCOLN CENTER EFFORT: Two months ago the Metropolitan Opera unexpectedly announced it was pulling out of plans for a $1.5 billion makeover of Lincoln Center. Now the Met is rejoining the project, but under an arrangement that gives it much greater say. The New York Times 03/19/01 (one-time registration required for access)

SACKING THE CHOIRBOYS: The Vienna Boys Choir has been beset by critics of late. Now it has lost its most important affiliation. “The Vienna State Opera said last week its agreement with the 500-year-old choir would not be renewed when it expires in 2004. The opera plans to establish a rival choir.” Sunday Times (London) 03/18/01

MUSIC + IMAGE = In some serious circles, describing a music score as “film music” is meant as derisive. But “there is a growing feeling that music in the context of film, performed as a live event, could be the most exciting new art form of the era. We have begun to notice that the combination of music and the filmed image can seduce us at the deepest level, with its ability to mimic the form of a dream.” Financial Times 03/19/01

ARDOIN DEAD: John Ardoin, for 32 years music critic for the Dallas Morning News, and an expert on the life of Maria Callas, has died at the age of 66. Dallas Morning News 03/19/01

Sunday March 18

WHERE ARE ALL THE WOMEN? “Conducting is a competitive field, but some say that for women, it seems bitterly so. America’s best-known female conductors have little to show for decades of effort. None of the 27 American orchestras with the largest budgets has appointed a woman music director, and many insiders expect a woman president to be sworn in long before a female takes the helm of one of America’s top orchestras.” Minneapolis Star Tribune 03/17/01

HERE’S ONE OF THE MEN: When the Cleveland Orchestra selected the relatively young and unknown Franz Welser-Möst as its next music director, eyebrows were raised all over the music world. But as the director-designate prepares to take the reins in 2002, critical perception is softening, and some are even whispering that Cleveland may have found their Bernstein. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/18/01

WORLDWIDE WEBCASTING: The big problem of streaming audio and video on the web is that such webcasts cross international boundaries, and require multiple sets of legal permissions. “To figure out what licensing agreements a business needs to launch a legal, digital music company is like searching for the beginning of an M.C. Escher painting –- everywhere you look, it seems like you’ve found the start of the maze, until you look somewhere else.” Wired 03/17/01

FORGETTING VERDI: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the great Italian operatic composer Giuseppe Verdi, and the music world has cranked up for the occasion to deliver… well, next to nothing, actually. Why the hesitance to program some of the finest operas ever written? For one thing, Verdi’s stuff is just excruciatingly difficult to sing, and most of today’s stars are loath to take the chance. Philadelphia Inquirer 03/18/01

CAN’T GET NO RESPECT: This week, the Metropolitan Opera premieres a new production of Prokofiev’s rarely-heard and much-reviled “The Gambler.” That the Met is performing the work at all begs the question: just what went wrong with Russian opera in the twentieth century? The world’s leading expert on Russian music weighs in with the opinion that Prokofiev and his contemporaries were simply too disdainful of operatic convention, and too far ahead of their time. New York Times 03/17/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HOW I FOUND A MISSING MOZART: A previously unknown Mozart arrangement of Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus was found in Halifax, West Yorkshire last week. “The Halifax score is a beautiful piece of work – a fair copy, with scarcely any erasures or crossings out.” The Guardian (London) 03/17/01

THE CHANGING IRISH: For centuries Ireland has been a homogeneous country – a country people left to find a better life rather than a destination for others in search of their dreams. But Ireland’s newly prosperous economy has changed all that, and the face of Irish music is changing too. Christian Science Monitor 03/16/01

SMALLER IS BETTER? The classical music recording business continues to wilt. But while larger labels have a tough time, a number of smaller recording companies chalk up successes. Christian Science Monitor 03/16/01

ATTENTION PAID: Mildred Bailey is hardly a household name, even among jazz aficionados. But throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Bailey was as big as stars got in the world of the big band. A stunning singer and legendary diva, she later developed a terrible overeating disorder, and died in obscurity in 1951. Now, a small New England-based record company has re-released her complete recordings for Columbia. Hartford Courant 03/18/01

Friday March 16

SAVING THE BOLSHOI: “The Bolshoi was a facade of the Soviet empire; and sure enough, when the empire collapsed, the facade started to crumble. The chaos which engulfed the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union could not have left the Bolshoi untouched.” Now it is damaged and discredited. Now conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky has stepped in to try and save the day. Financial Times 03/16/01

IF NOT NAPSTER… Digital song-swapping is down almost 60% since Napster introduced its filters Wednesday to block copyrighted material, with the number of downloads per individual user down from 172 files each to 71. But “anecdotal evidence already indicates that users were switching to other peer-to-peer song-swap systems. It is only going to be a matter of days before Napster users start migrating to those systems in large numbers.” Inside.com 3/15/01

• HAVING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT TOO: Having successfully crippled Napster (at least partially), record labels are turning to coopting the song-swapper’s mission, and preparing to launch their own streaming/downloading sites. Wired 03/16/01
• IX-NAY ON THE EVER-CLAY ICKS-TRAY: The website “Aimster” has removed, at Napster’s request, a program that allowed users to translate song titles into Pig Latin to circumvent filtering software designed to stop illegal downloads. Nando Times (AP) 03/15/01

CROSSOVER ALBUM, HOLD THE CHEESE: Elvis Costello is no stranger to the world of classical crossover music, having recorded a full-length album of his vocals backed by the Brodsky Quartet nearly a decade ago. Now, the iconoclastic pop singer has teamed up with soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, and the result is an album that may actually give crossover albums a good name. National Post (Canada) [from the Daily Telegraph] 03/16/01

CROSSING BOUNDARIES: Think “jazz orchestra,” and you probably think of the classic Big Band, or perhaps a Dixieland ensemble. The New Black Music Repertory Ensemble thinks a jazz orchestra is these things and more, and their unique method of weaving the disparate sounds of early jazz, hard-edged bebop, and the avant-garde into a single evening is winning converts to serious African-American music of all kinds. Chicago Tribune 03/16/01

APATHY ALL AROUND: There’s still plenty to rail against in the world, so why isn’t anyone singing about it? “Never mind where have all the flowers gone; where have all the protest singers gone? The Falklands gave us Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’ and Billy Bragg’s ‘Island of No Return.’ But the Kosovo conflict has produced nary a B-side.” The Times (London) 3/16/01

Thursday March 15

PLUGGING THE HENZE: With a major new Henze opera set to debut and dismal advance ticket sales, London’s Royal Opera House is taking to some old-fashioned PR to try and generate buzz. The company is comping TV celebs to the production, hoping to get them to plug the opera on their shows. The Independent (London) 03/15/01

A LITTLE THING LIKE FILTERS? As Napster attempts to filter copyrighted songs from its service, an army of free Pig-Latin encoder/decoder programs proliferates on the net. What are they? They translate music file names into Pig Latin so they escape the filters…Wired 03/14/01

PAY FOR PLAY (ISN’T THIS ILLEGAL?): “Listeners may not realize it, but radio today is largely bought by the record companies. Most rock and Top 40 stations get paid to play the songs they spin by the companies that manufacture the records. But it’s not payola — exactly. Here’s how it works.” Salon 03/14/01

PRICED OUT: Young string players are facing an instrument crisis. “In the past 10 years, prices of violins have more than doubled. My generation faces the prospect of never owning a violin without the help of a patron.” Philadelphia Inquirer 03/15/01

Wednesday March 14

A DELICATE BALANCE: Running the clubby Glyndebourne festival has always been seen as a plum opera job, but that may be changing. New director David Picker, whose appointment was announced this week will have to keep a delicate balance between “those who hanker after the days when opera at Glyndebourne was an entertainment for a large extended family, and those who want to see it more at the cutting edge of the art form.” The Guardian (London) 03/14/01

A NEW “GLORIA”: An unknown choral work by Handel (believed to have been written in 1708-9, when the 22-year-old composer was in Rome) was recently discovered in London’s Royal Academy and will receive its world premiere Thursday night. “It is worth emphasising that this is not a ‘new Messiah.’ But there will be a race to get the first recording out. It really is that good.” The Times (London) 3/14/01

NEW MOZART: A new work by Mozart – an adaptation of Handel’s oratorio “Judas Maccabaeus” dating from the 1780s – has been found in a Yorkshire council records office in England. BBC 03/14/01

TWICE DISPOSSESSED: A wave of talented Russian composers fled the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s for new lives in Britain and throughout Europe. But the thriving composing community they envisioned hasn’t reestablished itself, and for the most part their work – some of it very good – goes unplayed and thus unknown. “Shunned by compatriot conductors, undiscovered by westerners, Russia’s emigré composers are the unheard ghosts at Europe’s over-subsidised feast.” The Telegraph (London) 3/14/01

A BALANCING ACT: Following on the heels of Nicholas Snowman’s abrupt resignation last fall, Glyndebourne’s new director David Pickard (formerly of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) will have a tough act to follow. “Pickard’s role will be to keep the balance between those who hanker after the days when opera at Glyndebourne was an entertainment for a large extended family, and those who want to see it more at the cutting edge of the art form.” The Guardian (London) 3/14/01

SEATTLE SCORES: Seattle has become one of the busiest places outside L.A. for recording film scores – a sign of increasing “runaway production,” the practice of hiring movie talent outside Hollywood to cut down on costs. Last month alone, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra played 26 soundtrack jobs, a total of 100 soundtracks last year. Needless to say, L.A.’s musicians are not pleased to see their work moving north. NPR 3/13/01 [Real audio file]

DO YOU HAVE AN EAR FOR MUSIC? If you do, you almost certainly inherited it. Research shows that you can’t learn to judge musical pitch; it’s in your genes. If you’re not sure, there’s an MP3 file to download which will help you find out. The New Scientist 03/08/01

ELEVATOR MUSIC WITH A 20 SECOND REVERB: An enormous grain elevator in Montreal has been turned into a giant musical instrument. With the help of high-speed internet connections, the Silophone “transmits and receives sounds sent in from around the world, which are transformed, reverberated, and coloured by this historical hulk, leaving a cacophony of haunting echoes. Those echoes, in turn, are captured by microphones and rebroadcast on phone lines to Web and telephone users.” The Globe and Mail (Canada) 03/14/01

Tuesday March 13

EXTRAVAGANT CLAIM: “It is only a decade-and-a-half since the London Symphony Orchestra hit rock-bottom, and now it is unquestionably the leading British orchestra. On a good night others can match it, but no other British band is playing consistently at the LSO’s level, and only the LSO could claim to have knocked America’s biggest heavyweights off their pedestals. Indeed, the LSO has surely become the first British orchestra to be mentioned regularly in the same breath as the Berlin Philharmonic and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw.” The Times (London) 03/13/01

BACH IN BLACK? Classical music has always been influenced by popular tunes, although “serious composers” are often loath to admit it. Still, at a time when pundits are continually proclaiming the death of serious art music, it can be difficult for a composer who openly embraces the work of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison to be accepted by his peers. Even when he’s a professor at Princeton. Boston Herald 03/13/01

NAPSTER TO GET LEGAL: The CEO of Bertelsmann says Napster will be relaunched in July and that “a re-launched Napster will likely charge $2.95 to $4.95 a month for a basic service and $5.95 to $9.95 for a premium service. Bertelsman, which owns the BMG label, has invested in Napster as part of a bid to convince music companies to drop their lawsuits and support a ‘legal’ version of the service.” Wired 03/12/01

• GUILTY PLEASURES: So Napster As We Know It is dead. The new Napster is yet to come. By law, now, trading music files without paying royaties is officially wrong. So how did so many users decide that it wasn’t? And what has the experience done for the millions who participated? For some, it has meant a guilt-free way of exploring the music they’d be too embarrassed to buy at the store. Boston Globe 03/13/01
• FREE FLOW: A group of programmers dedicated to keeping the flow of free internet music going is hard at work on son-of-Napster, which they say will circumvent the crackdown on Napster. “The Freenet programme is similar to the popular Napster file sharing software, but uses a different storage and retrieval system which maintains no central index and does not reveal where the files are stored.” BBC 03/13/01

Monday March 12

PAEAN TO ALBERT HALL: London’s Albert Hall may not be perfect acoustically. But inside it is magnificent. “We feel queasy about Victorian buildings, almost as we do about Victorian cooking. Nostalgia is a corrupt function of memory, but Albert and Fowke were not indulging in sentimental histrionics. They were mapping the known world with confidence and conviction. It is the resonance of this spiritual energy that makes us sometimes feel uncomfortable with Victorian buildings.” The Independent (London) 03/08/01

TECHNOLOGY CHANGES EVERYTHING: “The music industry is far too focused on the debate over MP3, Napster and music theft, and is missing out on the point that not only is their business model changing, but their current technological foundation – the CD – is just about obsolete for many people.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/12/01

A NEW HANDEL: A work by Handel is newly rediscovered in London’s Royal Academy. “The seven movement work for soprano and strings is thought to have been composed in Rome in 1707, when the composer was about 21 years old.” BBC 03/12/01

Sunday March 11

TRYING TO BE NEW: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette music critic takes the Pittsburgh Symphony to task for its conservative ways. So the orchestra invites him to a planning session, just to see the planning difficulties involved in programming new music. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 03/11/01

CLEVELAND CANCELS SOUTH AMERICA: The Cleveland Orchestra this week suddenly announced the cancelation of a major tour of South America. Why? “Presenters in South American didn’t schedule a sufficient number of performances for the tour, especially in Buenos Aires, to make the trip viable.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/09/01

WHEN WOTAN RAN THE MOB: There’s something operatic about HBO’s “The Sopranos,” something Wagnerian, something Nibelungian. Boston Herald 03/09/01

SALONEN STAYING: When big prestigious music directorships come open Esa-Pekka Salonen is often mentioned as a candidate. But he’s staying put in LA. “In his time in Los Angeles, Salonen has observed the orchestra’s audiences becoming younger and more racially diverse. He has witnessed a major personnel changeover (almost 30 players) in the orchestra, and he finds the playing level at auditions ‘absolutely stunning’.” San Francisco Chronicle 03/11/01

Friday March 9

BUSONI? WASN’T THAT BACH’S LAST NAME?: “He could play louder and faster than anyone alive, and his Liszt interpretations had ‘chords like cast bronze.'” He heard Brahms play and hung around with Schoenberg. He scared people with his intellect, and sometimes with his music. That was Ferruccio Busoni, who is remembered, if at all, for Bach transcriptions and for an unfinished Doktor Faust. Maybe it’s time for a re-evaluation. The New Republic 03/12/01

RUMORS OF ITS DEATH ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED: Napster has been shut down. No, it is being shut down. What we mean is, it’s in the process of being treated as if it might eventually be in a position which someone with minimal Internet skills might mistake for shut down. “So basically Napster is still a free-for-all for everyone — unless, that is, you are a fan of Roy Orbison… much to the chagrin of at least a couple Napster users, the service has started blocking people who have Roy songs in their libraries.” Wired 03/09/01

Thursday March 8

CLEVELAND BAILS ON TOUR: The Cleveland Orchestra has canceled its upcoming tour of South America, only two months before it was scheduled to kick off. Management did not immediately provide a reason for the cancellation, but the move calls into question the status of the orchestra’s planned 2001-02 European tour. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/08/01

CATALOGUING THE KIROV: It has long been suspected that the Kirov-Mariinsky Opera in St. Petersburg is sitting on one of the world’s greatest archives of musical material. Financial considerations had previously prevented the opera from any attempt at cataloguing its stash, but now, with the help of the U.S. Library of Congress, scholars may finally get a look at the countless scores that were previously a part of the Tsar’s personal archive. Washington Post 03/08/01

ABBADO ILL: Conductor Claudio Abbado recently had his entire stomach removed because of cancer. “Those who saw photographs of the conductor over the past few months were shocked at how emaciated and miserable he looked. This naturally gave rise to a great deal of speculation. This was even more of a strain upon Abbado than the illness itself, which was indeed serious, so much so that he took the step – which must certainly have been difficult for him – of countering all the speculation.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03/08/01

END RUN THROUGH NAPSTER: The judge may have ordered Napster to start filtering out copyrighted songs, but Napster users are resourceful. They’re finding ways around the filters and traffic is still robust. Inside.com 03/07/01

BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER: Don’t think the other music retailers out there on the web aren’t cheering the looming demise of Napster. In particular, EMusic, which has joined the list of companies suing the embattled song-swapper, is hoping that Napster’s loss will be its gain. Wired 03/08/01

PAYING FOR IT: Next season, the Philadelphia Orchestra moves into its beautiful new hall in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. But new digs cost money, and apparently selling the hall’s naming rights to a phone company (really, now: “Verizon Hall”?) didn’t cover everything. Ticket prices will jump a mind-boggling 16% next season, and the ever-mysterious “ticket surcharge” will double. Philadelphia Inquirer 03/08/01

TIME TO SAY GOODBYE: Jung-Ho Pak, the conductor who has been largely credited with resurrecting the San Diego Symphony from the ashes of bankruptcy, has announced that he will step down as the orchestra’s artistic director and principal conductor after next season. (First item) Los Angeles Times 03/08/01

TAKING A STEP BACK: Minnesota-based University of St. Thomas is making budget cuts, and the 15-year-old Conservatory of Music is one of the casualties. Although it was certainly not a major musician training ground, the conservatory had gained respect for its dedication to community music, and was one of the more popular programs at the university. Minneapolis Star Tribune 03/08/01

BEHIND THE SCENES: Audio artist Janet Cardiff has been awarded Canada’s $50,000 “Millennium Prize,” one of the largest arts awards in the history of the country. Cardiff’s latest piece, “Forty Part Motet,” consists of a massive array of 40 speakers, and very little else. “Each of the speakers emits the sound of a distinct voice singing one part from . . .a 12-minute choral work written by the British composer Thomas Tallis in 1575. During the performers’ intermission, we hear the singers chatting, working out difficulties in the score, or discussing their various jobs and interests before the performance resumes again.” The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 03/08/01

WHAT ARE THE VILLAGE PEOPLE DOING HERE? The NEA and the recording industry have published a list of the “best” 365 songs of the 20th century. Why? Because everybody loves lists, that’s why. You love lists. Yes you do. Don’t argue with us. You want to argue, argue about whether “YMCA” (#86) ought to be ranked nearly 50 spots above Frank Sinatra (#144). Dallas Morning News 03/08/01

MUSIC GETS A NEW LOOK: The University of Illinois has unveiled an exhibit that focuses on the visual side of the music world. “Between Sound and Vision” is no high-tech, cutting-edge, multimedia effort – what the creators of the exhibit have done is take the truly “inside baseball” parts of the contemporary music world (scores by John Cage, unconventional in the extreme, make up the lion’s share of the exhibit) and displayed them as artworks that stand on their own. The idea is to explore the ever-expanding definition of music. Chicago Tribune 03/08/01

Wednesday March 7

NAPSTER BITES: As ordered by a judge, the file loader has three days to remove copyrighted songs from its trading lists. Or else. Wired 03/06/01

OPERA VS SPORT – AN UNFAIR MATCH: In the UK it now costs less to buy a ticket for Covent Garden opera than for a Premiere League soccer match. Does that mean Opera will become a mass entertainment? Not hardly. “Sport has the kind of mass appeal that art can never attain, by reason of its child-like simplicity. In Italy, crucible of opera, Venice and Bari have had their theatres burned down and citizens have not taken to the streets to demand restoration. If a Serie A soccer ground were to be shut down, there would be a bloody revolution.” The Telegraph (London) 03/07/01

THE BEST JAZZ ALBUM EVER? Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” has sold 5 million copies since it was released in 1959, making it the biggest-selling album in jazz history. But the recording has had a major influence on subsequent generations of jazz artists as well. The Independent (London) 03/05/01

ROLL OVER HEIFETZ: Violinists have always gloried in their ability to dazzle audiences with fingerboard pyrotechnics and needlessly speedy performances of blatant showpieces. But a new stage show takes showing off to a whole new level, using the wildly popular “Riverdance” model as a starting point. Needless to say, audiences love it, and critics are dubious. Los Angeles Times 03/07/01

THE HONEYMOON BEGINS: When the Cleveland Orchestra announced that the young Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst would be its next music director, many critics jumped on the organization for moving too quickly, and settling for less than it deserved. But as Christoph von Dohnanyi’s tenure in Cleveland draws to a close, the orchestra and its leader-to-be seem genuinely appreciative of one another. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/07/01

BRINGIN’ IT TO THE PEOPLE: Composer and San Francisco radio host Charles Amirkhanian is on a mission to unite the creators of new music with an increasingly skeptical public. His unique program on KPFK-FM makes few judgments, and refuses to cater to one particular style of composition. The resulting mish-mash of modern music has garnered an unlikely following for what Amirkhanian calls “outsider music.” San Francisco Bay Guardian 03/07/01

BUT HE DIED SO YOUNG… Fans of dead pop stars are fanatical in their devotion. “These fans are a gentler breed than the celebrity stalkers of the living. Although a few do skirt the edges of parody at times, they reveal more clearly than any conventional star biography why rock music can mean so much, and also how far from normality it can take you.” The Guardian (London) 03/07/01

Tuesday March 6

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU SPELL GUILTY? Napster started blocking access to copyright-protected music Monday by implementing new name-based filters. One problem: the slightest typo can go undetected by the filter, leaving songs in question still available to all. Example: “Metallica/Enter Sandman” is no longer available, but “Metellica — Enter Sanman” is. “It seems safe to assume that Napster’s professed hope for an amicable working relationship with the labels on screening will likely go unfulfilled. One reason is that the number of possible file names is so large.” Inside.com 3/05/01

WHO NEEDS WHOM? Free-music fans continue arguing that Napster doesn’t harm the music industry; it actually serves it well by letting consumers sample before they buy – and then buy even more. “The music industry wouldn’t last two weeks without Napster.” New York Times 3/06/01 (one-time registration required for access)

HOW GOOD WAS MENDELSSOHN? Audiences love him. Critics often don’t. Shaw criticized his “kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio-mongering.” Other commentators routinely categorize him as a “minor master.” Is this any way to treat the composer of the E-Flat Octet for Strings, the Scottish Symphony, and the E-Minor Violin Concerto? Commentary 03/01

MORE THAN JUST MOVIES: Ennio Morricone is well known for his film scores, but few fans are aware he’s also been composing classical composition all these years. Are there differences between composing for movie audiences and chamber halls? “In writing a film score you are absolutely aware of the public, and of writing music the audience understands. I would never think of distracting a film audience with complicated music. The audience for movies does not usually have a high musical culture.” The Telegraph (London) 3/06/01

Monday March 5

MUSIC CONTINUES FLOWING: Napster had promised it was going to start filtering out copyrighted music this weekend. But “all the top 10 songs listed on the Billboard Hot 100 list were available on the company’s servers late yesterday, including the No 1 Stutter by Joe featuring Mystikal. Songs by longtime Napster foe Metallica also showed up in searches.” The Age (Melbourne) 03/05/01

OH YES, IT’LL BE GREAT: The English National Opera’s production of David Sawer’s opera “From Morning to Midnight” is new. How new? “With rehearsals due to start this month, its penultimate scene is still being faxed, page by page, to waiting singers desperate to familiarise themselves with the score.” The Independent (London) 03/05/01

BATTLING THE MUSIC BIZ: Courtney Love believes the music recording business is rotten to the core. So “she is suing her recording company, the Universal Music Group, to release her from her contract and what she sees as a form of coercive indenture that she never asked for and feels she never deserved. Unlike plaintiffs in previous suits, she is not merely in it for herself; she has every intention of bringing the whole edifice of the music business crashing down all around her.” The Independent (London) 03/05/01

EASY LISTENING: Michael Torke is one of a generation of composers coming into its own for whom listenability is a primary goal. “My generation is trying to bring back the relationship with the audience. We love the audience, we need the audience. The audience is made up of wonderful, intelligent, vital, vibrant people and I want my music to communicate.” The Scotsman 03/05/01

Sunday March 4

THE IDEAL SOPRANO: They say there are no more Verdi sopranos. “What Verdi required in nearly all his operas was a soprano with a dramatic color and weight of timbre and wide compass; stamina in the high range; both boldness and delicacy in coloratura; vigorous and flexible attack in the low, middle and high range; a voice capable of conveying tenderness, aggression and conflicting feelings; an artistic personality of imagination, temperament, passion, imperiousness, nobility and warmth. And since Verdi’s time, another requirement has been thrown into the mix: linguistic authority.” Now what could be difficult about all that? Opera News 03/01

GETTING AROUND A CRIPPLED NAPSTER: Millions of music fans jammed onto Napster’s servers this weekend to try and beat court-imposed filtering out of copyrighted songs. Alternative music file-trading services also had big surges of users as traders explored alternative means of getting music they wanted. Dallas Morning News (AP) 03/04/01

THE MEZZO WHO WOULDN’T QUIT: Frederica von Stade is 55 and said to be winding down her career. But some new operas have got her attention – she’s commited to some revivals of Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” and anxious to participate in a new Richard Danielpour effort. That takes her to age 60. And then… Boston Globe 03/04/01

Friday March 2

ATTACKING THE CRITIC (ARE YOU NUTS?): Are Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra trying to get Washington Post music critic Philip Kennicott fired? “The NSO attacked Kennicott in a stinging letter posted on its Web site, calling him “irresponsible” and insinuating that he had concocted a quote.” The Post, meanwhile, has nominated Kennicott for a Pulitzer. Washingtonian 03/01

WHO TO BLAME? Did Arnold Schoenberg bring on the end of music? Is he to blame for the current predicament of contemporary music? The evidence is rather thin. Maybe he merely represents the end of a way of thinking that art is a linear process in which “improvement” is the goal. The Independent (London) 03/02/01

THE ESSENTIAL NAPSTER: Wondering about the fuss over Napster? Check out ArtsJournal’s annotated primer on the subject. It should surprise no one that the issue is neither about the sacred principle of intellectual property rights nor about the need for fair compensation to artists. It’s about who gets to keep the profits of a lucrative worldwide multi-billion-dollar business. Arts Journal 03/02/01

Thursday March 1

WIN? WIN WHAT?  So the recording industry beats Napster. “The music industry (by which we mean the five companies that supply about 90 percent of the world’s popular music) is dying not because of Napster but because of an underlying economic truth. In the world of digital products that can be copied and moved at no cost, traditional distribution structures, which depend on the ownership of the content or of the right to distribute, are fatally inefficient.” The Nation 03/12/01

LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD TENORS: The Three Tenors have been classical music’s hottest act (not to mention cash cow) since their debut in 1990 – but Pavarotti, Domingo, and Carreras are all “approaching their 60s and will soon need walking frames to reach those high Cs. So what happens when the fat lady finally sings? The world’s major record companies have embarked on a mad, expensive scramble to locate and groom the musicians that could succeed the Titanic Trio.” Time (Europe) 3/05/01

BOHEMIAN GROOVE: What is it about the music of the Bohemian composers (Dvorak, Janacek, et al) that listeners find so captivating? Maybe it’s the politics? “Unlike German musical nationalism, which was founded on the idea of the unification of disparate political states, Czech music has always been about freedom of speech and autonomous expression.” The Guardian (London) 3/01/01

Wednesday February 28

• DURABLE BRASS: The Chicago Symphony’s brass section is thought by many to be the best around. One of the reasons for that is about to go away. Adolph Herseth, principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony for an amazing 53 years, will retire from the orchestra at the end of the CSO’s summer season. He will be replaced by the current associate principal trumpet of the San Francisco Symphony. Chicago Tribune 02/28/01
• SELLING SHARES IN MUSIC: England’s New Cambridge Singers wanted to commission a new work from Richard Rodney Bennett. But it was expensive. So the chorus’s director took to an e-mail list and offered fellow choral directors a share of the commission for $500 apiece. Fifteen took him up on it and a new piece was born. The Independent (London) 02/24/01
• OPERA POLITICS FLAME UP IN BERLIN: Berlin has three opera houses, and it can’t afford to run all of them. But any talk of change inflames passions. “Such is the passion of opera politics here that a banal battle over spending priorities has awakened residual East-West tensions and exposed simmering German distrust of Berlin as the capital of a united Germany.” The New York Times 02/28/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• DEFENDING AUTHENTICITY: The debate over the worth of period performance continues: “A decade ago. . . ‘authentic,’ performances usually meant playing Beethoven faster. All the while, though, earlier music . . . has been experiencing more radical transformations, ones that challenge the idea that classical compositions are static objects on the cultural landscape.” Philadelphia Inquirer 02/28/01
• RIAA GETS SERIOUS: The recording industry is enlisting the support of top Republican politicians as it prepares for what record company execs hope will be the final charge against Napster. Wired 02/27/01
• INDUSTRY LAYOFFS: The AOL Time Warner merger went through last month with honchos on all sides promising massive budget cuts and the elimination of some 2400 jobs, 600 of those in the Warner Music subgroup. The hatcheting has begun, and the head of Warner Bros. Records is out. Other label execs will likely follow. Variety 02/28/01
• FILM MUSIC YOU DON’T HAVE TO SEE: Aaron Copland once said that film music is “a small lamp that you place beneath the screen to warm it”. But must film scores always play second-string to the images on screen? Maybe not… The Guardian (London) 02/28/01

Tuesday February 27

• WHAT WOULD THE ALL-STAR GAME LOOK LIKE? The Kennedy Center’s new head man says he wants to expand the complex with two new buildings, one of which would be a “Cooperstown-style Performing Arts Hall of Fame.” The idea raises an immediate controversy: When Simon Rattle is inducted, will it be in a Birmingham or Berlin uniform? Washington Post 02/27/01
• DOING IT RIGHT: Even as America’s major orchestras continue to toil in closely-guarded secrecy to secure the services of the world’s great conductors, one of the country’s scrappiest and most unconventional ensembles is doing it a new way: with musician input, a public list of candidates, and announced “tryout” concerts. The Oregon Symphony may just be on to something. San Francisco Classical Voice 02/27/01
• SAY IT AIN’T SO, J.S.! Debate has raged for years over the distinctly anti-Semitic vocal music of Richard Wagner, and of late, other composers have come in for accusations of racism. But J.S. Bach? In truth, the charge is anti-Judaism, not anti-Semitism, in the great St. John Passion, but many scholars are taking it seriously. Philadelphia Inquirer 02/27/01
• FINDING AN AUDIENCE? “People who actually care about opera do well to worry about the art form becoming associated with a single segment of society.” On the one-hand, it has become a high-fashion, elitist enterprise that few can gain admission to unless they’ve got the money. On the other can it be “popular opera, well done and at a decent price?” The Times (London) 02/27/01
• NAPSTER & CD SALES: Has Napster hurt sales of compact disks in the US? That’s what recording execs are claiming. Sales of CD singles have fallen (even though the industry made more money than ever last year). BBC 02/27/01
  • IT ISN’T GOING AWAY: Even as Napster prepares for its next court date, countless other music-on-demand services try to come up with new ways of picking up where Napster may be forced to leave off. What’s legal seems fairly fluid, and entrepeneurs want to be prepared to take advantage of any loopholes they find. Wired 02/27/01
  • THE PLOT THICKENS: A German newspaper is reporting that a Napster-like song-swapping service that was beta-tested earlier this month was in fact designed by the Bertelsmann record group, in preparation for the possibility of a Napster shutdown. Inside.com 02/26/01

Monday February 26

• SHOWING UP FOR CLASSICAL RADIO: Chicago just lost one of its classical music stations. Music fans don’t want to lose the other. So this weekend the remaining station held an on-air fundraiser, and the phones rang off the hook. “We don’t have enough phones; we don’t have enough volunteers. The level of support is without precedent.” Chicago Tribune 02/26/01
• DIVA DENIED: Spanish opera diva Montserrat Caballé – hailed as Spain’s greatest living soprano – has failed to gain membership into Barcelona’s 150-year-old all-male Cercle de Liceu opera club, which recently agreed to start considering women for membership amid a whirl of controversy. Caballé was among a group of nine other women applicants seeking entry into the male stronghold, all of whom were denied entry. “I don’t know why we have to listen to these machistas any more.” The Times (London) 2/26/01
• VIRTUAL VERDI: Verdi’s “Aida” is expensive to produce. Now an Italian conductor is creating a sound-and-light virtual stage set that he’s sure audiences will take for the real thing when his “Aida” premieres in Melbourne next winter. And he’s not just eyeing the bottom line; he thinks Verdi would have liked it better this way. “Verdi was a man of the people and the most popular composer of his day. Why make opera so sophisticated it scares exactly the same sort of people who used to worship him?” The Age (Melbourne) 2/26/01
• MAD OR DEPRESSED? Schumann spent the last two years of his life locked up in a mental institution. Now “an American academic has taken up his cause, contending that this was a brutal and unnecessary fate for a man who was not so much deranged as depressed. Schumann was not only denied his freedom, but at times even denied the paper on which to compose. He confronted that most horrifying of fates: being the one sane man in a house of the mad.” The Times (London) 02/26/01
• GERARD SCHWARZ TO LEAVE NEW YORK: Conductor steps down as music director of the New York Chamber Symphony after 25 years. New York Times 02/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday February 25

• MCFERRIN LEAVING MINNESOTA: Bobby McFerrin, the eclectic pop singer who has held the position of assistant conductor with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for the last seven years, is stepping down to pursue other interests, which reportedly include vocal composition, and a return to his solo career. Minneapolis Star Tribune 02/25/01
• LOOKING FOR A COMPROMISE: On Saturday, Napster asked the court that ruled against it to review its ruling, but the company changed its tune a bit. Napster is now asking that the court consider requiring it to pay royalty fees as an alternative to an outright shutdown. The tactic is unlikely to play well with devoted Napster advocates. Inside.com 02/24/01
  • GETTING COCKY: The recording industry, apparently buoyed by its recent court victory over Napster, is warning internet service providers that they may find themselves on the business end of a lawsuit if their service sanctions the free song-swapper. Nando Times (AP) 02/25/01
• HYPING THE CLIBURN: The buildup to the finals of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, has become the closest thing the classical music world has to Oscar buzz. The event has developed a cult following, and even spawned a smaller competition for amateur pianists. This week, the 5-person jury begins the endgame: culling 30 final competitors from the 137 who participated in “screening recitals” around the world. Dallas Morning News 02/25/01
• JARVI’S GAMBLE: Kristjan Jarvi is convinced that modern audiences are smart enough to sit through, and enjoy, modern music. He is equally certain that classical music must adapt to and embrace the newer musical traditions if it is to survive in an age of music-on-demand. The result of these convictions is Absolute Ensemble, an 18-member group that breaks every rule of the concert hall in the hope of saving the staid, stuffy world of the classics from itself. Detroit Free Press 02/25/01
• MORE MAAZEL MUSINGS: Marginalized or not, the American symphony orchestra still has much to offer the world. But appointments of old schoolers like Lorin Maazel continue to puzzle the nation’s critics. New York Times 02/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• GREATEST OF THE 20TH? The debate over Igor Stravinsky has always been a fierce one. Was he the greatest composer of the twentieth century, or an overrated, self-promoting musical bully? Did his decision to flee Russia compromise his music, or make it all the more important? With the century officially over, prominent musicians and composers are weighing in. Los Angeles Times 02/25/01
• FILLING IN THE GAPS: Charles Mingus was one of the great innovators of jazz, and has been written about, studied, and copied extensively. But until quite recently, little was known about the early output of the great bassist. A new recording reveals that Mingus was a rabblerouser from the very beginning, bending existing forms of jazz to suit the inimitable style that the world would come to know as his. Chicago Sun-Times 02/25/01

Saturday February 24

• PERFORMANCE PRACTICE ON THE BRINK: The period-performance movement has come under heavy fire in recent years from various musical heavyweights, for its rigid and unyielding vision of how music of a given era should be performed. But as elements of performance practice continue to seep into even the most modern ensembles’ musical vocabulary, will the period ensembles find themselves edged out by their own success? London Telegraph 02/24/01

Friday February 23

• THE GREAT MAESTRO DEBATE: For the public, whose contact with an orchestra’s music director tends to be limited to a view of his back as he leads yet another Beethoven symphony, the furor over the hiring process must seem somewhat perplexing. But critics and musicians alike are furiously debating the implications for the orchestral world as a whole in the wake of the New York and Philadelphia hirings. The most-frequently-heard complaint: why won’t anyone take a chance anymore? Christian Science Monitor 02/23/01
• IS CLASSICAL MUSIC DYING? For some time now, the classical music press has been holding a virtual deathwatch. But what does the evidence really say? ArtsJournal 02/23/01
• PURE NAKED GREED? Why were recording companies so quick to turn down Napster’s offer to pay them $1 billion? “While the money sounds like a huge chunk of change for the recording industry to pass up, that’s exactly what several label executives have said. The reason: The economics of the system don’t add up.” Wired 02/23/01
  • COMPETITION: Music giants Vivendi Universal and Sony are starting their own music-file sharing service. “The news is a fresh blow to Napster which is trying to reach a compromise with the record firms after losing a legal case about copyright.” BBC 02/23/01
  • WHY THE FIGHT OVER NAPSTER MATTERS: “Suggested revenue models for making money on the Net trickle up from the software industry: you give away the intellectual property, then make your money in services and customization. These models simply don’t make sense when talking about a great riff, an evocative piece of photojournalism or a work of fiction good enough to anthologize in the world of dead trees. Art is not information. Art is precisely that which can last and last — whereas nothing dates faster than a revision to a piece of software.” The New York Times 02/23/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Thursday February 22

• STEELY DAN WINS (OR IS IT EMINEM LOSES?): After one of the most controversial build-ups to any awards show in history, it was no gangsta rapper, but classic rocker Steely Dan who walked off the stage with top honors at the Staples Center last night. The official complete Grammy.com list of winners. Boston Globe 02/22/01
  • YES, VIRGINIA, THERE ARE CLASSICAL GRAMMYS: And here’s a wrap-up of who won them. Philadelphia Inquirer 02/22/01
  • WALKIN’ AWAY A WINNER: Eminem may not have exactly swept the Grammys, but when it comes to free publicity, he was the winner in a landslide. Even the other trophy-winning artists could seem to talk of nothing else backstage. Los Angeles Times 02/22/01
• CHUMP CHANGE? Trying desperately to stay alive, Napster offered the recording industry $1 billion this week. But the offer has been swiftly rejected: “It is Napster’s responsibility to come to the creative community with a legitimate business model and a system that protects our artists and copyrights. Nothing we have heard in the past and nothing we have heard today suggests they have yet been able to accomplish that task.” Variety 02/21/01
  • NAKED PLOY FOR SYMPATHY: “You could, perhaps, call Napster’s latest machinations the death throes of a company in the last minutes of life; but this final rally could also be interpreted as a savvy attempt to pull the record industry’s strings by gaining public sympathy. If the record labels don’t accept the billion, don’t they end up looking like killjoys determined to put an end to music sharing once and for all?” Salon 02/21/01
• LOOKING FOR LEADERSHIP: With orchestral press as East Coast-centered as it is, it can be very difficult for a major symphony orchestra outside the Boston-New-York-Philadelphia corridor to attract the top candidates for an open music director post. Toronto may have one of the toughest sells of all, but they are still in the running to name one of the top conductors in the world as their next artistic leader. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/22/01

Wednesday February 21

• NAPSTER OFFERS SETTLEMENT: Napster, under threat of being shut down and bankrupted by the courts, offers the recording industry $1 billion to drop their lawsuits. The company says it is “willing to pay $150 million per year in licensing fees to major record companies and $50 million per year in fees to independent labels and artists.” Wired 02/20/01
  • NAPSTER WILL NO LONGER BE FREE: With all that money going out, Napster hopes to bring more in by charging for on-line file exchange — from $5.95 to $9.95 for unlimited downloads. But questions remain, such as “whether Napster users will be willing to pay, whether the company will be able to build the technology to securely transfer files, and whether the record companies will go along.” The New York Times 02/21/01 (one-time registration required for access)
  • FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL: “Napster said that for months the company has pitched the record labels on a model that would split subscription revenues with 64 percent going to the labels and 36 percent going to Napster.” When the labels turned down the deal, Napster decided to guarantee the cash. Inside.com 02/20/01
• FAILURE TO REINVENT: Here and there, a few signs of success in the orchestral world. But by and large, orchestras are in a death spiral, with little good news to cheer about as they circle the drain. The Telegraph (London) 02/21/01
• YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU LIKE. THEY DO: You may think you know what music you like, but several companies are betting they know better. Just rate a few short sound tracks for them. They’ll analyze your answers, and tell you what you really like. “Some will even suggest Mozart when you thought you only wanted Metallica.” Hmm… probably better that than the other way around. Wired 02/20/01
• OH, YOU MUST HAVE BEEN A MUSICAL BABY: Everyone begins life with perfect pitch, say researchers who tested adults and eight-month-old infants. “[A]ll of the babies could tell the difference between segments of bell-like ‘songs’ that differed in absolute pitch…. most of the adults could not…. Our hypothesis is that the ability goes away for most of us because it’s not really useful – unless you happen to be speaking a tonal language like Thai or Mandarin.” New Scientist 02/20/01

Tuesday February 20

• CREATING THE FUTURE: The digital-music industry continues to grow at an ever-increasing rate, and the debate is on over what will become the consumer standards for the medium. Security is important, as is convenience, and several companies are banking on the potential of a secure streaming service called Bridgeport, which has the potential to solve many of the problems that currently plague online music. Wired 02/20/01
• AN OLD FRIEND RETURNS: One of the more visually stunning aspects of the massive restoration of Cleveland’s Severance Hall is the rebuilt 1931 Ernest M. Skinner organ, which had been been stifled by the old stage shell. Now, with the hall restored to its former glory, the organ towers above the stage in grand turn-of-the-century style, and this week, it was the star in the first organ recital given at Severance in over 70 years. Cleveland Plain Dealer 02/20/01
• TAKING THE PLUNGE: A small Pittsburgh nightclub has announced that it will become one of the first performance spaces in the nation to offer a live webcast of its shows. Club Cafe has wired up $250,000 worth of fiberoptic cable, cameras, and computer equipment to carry audio and video directly from its stage to an audience that they hope will be growing exponentially in the next few years. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 02/20/01
• THE NEXT WYNTON? Chicago trumpeter David Young is making waves in the jazz world with a style that can produce “a fat and creamy tone one moment, a piercing cry the next.” Audiences fall over themselves to cheer his solos. Critics adore his softly powerful playing, and his willingness to explore the new without trashing the classic. All this, and he’s still a student. Chicago Tribune 02/20/01
• CLASSICAL COMEBACK: Classical music was steadily losing its listener base in the UK just a decade ago, but now it’s more popular than ever. Concert attendance and CD sales are up, and this week’s “Gramophone” magazine recorded its highest-ever circulation figures. Even demand for music lessons and instrument-making is booming. “Why it has happened is a bit harder to understand. Whatever the web of reasons, the fact that classical music is now firmly a mass-market phenomenon is to be welcomed.” The Herald (Glasgow) 2/19/01
• INTERNET KILLED THE POP JOURNALIST? Two of Britain’s most popular music mags have folded, and the industry’s wondering why. “The British music press is in crisis. There are now more exciting ways of accessing information than just sitting down with a pile of magazines. Now they’re probably the least sexy way of doing it. You don’t have to read a hundred words on ‘sonic cathedrals’, take someone’s word for it and buy the album only to find out it’s a pile of shit. You can read about it, get excited, go to a website, hear it, buy it and have it delivered to your door the next day.” The Guardian (London) 2/20/01
• EXPOSURE IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT: So you’re an aspiring classical musician trying to make a career. Traditional competitions are a lot of work and require multiple rounds of elimination. Now a new online competition puts a twist on the idea – enter your recording and the winners get to have their music reside on a website as streaming audio for a year. New Republic 02/01/01

DUELING EDITORIALS

• The New York Times:“The Internet is a revolutionary medium whose long-term benefits we are only beginning to fathom. But that is no reason to allow it to become a duty- free zone where people can plunder the intellectual property of others without paying for it.” 02/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “The prevailing view of Napster, reinforced by last week’s court ruling, paints it as a digital burglary tool that scofflaw youngsters can use to grab free music and beat musicians out of royalties. This is a convenient oversimplification by the recording industry, whose archaic business model is as big a reason as any for the success of the Internet music-swapping services it is trying to shut down.” 02/19/01
• Toronto Globe & Mail: “We’ve used Napster to explore, educate ourselves and chase down obscurities — areas either badly served by the companies, or not served at all. Napster gives you access to music at the speed of intellect. I can recall more than once a quick download settling a musical argument.” 02/20/01

Monday February 19

• AMERICA’S CLASSICAL MUSIC? In late 1999 the listeners of America’s National Public Radio voted on the 100 most important musical works of the 20th Century. What does the list say about us (or at least NPR listeners)? “The voters rejected the more musicologically correct candidates and overwhelmingly favored a category of music hitherto scorned by scholars: the oldie.” The Atlantic 03/01
• NAPSTER’S BID TO GET LEGAL: Napster is hurrying to develop a new form of its program to get legal. “Expected out by mid-summer, the new system would “tag” files as they are traded across the Napster network. Each file would then be wrapped in an encryption system, allowing content owners to determine how the new files could be used. The system would remove the MP3s from the system and replace them with a new, proprietary, digital rights management system that has not yet been developed.” Wired 02/18/01
  • WHY RUIN THE PARTY? All the record-company high-fives the other day over their appeals-court judgment against Napster looks like a Jurassic convention of brontosauri celebrating the death of the first mammal. They may not have noticed how few of the critters scuttling around at their feet share their enthusiasm.” Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/19/01
• ALL MUSIC ALL THE TIME: Chicago radio station WNIB played classical music for 27 years until new owners took over. A week ago the classical format disappeared, and the music, announcers and commercials have been replaced by a lonely six-CD player set on continuous play. What’s going on? New owners are just trying to figure out what the new format will be – and losing millions of dollars in the meantime. Chicago Tribune 02/19/01
• FAKE IF YOU WANT TO: A survey of young British pop music fans reveals that a sizeable percentage believes pop stars don’t sing their own songs. “As many as 34% believed that some of the most famous faces in pop do not sing on their chart hits.” Does it matter to them? Apparently not – they still buy the recordings. BBC 02/19/01

Sunday February 18

• THE EMINEM PROBLEM: Since its release last May Eminem’s latest album has sold 8.1 million copies, more than three times as many as the other Grammy-nominated Best Albums combined. How could the numbers-obsessed Grammys not invite the rapper to the party? And yet… Philadelphia Inquirer 02/18/01
• STOP ROMANTICIZING NAPSTER: Time to stop romanticizing the Big Guy/Little Guy struggle between Napster and its users and the big recording companies. “The much-posited notion that ‘the internet is the new punk’ is soon destined to follow its discredited predecessors ‘brown is the new black’ and ‘poetry is the new rock’n’roll’ into the dustbin of history. For the simple reasons that true cultural upheavals are not about delivery systems, they are about content.” The Telegraph (London) 02/17/01
• ENDURANCE TEST: “At 80 minutes in duration, Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson’s ‘Passacaglia’ is not only the longest piece of music in the piano repertoire; it’s the longest continuous stretch of music composed for any instrument in history. And yet it’s based on a mere four notes, which also makes the work one of the most extraordinary pieces of musical architecture ever conceived.” Is it any wonder only six pianists have performed it in 20 years? The Independent (London) 02/17/01
• OBSESSED WITH GOD: “How are we to explain the current explosion of musical Christianity: Masses, Passions and oratorios by God-obsessed composers emanating, it would seem, from every continent? Where has all the worshipful rhetoric come from, given that its creators are in large part lapsed Christians, those with whom faith never took hold, or aggressive atheists?” The New York Times 02/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• COUNTRY’S RACE BARRIERS: Country music is pretty much an all-white business when it comes to performers. “There has always been a black presence in country music, but that history has been largely invisible.” And yet, the black audience for country music – while still small – is growing. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 02/18/01
• MR OPERA DEAD: Opera impressario Boris Goldovsky has died at the ge of 92. “Mr. Goldovsky himself, and then his students, fundamentally changed the nature of operatic performance in this country and the public perception of the art. In his hands, it was not an exotic and irrational entertainment, but the most precise, inclusive, accessible, and communicative of the performing arts.” Boston Globe 02/17/01

Friday February 16

• NAPSTER’S PLAN TO GET LEGAL: Napster reveals its plans to retool. “But, as Napster acknowledges, the restructuring of its architecture will not answer the demands by the recording industry that it block songs whose copyright holders do not want them to appear on the service. Napster presented the new features as the initial moves in a series of alterations that will, company management hopes, ultimately transform the file-swapping service into a valuable – and profitable – part of the music industry.” Inside 02/16/01
• NAPSTER: THE POLICE STEP IN: So far in the US, the Napster controversy has been confined to the courtroom. In Belgium, however, it’s gone a step further. “[P]olice have raided the homes of users of music-sharing websites looking for evidence they infringed copyright rules…. the searches were part of an investigation of the Internet site mp3blast.com.” Salon (AP) 02/15/01
• KIDS VS THE GROWNUPS? “According to a recent survey by Family PC magazine, one out of three teens ages 12 to 17 download songs through Napster. The proportion of college students is considerably higher. Young people have gotten used to doing whatever they want to do on the Internet. Until Napster blew up, they didn’t understand they could be regulated.” Now they’re considering what to do. Washington Post 02/16/01

Thursday February 15

• DOING IT RIGHT: Nearly every symphony orchestra in the U.S. has conceived of some sort of “casual classics” series designed to bring in listeners who ordinarily shy away from the pomp and circumstance of the concert hall. But most of these series program little more than elevator music, and assume that the rock’n’roll generation will be turned off by anything challenging. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new “Classic Encounters” series tries the opposite approach. Chicago Sun-Times 02/15/01
• DOING IT ALL: Most composers would not choose a full-scale opera as their first work to be premiered in public. Most would also not choose to tempt fate by conducting the premiere themselves. But conductor/composer Anton Coppola will do just that next month in Florida, leading the world premiere of his “Sacco & Vanzetti.” The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 02/15/01
• PRIZE CAREER: Canadian mezzo Isabel Bayrakdarian won a contest. “More precisely, she won a contest called ‘Operalia’. Operalia was conceived of in 1993 by Placido Domingo and sponsored by Alberto Vilar, the Cuban-American billionaire ‘high-tech guru’ and opera enthusiast. In the opera world, Operalia is the crème de la crème of prizes.” It is the prize that makes a career. Saturday Night (Canada) 02/11/01
• UNEXPECTED HIRING: The Northwest Chamber Orchestra, based in Seattle, was not looking for a new music director. But they’ve hired one anyway: pianist/conductor Ralf Gothoni, who so impressed the group when he appeared with them recently that they decided to sign him to a contract before someone else did. Seattle Times 02/14/01
• HOW TO RUIN A SYMPHONY:  Nothing can spoil a climactic moment in a performance like a beeping watch or a chirruping cell phone, and increasingly, concertgoers are disregarding warnings to shut them off. But in an industry desperate to attract the public, most managements are loath to take any harsh measures to enforce the ban. Boston Herald 02/15/01
• TODAY’S BIBLICAL SIGN OF ARMAGEDDON: Luciano Pavarotti has announced his intention to aggressively pursue the opportunity to duet with Madonna. Yes, that Madonna. But he’s not getting his hopes up. “I have asked her but she has been busy – first she makes the baby and then, I don’t know.” BBC 02/15/01

Wednesday February 14

• NAPSTER’S FINANCIAL PERILS: It’s not just the judges’ ruling giving Napster a reprieve that the company has to worry about. If recording companies continue to pursue Napster, the copyright violation fines could bankrupt the service. “Statutory damages could quickly add up to big bucks. A federal judge in New York ruled last year, for instance, that MP3.com was liable for $25,000 in damages for each CD copied. It’s extremely likely that Napster will have a very large financial judgment against them.” Wired 02/13/01
  • END OF THE LINE? Napster execs say they don’t know whether they can continue the company given restrictions imposed by Federal judges Monday. The New York Times 02/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)
  • NO LEGISLATIVE RELIEF: The US Congress could make Napster’s problems go away by passing legislation aimed for for new digital realities. But “I don’t think you’re going to see legislation in the Congress…. We just spent years trying to get things right. Things are changing much too fast for us to jump in and try to get it right a second time.” Wired 02/13/01
  • THE REAL GENIUS OF NAPSTER: “Napster is considerably more than an online shoplifting service. What Napster has done is to provide access, from any Internet connection, to nearly every recording anyone could want. Napster hasn’t copied or accumulated those recordings. It searches the ad hoc network of people using Napster at any moment and, like a card catalog or a virtual bulletin board, it simply helps people find the music they seek. By doing so, Napster provides something that for many listeners is even more desirable than free tunes: access.” The New York Times 02/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• DON’T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER: Put him or her on the Endanger Species List. The classic piano recital seems to be a fading pleasure – there are fewer with each passing year. “Wasn’t there a time… when the image of a noble profile, white tie and tails, and fingers flying across black and white keys was the personification of classical music?” New York Observer 02/14/01
• BEHIND THE WALLPAPER: Why does Vivaldi’s music have a reputation for vacuousness? “Most movements of Vivaldi concertos go on no longer than a fifties pop hit, but they are packed with information, invention, and emotion; each work is a game of twists and turns, an arrangement of artful shocks. It is difficult at first to hear the element of surprise in this composer’s language, because so many of his tricks have become clichés, but the tricks are still there to be savored.” The New Yorker 02/12/01
• FROM CLASSICAL TO JAZZ: Tchaikovsky Competition winner violinist Viktoria Mullova has improbably embarked on a jazz career. “I thought I could never do it. When you have been trained as a classical soloist, it is very difficult after 30 years to play something which is not written. You have been raised to play every single note and play it perfect. You are terrified of making a mistake. All my stage fright is about playing wrong notes. The more scared I am, the better I play.” The Telegraph (London) 02/14/01

Tuesday February 13

• COURT TO NAPSTER – STOP: A US appeals court rules against the music-sharing service. But Napster lead counsel David Boies stressed that, “in his view, the court was saying that ‘the Napster architecture does not have to be redesigned,’ and that Napster need only police its files ‘within the limits of its system.’ If so, then the ruling really might not be the catastrophe that it seemed on first glance.” Inside.com 02/12/01
  • HANGING BY A THREAD: “The court is requiring that Napster be notified in advance that it is in violation of copyright in particular cases, and if Napster refuses to bar transmission of the songs across the Napster network, it will then be in violation – and will be shut down.” Salon 02/13/01
  • RESISTANCE IS FERTILE: Napster opponents may have won in court, but online resistance to the commercial recording industry is growing. “With every song they tell Napster to remove, the political resistance to this extreme view of copyright law will grow stronger.” The New York Times 02/13/01 (one-time registration required for access)
  • SO MUCH FOR THE NAPSTER EFFECT: Sales of recorded music in Australia rose again last year (mirroring sales figures in the US) despite free digital sharing of music over the internet. “In Australia, CD sales rose by 2.9 per cent to almost 43 million, while vinyl continued its comeback, with sales increasing by 23 per cent to 37,400 records, according to Australian Recording Industry Association figures.” The Age (Melbourne) 02/13/01
• THE DU PRE TRADE: Cellist Jaqueline du Pre seems to hold endless fascination, even years after her death. “Endlessly recycled images of her gilded youth and wheelchair-bound decline symbolise the malign power of the illness that killed her. Meanwhile, the furore unleashed by her siblings’ memoir and its consequent film – painful truth or grotesque travesty? – rages on.” And now a new documentary (an answering documentary to the “Hilary and Jackie” movie, perhaps?) examines her life again. The Independent (London) 02/13/01
• JANSONS STAYING PUT: That sigh of relief you hear is from Pittsburgh. After months of speculation that he would leave the PSO for a more high-profile job elsewhere, music director Mariss Jansons has reaffirmed his commitment to the Steel City. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 02/13/01
• HOW TO TICK OFF A UNION: The furor over the lack of a traditional pit orchestra in the national touring production of “Annie” has shifted to Cleveland. The producers call the synthesized facsimile an “orchestra enhancement system.” The musicians’ union calls it deceptive, stingy, and “karaoke theater.” Cleveland Plain Dealer 02/13/01
• SIGNING OFF: Although most American cities are lucky to have even one classical radio station, Chicago had long prided itself on its ability to sustain several. No more. Chicago’s WNIB abandoned its classical music format at midnight Sunday, leaving WFMT as the city’s only commercial classical station. Chicago Sun-Times 02/13/01
• MAKING HISTORY: It’s easy with all the concentration on repertoire from the past, to forget that classical music is still an evolving artform. So what are today’s masterpieces? Herewith a nomination for one of John Adams’s latest works – the first American masterpiece in the last quarter-century? Philadelphia Inquirer 02/13/01
• THAT MAGNIFICENT MACHINE: An unusual gathering of musicians and scientists occurred last week in New York, aiming to examine the connection between the physical motions involved in playing the piano, and the emotional content of the sound that results. It was a lot more fun than the title of the concert/seminar (“Polymaths & the Piano”) made it sound. The New York Times 02/13/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Monday February 12

• NAPSTER KAYOED: A US appeals court has ruled against the music-file trading service Napster. “The court ruled that “Napster, by its conduct, knowingly encourages and assists the infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrights.” The recording industry was understandably thrilled with the decision.” Wired 02/12/01
  • LAST MINUTE TRADING: Napster was swamped this weekend (some 10,000 users at any one time) as music fans spent the weekend madly copying music files just in case a US court shuts down the service Monday. “A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will issue its ruling on Monday on the recording industry’s request that Napster be ordered to stop enabling users to swap songs for free.” Wired 02/11/01
  • FAIR USE: Napster has already made a deal with music giant Bertelsmann. “For obvious reasons, media moguls and teenage music fans are watching the deal closely. But so should everyone who writes or creates for a living: we are about to witness a live test of whether technology can protect digital intellectual property.” Columbia Journalism Review 02/01
• DEMOCRACY AND THE NEW NEW GROVES: “Traditionally, musicologists have regarded music as a qualitative pyramid, with Bach at the top, Hungarian folk singers somewhere in the middle, and Eminem at the bottom. Since the first edition, however, the quiet congregation of music scholars that used to spend much of its time seeking new ways to explain the greatness of the great composers has been shaken by a rude outbreak of postmodernism. The old pyramid model has been partially displaced by the idea that music is a constellation of equally valid systems, shaped in part by power relations, sexuality and social context.” The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/12/01
• 34 CONDUCTORS FOR ONE: Toronto Symphony music director Jukka-Pekka Saraste leaves the orchestra at the end of this season. But the orchestra will not immediately replace him. Instead, 34 conductors will fill out the 2001/02 season. The orchestra’s director says “it would be wrong for the symphony to make a quick decision about replacing Saraste.” CBC 02/10/01
• AFTER THE POMP IS GONE: A redo of Edinburgh’s Usher concert hall was greeted with great pomp last year. But an expected increase in performances and activity hasn’t materialized. So what’s the problem? The Scotsman 02/12/01

Sunday February 11

• MUSICIANS PRICED OUT: Old rare violins have escalated in price so as to be all but unaffordable for musicians. “With even the biggest private collectors, let alone performers, finding it hard to keep up, the great Italian fiddles seem destined for public or institutional ownership, like the great Italian paintings before them.” The New York Times 02/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• OPEN SELECTION: In the old days, music directors of American symphony orchestras were chosen amid secrecy and in consultation with only a select few insiders. No more. “It would be virtually impossible today for a major orchestra to name a music director who had not previously appeared as a guest conductor and survived the evaluating scrutiny of the players.” Boston Globe 02/11/01
• THE CLASSICAL NET: “Nobody knows yet if the Internet will be a boon or bust in the long term for American orchestras, opera companies, chamber ensembles and solo musicians. But classical groups large and small are mounting some interesting experiments. In an inherently conservative field, visionaries see the Internet becoming a super-efficient box office for concert ticket sales, a global network for selling CDs and a vehicle for broadcasting live concerts.” Chicago Sun-Times 02/11/01
• THE NEW MUSIC BUSINESS: “The Net is changing almost every aspect of the way that bands do business, and Chicago musicians say it’s almost entirely for the better. In terms of how independent or underground bands go about building a following and making themselves heard, there has already been a dramatic shift in the last five years.” Chicago Sun-Times 02/11/01
• MUSIC WITHOUT MUSICIANS: “The music business has finally figured out how to do without musicians, those pesky varmints. Today, more and more pop is created not by conventional musicianship but by using samplers, digital editing software and other computerized tools to stitch together prerecorded sounds.” The New York Times 02/11/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• LIFE BEYOND CONDUCTING: Esa Pekka Salonen just took a sabbatical from his job as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He’s coy about his future: “Does the star conductor of the 82-year-old orchestra, one of the most sought-after guest conductors in the world today, mentioned as a candidate to head any major orchestra in need of a music director – in short, one of the great hopes of classical music – does he mean to say that he’s giving up conducting?” Orange County Register 02/11/01

Friday February 9

• SHARING FOR PROFIT: An online marketer figures a way to get rich off Napster. The company tracks who has downloaded what mp3 files and shared them, then sends messages (ads) to the music fans. “Several marketing companies are working to prove that file-sharing can be a commercial bonanza for the music industry – apocalyptic major-label lawyering to the contrary.” Inside.com 02/08/01
• MAYBE A SUPER BOWL AD WOULD HELP? The Toronto Symphony Orchestra is one of North America’s finest, and yet they play in one of the worst (acoustic) halls ever built, face deficits and mismanagement, and have trouble luring the top musicians. A new marketing campaign aims to recapture some of the lost audience, and redefine the brand. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/09/01
• A GIFT FOR TOMORROW’S DIVAS: The Washington (D.C.) Opera is the recipient of an $8 million donation, with the lion’s share earmarked for a new training program for emerging artists. The program will begin next season, and be continued for five years. The New York Times 02/09/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• THEY’D NEVER DO THIS TO BRITNEY: E-Music, the music download site, is dumping the Internet Underground Music Archive that alt-rock fans had hoped would help jumpstart the indie scene online. E-Music is desperately struggling to become profitable before their cashflow dries up a year from now. Wired 02/09/01

Thursday February 8

• WHAT “JAZZ” GOT RIGHT: The critics have made it abundantly clear where they think Ken Burns’ “Jazz” series got it wrong: “’Jazz’ was penny-ante sociology. It rolled over for Wynton Marsalis. It bought into the Albert Murray-Stanley Crouch party line. It deified Louis Armstrong. It presented legends as historical fact. It didn’t cover contemporary jazz. It misrepresented Duke Ellington’s compositional process. It shorted Latin jazz. It was anti-Semitic. And so on.” But what about all the things it got right? Salon 2/07/01
  • A SPOOF ON “JAZZ”:”When people listened to Skunkbucket LeFunke, what they heard was, ‘Do do dee bwap da dee dee de da da doop doop dap.’ And they knew even then how profound that was.” Salon 2/07/01

Wednesday February 7

• ONE WAY TO DEAL WITH A UNION: English opera impressario Raymond Gubbay locked his company of singers in their rehearsal room yesterday to prevent the actors union Actors Equity from “disrupting” rehearsal. “It is unbelievable what Equity are doing. They have seized on a change in the law regarding rights for unions that was designed for bargaining rights in factories and shop floors, not for itinerant opera companies that are together for a few weeks. They are trying to call meetings and disrupt rehearsals.” The Independent (London) 02/07/01
• NEWLY FUN: Who says contemporary music has to be dull and serious? And yet for a generation (or two) new classical music events were serious to the point of dullness. But a new generation of players, composers and presenters in New York is making new music fun. Sonicnet 02/06/01
• JUILLIARD ADDS JAZZ: Time was when ‘serious’ musicians looked down at jazz as barbaric. But now jazz is not only part of the mainstream, it’s become an ‘artform’ (should that be a capital ‘A’?). The Juilliard School has added a degree program in jazz. Public Arts 02/06/01
• VARIATIONS ON A VARIATION: Glenn Gould’s virtuosic 1955 recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” gave the piece more popularity than it had enjoyed for centuries. “Until Gould, the piece, when played in public at all, was largely performed by Baroque specialists, usually on the harpsichord, and often presented in a ‘now you must take your medicine, it’s good for you’ spirit. Gould’s great achievement was to demonstrate that the piece is also fun.” Herewith, samples from Gould and others’ variations on the theme. Slate 2/05/01

Tuesday February 6

• UNION BLUES: Britain’s 108-year-old Musicians’ Union is being sued for allegedly failing to pay out millions of pounds owed to session musicians over the last 55 years, and publicity surrounding the trial is shedding light on this little-understood – but highly influential – arm of the recording industry. “The Musicians’ Union has long held a reputation as a left-wing, doctrinaire organisation as secretive and tight-lipped as the KGB. If it’s widely known for anything, it’s for imposing a labyrinth of infuriating bureaucratic restrictions on the performance or recording of music.” The Guardian (London) 2/06/01
• TOOTING YOUR OWN HORN: Wynton Marsalis has angered a lot of jazz fans for being too much of a traditionalist and straining to fix the great names of jazz into a fixed hierarchy. “What are these critics trying to protect? The conservative vision that there are no objectives to the music. The conservative vision that a group of guys playing without rhythm is a forward-thinking notion of jazz. I would rather see a more enlightened community, because it would give [people] a greater appreciation of the music and would raise the standard of musicianship.” The Telegraph (London) 2/06/01
  • WHO CARES ABOUT JAZZ? “The only people who really care about Ken Burns’ “Jazz” may be die-hard aficionados – whose numbers, as is well known, are lamentably small – and others keenly attuned to the subtlest nuances of race relations in the United States. The rest of the country – I’d guess something on the order of 275,million souls – seems to have been blissfully unaware of the series; given the distortions, omissions and fabrications with which it was riddled, doubtless that is for the best.” Washington Post 02/05/01
• POWER-SHARING: Lorin Maazel’s appointment as the new music director at the New York Philharmonic came with the broad approval of the orchestra’s players. Such consensus and power-sharing is becoming increasingly common in the classical music world. “The shift of power in the orchestra has acquired a label that borrows from the jargon of grass-roots organizing: musician empowerment.” New York Times 2/06/01 (one-time registration required for access)
  • THE MAESTRO SPEAKS: Meeting with the New York press for the first time since his appointment to the helm of the NY Phil, Lorin Maazel was pleasant, spoke no ill of the critics who have labelled his selection “appalling,” and announced his intention to rally Big Apple audiences to the side of new music. New York Post 02/06/01
• BETTER NOT DROP IT: Sixteen investors have joined forces to purchase violinist Robert McDuffie the instrument of his dreams: a 1735 $3.5 million Guarneri del Gesù violin known as the Ladenburg (whose past players include Paganini). The partners are leasing the instrument to McDuffie for 25 years, after which time it will be sold for an expected profit. “The price of rare violins makes it virtually impossible for individuals to afford them. In Europe, the Middle East, and Japan, governments or businesses purchase these instruments and lend them for little or no fee.” New York Times 2/06/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• GOVERNMENT BAILOUT: The beleagured Scottish Opera has been presented with a £1 million grant by the national treasury, a move which will finally end the uncertainty that has surrounded the organization’s future since late 1999, when an emergency government subsidy was necessary to avert bankruptcy. BBC Music Magazine 02/06/01
• NAPSTER ON THE BRINK: With the notorious music-swapping service on the verge of becoming a subscription-based pay music provider, other song download sites wonder what the future of their industry will be. With the decline and fall of so many dot-coms, companies like E-Music have been trimming staff and resources, and their future will be directly tied to the “new” Napster’s success or failure. New York Press 02/06/01
• 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT NEW MUSIC: An unusual sextet of young musicians is leading the charge for public embrace of modern music. eighth blackbird, an award-winning 5-year-old ensemble based at Northwestern University, takes a unique approach to presenting contemporary works: they want the audience to have a good time. Rocky Mountain News 02/05/01

Monday February 5

• PLAYERS RULES: Last week’s choice of Lorin Maazel as music director of the New York Philharmonic marks a significant shift of power in who shapes the historically fractious orchestra. “It was the first time in the orchestra’s history that it has, to a good degree, chosen its music director.” The New York Times 02/05/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• SUPER “BOWL” BRAWL: The L.A. Philharmonic’s summer series at the Hollywood Bowl is one of the most successful summer festivals in the U.S. But the famous bandshell has long been a source of frustration for performers: it’s tiny stage and awful acoustics make for substandard concerts, and the leaky roof and asbestos-filled shell are downright dangerous. The city is quietly moving ahead with plans to demolish the shell and replace it with a new one, and preservationists are furious. L.A. New Times 02/01/01
• WRAPPING UP “JAZZ”: As Ken Burns’s unavoidable and controversial documentary draws to a close on PBS, the jazz world takes stock, and considers the future. One critic’s view: “We’ve just been through 15 years of neo-traditionalism, overlapped by three or four more years of Swing revivalism, both phenomena driven by commerce rather than creativity to no particular aesthetic gain. Do we really need to repeat that exercise?” Globe & Mail (Toronto) 02/05/01
• GOTHAM’S BEST: Like it or not, and many musicians don’t, a composer operating out of New York City is automatically accorded a great deal more respect than one based in, say, Cleveland. As a result, most of the past century’s advances and declines in new music can be traced to the ever-celebrated, ever-squabbling world of New York’s compositional elite. A new nine-concert festival celebrates the group’s contributions. New York Magazine 02/05/01
• SCHUBERT REVISED: Franz Schubert has spent much of the last century being portrayed as a drunken, homosexual reveler, in stark contrast to his previous image as something of a musical saint. The disparate characterizations are largely due to the fact that relatively little has been known of Schubert’s life, and, as more facts are unearthed, the truth of the composer’s character turns out to be somewhere in between the two extremes. Chronicle of Higher Education 02/09/01
• FIGHTING DEPORTATION: A violist with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario is appealing a government ruling that would send him and his family back to their native Albania. The violist claims that he is in imminent danger from the Albanian government, and the orchestra is backing him. CBC 02/02/01
• XENAKIS DIES: Iannis Xenakis, the Greek-French composer whose highly complex scores were based on sophisticated scientific and mathematical theories, died yesterday at his home in Paris. He was 78. The New York Times 02/05/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Sunday February 4

• LEVINE TRYOUT? Now that the orchestras of New York and Philadelphia have settled on their new music directors, eyes turn to Boston, where James Levine is rumored to be the top candidate. Levine conducted in Boston this week in what is being considered in some quarters as a tryout. Levine got a warm reception… Boston Globe 02/03/01
  • TALKING THE TALK: Boston Symphony management has been talking with Levine about the job. “But they said that considering the range of difficult issues to be resolved, including orchestra work rule changes sought by Mr. Levine, the talks could continue through this year or even into 2002.” The New York Times 02/03/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• THE NEW JAZZ: “While Americans have always regarded European jazz with the same tolerant smile they reserve for Japanese baseball, the most exciting music now is coming from the Europe. Just five years ago this would have been dismissed as a fanciful notion, but American jazz, once famously dubbed ‘the sound of surprise’ hasn’t been sounding so surprising for a while.” The Telegraph (London) 02/03/01
• MASTER TEACHER: Few people outside the world of classical music have heard of 82-year-old Maria Curcio, but within that world she’s a legend: as Artur Schnabel’s favourite pupil, as the muse of Rafael Orozco and Radu Lupu, and as a tutelary goddess second to none. Her verdict on Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, with whom she once duetted in concert, would get that lady’s lawyers scurrying for a writ; likewise, kindness prevents my repeating her damning view of one of today’s celebrated young stars in the pianistic firmament.” The Independent (London) 02/03/01
• EATING IN PEACE: A New York judge has prohibited a union that is in a dispute with the restaurant service that serves the Metroploitan opera from trying to embarras the Met. Before the injunction was issued, the union sought to embarrass and otherwise pressure the Met with the hope that the opera would pressure Restaurant Associates to give in to its demands. The New York Times 02/03/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday February 2

• A FINE STATE OF AFFAIRS: Germany fields some 21 state orchestras, orchestras that use the seal of the state to claim excellence. That is five more orchestras than there are German states. But now some jostling about who and what gets funded and some promises for same and what was promised and what wasn’t… Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02/02/01
• FAKE MONKS: A group of Greek monks who recorded an album that became a sensation on the Greek pop charts last summer has a little credibility problem. Turns out only one of the 12 members of the group is actually a Greek Orthodox monk. “Last summer, the group’s CD, ‘I Learned to Live Free,’ sold over 50,000 copies in Greece. They also made a music video showing the group in black monks’ robes dancing, singing and advocating a life free of drugs, stress and the ‘pressures of modern society’.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02/02/01
• THE NEW MUSIC: Violinist Viktoria Mullova is a Tchiakowsky Competition winner. But these days she’s into something else. “You would have to come up with some cumbersome term like ‘classical-jazz-pop-rock-fusion’. It consists of a collection of pieces, ranging from the Bee Gees to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, all of which are swirled together and transformed into something radical and strange. ‘We don’t like the term crossover. We’re not crossing to anywhere. It’s new music. It’s not a jazz concert. I can’t pretend that I can play jazz. You need a lifetime’s experience to play jazz.” The Guardian (London) 02/02/01
• LIVE TO SING ANOTHER DAY: An agreement to fund the cash-strapped Scottish National Opera has bailed it out of its current difficulties. Is the company rejoicing? “More likely, it will provoke a sigh of relief as it presents an opportunity to the company to restabilise and introduce something more resembling a full programme of operas for next season.” The Herald (Glasgow) 02/02/01
• BURNS BAN: “It’s said that more Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source, and Burns does jazz such a great service by introducing it to tens of millions of them that specific complaints against him don’t carry much weight. But jazz the form is reduced to an endless string of incidents and accolades, people and platitudes, while Jazz the film manages to explain what the music means without explaining what it is, or how to listen to it.” Feed 01/31/01
• THEY HEAR BETTER THAN WE DO: A new study says that orchestra conductors’ brains have adapted to the task: “conductors can localize sounds in their periphery better than either pianists or non-musicians. The same brain areas were active in all three groups, suggesting that conductors do not use different groups of nerve cells for this task.” Scientific American 02/01/01
• LEARNING ON THE JOB: Itzhak Perlman will begin a new career path this fall, when he becomes Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony. He is hardly the first high-profile soloist to make the leap to the podium – Bobby McFerrin in St. Paul and Mstislav Rostropovich in Washington both caused controversy when they decided to try waving the baton on a semi-full time basis. A Perlman guest stint in San Francisco reveals much about what he has learned already, and what he has yet to grasp. San Francisco Chronicle 02/02/01

Thursday February 1

• A CURIOUS CHOICE? Lorin Maazel has been widely despised by the musicians of orchestras he has led. And he’s old. So why did the New York Philharmonic settle on naming him the orchestra’s new music director? “Some critics will contend that only a man of Mr. Maazel’s experience would be able to keep a firm grip on the Philharmonic. There really isn’t anybody else out there. The idea of young conductors at the Philharmonic is absurd. These people don’t have the experience; the Philharmonic is not an easy orchestra.” New York Observer 01/30/01
  • WE REMEMBER HIM WELL: So Maazel’s old. So he doesn’t play well with others. Three decades ago he put his stamp on the Cleveland Orchestra and you can still hear traces of his influence today, says a Cleveland critic. Cleveland Plain Dealer, 01/31/01
• BIG MONEY IN JAZZ: “Sales of videotapes of Burns’ PBS documentaries, companion books and CDs have pulled more than $600 million in retail revenue. Burns’ cachet as documentary filmmaker extraordinaire could eventually make ‘Jazz’ one of the biggest revenue generators of his 25-year career. Sales of related merchandise – books, CDs, DVDs and videos – surpassed $15 million halfway through Jazz’ 10-episode airing.” USA Today 02/01/01
  • PILING ON “JAZZ”: It’s not just Ken Burns and his admittedly limited documentary that annoys contemporary jazz musicians. Numerous veterans of the jazz scene decry the influence of the “Lincoln Center mob,” and specifically the traditionalist trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, for trying to turn jazz into something akin to classical music: rigid, uncreative, and dominated by the past. Boston Herald, 02/01/01
  • NEW JAZZ: Ken Burns’ “Jazz” series has been widely criticized for paying scant attention to music after 1950. Herewith a list of some contemporary jazz greats who also deserve a listen. Slate 01/30/01
• MIDSUMMER NIGHTS JUST A DREAM: The Minnesota Orchestra officially killed off its plans to build a $40 million outdoor amphitheater in the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities. The orchestra’s venture had been considered the most stable of at least three competing plans to build a summer concert venue in the area, until it was disclosed last month that a lead donor had not yet been found. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 02/01/01
• NXNW R.I.P.: North by Northwest, the annual Portland-based music conference and festival, has been cancelled for the year after its principal financial backer pulled out earlier this week. The festival may or may not be resurrected in 2002. The Oregonian, 01/31/01
• CITY PAYS, OPERA PLAYS: The Scottish Opera, which has been in financial turmoil since narrowly avoiding bankruptcy in 1999, has been guaranteed a much-needed additional £1million – enough to guarantee a new season will begin in August. In the meantime, concerts at city councils and high schools? “We are wholly aware of the political implications of the potential for the company working so closely with the city and its community venues.” The Herald (Glasgow) 02/01/01

Wednesday January 31

• CLASSIC FAME: A colonial-era hymnodist and a couple of currently-active performers are among the 12 new member of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. William Billings, Itzhak Perlman, Van Cliburn and nine others will be inducted in a ceremony April 21 in Cincinnati. Hartford Courant (AP) 01/30/01
• SYDNEY’S OPERA BLUES: Opera Australia must earn 60 percent of its budget from ticket sales – a higher percentage than any other company in the world. No wonder OA’s having fiscal and artistic problems. The company’s chief executive defends his operation, while admitting the artistic downside. “The danger of relatively modest public funding is that our company cannot take sufficient risk, either with repertoire choice or new commissions.” Sydney Morning Herald 01/31/01
• TROUBLE WITH THAT UNION LABEL: Britain’s Musicians’ Union is in disarray. And questions are being asked: “Why, for instance, did the MU drive film-soundtrack work out of Britain by the rates they set? Why does it refuse to allow state-funded orchestras to exploit the concessions it gave the BBC bands, allowing their performances to be reissued any number of times without extra payment? And why does it still believe that restrictive practices benefit the musical economy? Is it coincidence that British orchestral musicians are now earning less than players anywhere in western Europe?” The Telegraph (London) 01/31/01
• STICK TO CONDUCTING? Conductor Lorin Maazel picks up his violin for a concert in London. How’d it go? “He was almost boring. As the movement wore on, the ‘almost’ vanished. He was boring. He even looked it: feet and body scarcely moving, violin held stiffly beneath that leonine head. Even with Yefim Bronfman’s magic fingers, so alert to the piano part’s textures and counter rhythms, the music’s song was sinking fast. Then in the adagio it disappeared, drowned under the maestro’s lugubrious, uninflected line.” The Times (London) 01/31/01
  • MAAZEL’S MONOTONY: Maazel does have credentials. “Should Philadelphia [which recently named Christoph Eschenbach its music director] be envious? Not on any level. Might it be fair to say that it’s a bad week for New York, which lost the Super Bowl on Sunday and gained Lorin Maazel on Monday?” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/31/01
  • BUYING AMERICAN? Lorin Maazel is the first American composer since Leonard Bernstein to be in charge of the New York Philharmonic. But the 70-year-old Maazel has spent much of his career in Europe, and some insist his style is more European than American. The New York Times 01/31/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• CLASSICAL FORMAT DOESN’T ROCK ENOUGH: Longtime Chicago classical music station WNIB was recently sold for $165 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a Chicago station. Prices for FM stations have skyrocketed since 1996 when the industry was deregulated. the high price almost ensures that WNIB will cease broadcasting classical. The format can make money – but not enough to justify the purchase price. The New York Times 01/31/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• SO MUCH FOR POPULAR APPEAL: So Napster is going to begin charging for its service. That makes the music industry happy. But Napster’s president has “publicly acknowledged that up to 95 percent of the company’s reported 51 million registered users would abandon the service if fees were charged.” Wired 01/31/01

Tuesday January 30

• SO MUCH FOR ALL THOSE DENIALS… Two weeks ago the New York Philharmonic vehemently denied Tim Page’s Washington Post story that the orchestra would hire Lorin Maazel as its next music director. Yesterday the Phil officially ended its three-year search and tabbed Maazel as Kurt Masur’s replacement, effective late next year. Washington Post 01/30/01
  • SOLID CHOICE: “Although critics have differed on whether he possesses qualities like warmth and communicativeness, there is no doubting his command of the central repertory with which the Philharmonic’s audiences are most comfortable.” New York Times 1/30/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• HONG KONG IN THE PASSING LANE? For all its vitality as a major financial and commercial center, Hong Kong’ cultural life has been something of an underachiever in Western eyes. But Samuel Wong, the new director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra has plans to change that, in large part by making use of the substantial arts funding the government has made available in recent years. “I think it’s high time that this temple of capitalism should also become a temple of art.” International Herald Tribune 1/30/01
• WE COME TO PRAISE IT… World business leaders at this week’s toney World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland declared the internet startup phenomenon dead last week. Monday they turned around to marvel at Napster, the upstart music file trader for its success and user loyalty. Wait – aren’t some of these people the same ones who are trying to sue Napster out of existence? The Guardian (London) 1/30/01
  • BRAVE NEW WORLD: “As music is increasingly delivered in intangible streams of electrons, industry analysts expect many of the present structures, conventions, terminologies, and paraphernalia of the music industry to change radically in the next few years. Before long, every single piece of music ever recorded will exist on remote computer servers, so-called celestial jukeboxes. Distribution will then be just a question of access.” American Outlook 01/01
• GETTING TO KNOW ME… Can a three-week festival of Robert Schumann’s lesser-known music shed more light on the enigmatic composer? “Robert Schumann was the most literary and romantic of all the Romantics, with a history of nervous exhaustion, depression and, finally, mental derangement. But the past two decades have produced studies of the great song-cycles which have questioned just how far Schumann’s mental and physical condition affected his creative energies.” The Times (London) 1/30/01

Monday January 29

• THE WRONG AGE? Is Lorin Maazel the right conductor at the wrong age to be the NY Philharmonic’s new music director? “The Philharmonic’s board know that the time has come for a fresh start, for someone who can reach new audiences and broaden the orchestra’s repertory, especially in contemporary music. Mr. Maazel is 70, a traditionalist with an imperious manner that seeps into his music making. Does he represent the change the Philharmonic has been saying it wants?” The New York Times 01/29/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• NEW VERDI: A passel of unpublished scores by Giuseppe Verdi have been discovered. “The music was unearthed by Father Amos Aimi, the archivist of Fidenza Cathedral, who found it in a skip outside a church in Le Roncole di Busseto, the village where Verdi was born in 1813.” Discovery.com 01/29/01
• A WORDY OLD FRIEND: When the old Soviet Union broke apart, it did away with its national anthem. Now it’s been reinstated, but with some words added. “The revised anthem is the leading topic around Moscow dinner tables. Last month the State Duma (Russia’s parliament) decided to bring back the Stalin-era melody but modify its lyrics. Public reaction has been mixed.” Sonicnet.com 01/29/01

Sunday January 28

• WAITING FOR LEVINE: The speculation surrounding the possible appointment of James Levine to the Boston Symphony Orchestra music directorship will reach a fever pitch this week when the man himself comes to town to conduct Mahler’s Third. The BSO is far too venerable and aristocratic to ever be declared “in crisis,” but it has suffered artistically in the last fifteen years, and many see Levine not just as a replacement for Seiji Ozawa, but as a potential savior. Boston Globe, 01/28/01
• PAYING HOMAGE: The celebrations were everywhere. Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Verdi, and it seemed that no opera company on Earth was going to let the day pass without a tribute. But Verdi was much more than an operatic composer. His role as a symbol of Italian unity and artistic achievement is arguably as valuable as his musical legacy. BBC, 01/27/01
• COURTING AUDIO PERFECTION: A new Daniel Barenboim recording to come out this week is the first commercial release of the new DVD-Audio technology, which purports to outdo the conventional CD just as the CD outdid the cassette.  Some very noteworthy people in the world of music think it could change everything. Again. New York Times, 01/28/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• LEGITIMIZING NAPSTER: The infamous song-swapping site is searching for a new CEO to guide it through a complex period. As the company continues to join forces with record labels and artists in an effort to ward off legal action pending against it, Napster is looking to its ostensible enemy, the dreaded Industry, for a possible leader. Inside.com, 01/26/01
• THE COMPOSER DANCES: In an era of continued apathy towards new music, John Adams is as close as a composer can come to being a superstar. From his groundbreaking “Nixon in China” to this week’s premiere of his new piano concerto, Adams represents the best of the current generation of American composers, dedicated to the idea that music should be vibrant, thrilling, engaging, thought-provoking and fun to listen to. Los Angeles Times, 01/28/01
• RIGHTING AN OLD WRONG: The president of Ukraine has agreed to hand over 5000 pages of manuscripts by C.P.E. Bach to Germany. The scores, long believed to have been lost forever, were looted from German archives by the Red Army in World War II. BBC Music Magazine, 01/28/01

Friday January 26

• SOUNDS LIKE A DEAL So does Lorin Maazel have the job as the next music director of the New York Philharmonic? Says Maazel: “The problem with saying no comment is that no comment is a comment in itself. I really have nothing I can say, other than I had not conducted the orchestra for a quarter of a century and I was very impressed, both by the quality of the orchestra and the whole atmosphere. I really enjoyed it. Whoever becomes music director will have a very wonderful orchestra.” The Guardian (London) 01/26/01
• EVER-VERDI: Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death. “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Verdi’s career was that it very nearly didn’t happen at all, for his early life was dogged by circumstances that could have destroyed him and at one point very nearly did.” The Guardian (London) 01/26/01
  • VIVA VERDI : Commemorative concerts are planned around the world for January 27^th, the 100^th anniversary of Verdi’s death. The most popular opera composer ever, “Verdi is different from other composers in that he has the unique ability to combine drama, great music and great theater.” Times of India (AP) 01/26/01
  • THE VERDI RECORD: A list of the best Verdi recordings, by the classical-music critics of The New York Times. New York Times 01/26/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• FOOL ME ONCE… Is the recording industry in the thrall of an evil litigation genie? Last year recording companies got slapped by a US judge for price fixing. Now many of those same companies are under investigation by the European Commission for the same practices. BBC 01/26/01
• FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNED: In theory, it makes a lot of sense for the recording industry to set standards to combat music piracy. But the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is in trouble, with one of its major proposals finding nearly no support from the industry it is supposed to help, and another facing major delays. “These setbacks have contributed substantially to the dearth of unambiguously legal music online. The big record labels have refrained from releasing much music on the Net until they feel confident they can protect their copyrights. As a result, the landscape continues to be littered with trial projects and start-ups failing for lack of access to the most popular music.” ZDNet, 01/24/01
• WHAT HAPPENED TO THE “EVIL” NAPSTER? Last year they were all trying to sue the upstart music file trader out of existence. This year they can’t wait to make a deal. TVT Records, one of the largest of the “independent” record labels, has agreed to a partnership with Napster, and dropped its lawsuit against the Internet music service. TVT becomes the third label to break ranks and join forces with the embattled Napster, following the Bertelsmann and Edel labels. BBC 01/25/01

Thursday January 25

• WE OBJECT TO THE LITTLE GUYS: What’s behind the Metropolitan Opera’s objection to plans to redo Lincoln Center? “Yesterday Joseph Volpe, the general manager of the Met, while holding out hope that the dispute with Lincoln Center could be settled, said he was concerned that City Opera was not in good enough financial shape to support a new theater and that, because the Met pays 30 percent of Lincoln Center’s shared operating costs, any City Opera debt might land on the Met’s doorstep. The contretemps sets the Met, a cultural behemoth with an annual budget of nearly $200 million and an ensemble considered among the finest in the world, against a scrappy, risk- taking company of no small artistic stature itself, founded by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia to bring opera to the people.” The New York Times 01/25/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS:  Minnesota Public Radio is the 800-lb. gorilla of classical music radio. The network not only broadcasts throughout the Upper Midwest, its “Classical 24” satellite service provides programming to more than 250 stations nationwide. Increasingly, MPR is under fire for the incessant “dumbing down” of classical music on the air, and one of the network’s own news-talk hosts took on the man in charge of such programming on her public affairs show. “Midmorning,” Minnesota Public Radio 1/23/01 [RealAudio file]
• PRICED OUT OF BUSINESS? To get composers greater fees for performance of their music, Britain’s Performing Rights Society is raising the royalty performers must pay from the current fee of 3.8 per cent of gross box office receipts to 7.3 per cent by 2007. But “the increase in royalties paid to contemporary composers means that promoters may no longer be able to afford to stage concerts. Even the BBC Proms, staged at the Royal Albert Hall, could have to rethink its repertoire.” The Independent (London) 01/25/01
• NO LONGER NEEDED: The benefactor who helped raise £100 million for the makeover of London’s Royal Opera House was kicked off the company’s board. Dame Vivien Duffield left the Royal Opera House and “the decision not to renew her place on the board she served as deputy chairman is widely thought to be the result of a personality clash with the company’s chairman, Sir Colin Southgate.” The Independent (London) 01/25/01

Wednesday January 24

• FEELING LEFT OUT: In a surprise letter sent to top Lincoln Center officials, the Metropolitan Opera announced its withdrawal from the Center’s $1.5 billion redevelopment plans. “Specifically, they complained that the opera, by far the largest and richest of Lincoln Center’s 12 constituent groups, had been ignored on basic issues like the administration of the rebuilding, the allocation of city funds for the program and whether the opera would have the same representation in the project as other, far smaller organizations.” New York Times 1/24/01 (one-time registration required for access)VERDI WHO? Centennial celebrations of Verdi’s death get under way this week in Italy, “but does Italy’s younger generation care? Amid the wall-to-wall Verdi Fest, a disquieting, indeed heretical, thought nags at the brain of the opera lover: that Italy, like much of the rest of the world, has succumbed to the irresistible and relentless pop music industry.” The Times (London) 1/24/01BEETHOVEN.TECHNOGEEK.COM:  A Canadian pianist has completed a massive recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas, using a technology-laden piano that is as much a PC as it is an instrument. The Viennese-made concert grand can not only record and playback, it includes a feature that allows the keyboard to “remember” the pedaling and quality of notes that are played on it. Sure, it’s gimmicky, but it’s just so cool… Globe & Mail (Toronto) 1/24/01

Tuesday January 23

• WIRED UP CLASSICAL: Seventy-three American orchestras have embraced the digital age with an agreement about putting their music on the net. So will music fans want to listen? Sure, “15,000 of them took to the net and paid $2 to listen to the New York Philharmonic with conductor and violin soloist Itzhak Perlman performing two hours of Brahms, Bach and Beethoven.” Wired 01/22/01
• THE IMPORTANCE OF SEEING OPERA: “Visualisation is profoundly important in opera – despite what we are always told about audiences being interested only in the music. It is true that, thanks to CDs, the music is increasingly detachable from the totality of the operatic experience in the theatre. In opera, music is genuinely the essence, but design is also a notable and well-recorded part of operatic history from its earliest times. In this context, directors are arrivistes.” New Statesman 01/23/01
• WHAT CLAIMS FOR “JAZZ”? Unquestionably Ken Burns’ “Jazz” documentary is a culturally important event. But “there is no need for exaggeration such as Burns’s claim that jazz is ‘the only art form created by Americans.’ (Apart from the issue of whether jazz is a form or a style like baroque or twelve-tone music, Americans also created tap dance, country-and- western music, Abstract Expressionism, the comic strip, and more.)” New York Review of Books 02/08/01
• KILLING OFF MUSIC? Britain’s consumer affairs minister says that one in five recordings worldwide are pirated, and that if the music industry doesn’t do something to protect itself the record business could be “killed off.” BBC 01/23/01
• SOMETHING ABOUT WINNIPEG IN JANUARY: The Winnipeg New Music Festival manages to draw thousands to a week of concerts filled with challenging music. The festival is ten years old and no one can explain exactly why the city has taken to contemporary music with such gusto. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 01/23/01

Monday January 22

• WHERE’S THE MUSIC? There are thousands of websites devoted to jazz. Only one thing missing from most of them – the music. “Even though the Internet is capable of delivering audio and video in acceptable quality, the amount of live jazz online is remarkably sparse.” The New York Times 01/22/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• BUT IT’S PRETTY FROM THE OUTSIDE…“Despite public funding and both corporate and private sponsorship, Opera Australia – like most opera companies – is strapped for cash. For the OA, though, the perennial problem of making ends meet is exacerbated by the inadequacy of its main venue, the Sydney Opera Theatre.” Sydney Morning Herald 01/22/01
• VIVA VERDI: It’s the 100th anniversary of Verdi’s death. “Anyone who cares for opera, and many who don’t, find Verdi’s music of life-changing importance. A proud nationalist at a time when Italy was divided into different states governed by France or Austria, Verdi wrote noble music that summed up his compatriots’ aspirations.” Christian Science Monitor 01/19/01

Sunday January 21

• THE POLITICS OF THE NEW NEW GROVE’S: As the new edition of the venerable New Grove’s Dictionary of Music is published, a new attitude towards music is revealed. “There is not so much in the way of new facts. But ways of looking at music have changed. The New Grove has to be abreast of its time. It has to reflect changes in the social, political and intellectual atmosphere.” The New York Times 01/21/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• PONDERING A MAAZEL NY PHIL: There has been a bias on the part of American orchestras against American conductors. Maybe a Lorin Maazel appointment to head the New York Philharmonic will be a wakeup? The job is likely only to be interim given Maazel’s age (70). Chicago Tribune 01/21/01

Friday January 19

• IS THE CONCERT HALL DYING? Is the live concert experience tottering on its last legs? The ritual of “musicians playing to audiences in buildings designed solely for that purpose – could soon be a thing of the past. Already it is beginning to look like a relic of another age – an age when people had time and leisure to give up an evening for two or three hours of potentially less-than-perfect music- making.” The Guardian (London) 01/19/01
• THE MUSIC CURE: “If music cures the soul, does it also heal the body? Can it ever be more than a cathartic force, or a soothing distraction? The relationship between music and the spiritual and emotional aspects of healing is widely shared. But those currently interested in sound and healing, whether monks or New-Age therapists, argue that there is something physical to it as well.” The Economist 01/19/01
• THE CLASSICAL GRAMMYS: It might have been a bad year for the business of classical recording, but competition for the classical grammys this year is pretty good. “As usual with awards that attempt to be all things to all people, the nominations range promiscuously across time and space.” Concertonet.com 01/19/01
• BACH GOING HOME: Ukraine says it will return a collection of manuscripts by JS Bach to Germany. “The archive was taken by the Soviet Union’s Red Army at the end of World War II.” BBC 01/19/01

Thursday January 18

• MAAZEL IN NEW YORK: The fever of speculation this week about whether Lorin Maazel would be appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic is accompanied by an interesting coincidence. Maazel was scheduled for two concerts in the Big Apple – conducting the Israel Philharmonic and playing violin in a Brahms concert. So how’d he do? New York Times 01/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• STILL A WAY’S OFF: So this week’s Washington Post story saying Maazel would be offered the NY Phil job is being denied by the orchestra. But when would a music director be named? Orchestra manager Zarin Mehta said there might not be an announcement for “weeks or even months.” Washington Post 01/18/01
• CONDUCTING ASSISTANCE: Maazel and philanthropist Alberto Vilar announced a “$5 million competition and training program yesterday to help young conductors, who typically struggle in a haphazard way to reach the podium.” New York Times 01/18/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• BOSTON SWEEPSTAKES: It’s looking more and more likely that the Boston Symphony will name James Levine as its new music director, replacing Seiji Ozawa. Boston Herald 01/18/01

Wednesday January 17

• DENYING THE MAAZEL STORY: The Washington Post reported that Lorin Maazel will be named music director of the New York Philharmonic. But is it true? The Philharmonic denies it. Backing off yesterday’s announcement that Lorin Maazel will succeed Kurt Masur, the New York Philharmonic publicly stated today that no decision has yet been made and the search for a music director remains open. “It’s absolutely not the case. No one is close to being selected.” New York Times 1/17/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• PLAYING IT SAFE: Three American orchestras are about to inherit new maestros, after complicated two-year searches for quality leadership. Christoph Eschenbach goes to Philadelphia; Lorin Maazel may (or may not) take New York; and James Levine is likely to head to Boston. Yet, is anyone really enthused about these appointments, each a relatively “safe” foray into the past rather than a daring look ahead? “America may have the mightiest orchestras in the world, but its concert life may soon become duller than Belgium’s.”The Telegraph (London) 1/17/01
• MACAL STEPS DOWN FROM JERSEY: Zdenek Macal has resigned as music director of the New Jersey Symphony. Newark Star-Ledger 01/17/01
• THE POLITICS OF FOURTH: “The ‘fourth tenor’ is a meaningless soubriquet that can deliver the kiss of death, the crock of gold, or both. Vargas, Cura and Roberto Alagna have all variously been hailed as the “fourth tenor” but Alagna – a Franco-Sicilian – was the first to be marketed as such. And boy, oh boy, has he sold a lot of records.” The Independent (London) 01/14/01

Tuesday January 16

• NY PHIL TO NAME MAAZEL: After an arduous three-year search, the NY Philharmonic is set to name Lorin Maazel as its new music director. “Details of the three-year arrangement were still under discussion. Because Maazel is one of the busiest – and highest-paid – guest conductors in the world, it is likely that he will be available only for a limited time for at least his first season and possibly through his entire tenure.” Washington Post 01/16/01
• THE MEANING OF OPERA: “The old definition of opera – people singing instead of talking – stopped working long ago. Music becomes operatic, says present conventional wisdom, when it’s used as the primary means to illuminate characters and tell stories. Opera is one of America’s fastest growing fine arts, especially with the under-50 crowd. The opera subscription is what you get after you’ve bought your BMW and worn out your Frank Sinatra records.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/16/01
• PUTTING MUSICIANS FIRST: At last week’s Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington, musicians themselves took center stage in discussions of the music business’s unprecedented state of flux. “The summit had an unapologetically political agenda: to challenge musicians to move to the center of the changes that are transforming the industry, not just as would-be superstars but as active participants. New York Times 1/16/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• LOOKING FOR LEADERS: Sydney’s two largest professional orchestras are embarking on an international headhunt for new music directors, after the announcement that John Harding is leaving his post at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra has been without a permanent concertmaster for more than two years. Sydney Morning Herald 1/16/01
• WAGNER WEIRDNESS: A new cultural family history by composer Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter sheds light on the Wagner clan’s artistic achievements and bizarre legacy. “The treasure of the Wagners, the dysfunctional cultural dynasty he founded, bears a curse. The composer’s family – unto the fourth generation – are bizarrely obliged to act out carbon copies of the reconstituted myths that formed his operas.” London Evening Standard 1/15/01
• VERDI’S HIGH POINT? This month marks the 100-year anniversary of Verdi’s death, and celebrations are being planned around the world. But is his reputation secure for the next century too? “There are reasons to think not. The public image that retained such remarkable currency during the 20th century is at last showing some cracks.” The Times (London) 1/16/01

Monday January 15

• JANSONS TAKES NEW ORCHESTRA: Mariss Jansons, music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and often mentioned as a leading candidate to take over the New York Philharmonic, has agreed to become music director of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, one of the top ensembles in the world and currently led by his Pittsburgh predecessor, Lorin Maazel. The appointment does not rule him out of the NY Phil job should it be offered. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/13/01
• SKIPPING THE MIDDLEMAN: Forget all the lawsuits over copyrights and royalties. Ordinary musicians and bands are finding the internet to be a good place to bypass the middleman and reach fans and booking agents directly. Nando Times (Scripps Howard) 01/14/01
  • LIFE IN INDIEVILLE: The buzz in music circles these days is about being an “indie” musician, an independent artist using digital technology to get your work out. But does it work? Is life really better on the other side of the digital divide? CBC 01/15/01
• VOCAL “AFFLICTIONS”? “One of the hottest opera tickets around, 34-year-old American countertenor David Daniels has done more than any other contemporary countertenor to pull this vocal type out of obscurity and inject it with new vigour.” Financial Times 01/15/01
• EVISCERATING “JAZZ”: Leon Wieseltier doesn’t have much good to say about “Jazz” or the reaction to the Ken Burns documentary. “Burns suffocates the jazz tradition in his superlatives. He deadens everything with his wonder. He has come to be ravished. A helpless hero-worshiper, his success threatens to make hero worship into a respectable historical standpoint. It is easy to see why Burns flourishes in this culture of worthless admiration. He is really just a fan: Bob Costas with an NEA grant.” The New Republic 01/15/01

Sunday January 14

• CLASSICAL MUSIC LITE: Classical music radio is not exactly a thriving format in America. But where it does thrive, the artform is often inverted, with “serious” composers such as Brahms relegated to the second string in favor of frothy fare by von Suppe and Giuliani (Mauro). Certainly no 20th Century fare. These short easily- digestible morsels subvert the weight of the repertoire. Why? Minneapolis Star Tribunbe 01/14/01
• THE FUTURE OF JAZZ? All the talk of the history of jazz in the past few weeks leaves out the question of the future. “We live in a time when the idea of a single ‘vanguard’ – one pure, radical, cutting-edge movement that simultaneously incorporates, transcends and destroys the past — has been rightly discredited. There are hundreds of different creators out there, all pursuing their own paths, a number of which may turn out to have lasting merit.” Washington Post 01/14/01
• THE NEW SING: Until a few years ago, the song recital was one of the most formalized stiff rituals on the concert stage. But a new brand of losser, less-formal recital has emerged. “It’s a challenging, more naked way to go, and the typically modest financial rewards for such endeavors haven’t gotten any better.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/14/01
• MAKING LISZTS: One of the most prolific and flamboyant composers of all time, there is still much to be learned about Franz Liszt. The New York Times 01/14/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• WHAT’S AN ANTHEM YOU CAN’T SING? Composers in St. Petersburg, Russia have taken up the task of trying to find words to add to the city’s official anthe, “Officialdom seems largely thrilled by the idea of having a city anthem you can sing.” St. Petersburg Times 01/13/01

Friday January 12

• CHANGING WORLD: The Future of Music Summit beats up on the music establishment. “The only hope for those dead businesses is if they realize they are dead and begin to reinvent themselves. A lot of the issues we’re discussing here are much broader than music itself. The issues we face with Napster and MP3 are soon going to be faced by television. And it’s unsure who is going to be writing the script-courts, Congress or both.” Chicago Tribune 01/11/01
  • FREE FOR ALL: Columbia University law professor and champion of the free-software movement Eben Moglen stole the show during a panel discussion at this week’s Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington. “Drawing the loudest applause of the conference, he explained that the future had only two rules: 1) Everyone is connected to everyone else; and 2) All data that can be shared will be shared. It was difficult not to notice that the assembled musicians were applauding the one speaker who definitively promised they would not get paid for their music.” Inside.com 1/11/01
• DOUBLE DARE YOU: A recording industry forum challenged the public to crack digital encryption codes meant to thwart CD piracy. A Princeton professor “says he’s cracked all four codes. But he’s delayed releasing his report because it may violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.” CBC 01/12/01
• NEW OPERA HOUSE DIRECTOR CONFIRMED: Ending weeks of speculation, Tony Hall has been confirmed as the new executive director of the Royal Opera House. Hall will leave his position as BBC news director to replace Michael Kaiser, who left ROH in December to head Washington’s Kennedy Center. BBC 1/11/01
  • PROCEED WITH CAUTION: Hall will certainly have his work cut out for him. The Royal Opera House has gone through five executive directors in as many years, and the pressures, hurdles, and media scrutiny are sure to be intense. “The job is the definitive bucket of warm piss, as Lyndon Johnson once described the post of American vice-president, and anyone who takes it on can expect to fail.” The Independent (London) 1/12/01
  • WHAT’S IT WORTH? Hall’s new salary has already become a matter of great contention, amid speculation that he negotiated the largest salary in Britain’s entire subsidized arts sector. “If he has secured a package close to his BBC salary, it is likely to cause anger in the arts.” The Telegraph (London) 1/12/01
  • DIVA-PREPAREDNESS TRAINING? Is Hall, who’s spent his entire career at BBC News, prepared for the eccentricities of a performing arts organization? “In the next few weeks he will have to master ballet and opera repertory and prominent personalities, remember the technical names for bits of machinery, and learn how to deal with artistic temperaments.” The Telegraph (London) 1/12/01
  • PEOPLE’S OPERA: Hall has been urged by the ROH Board to “focus on openness and accessibility,” an acknowledgment of the continuing criticism of the Royal Opera as overpriced and elitist. The house became the subject of intense political debate over whether public money – in this case, a $125 million grant from national lottery profits toward the lavish refurbishment of its 1858 horseshoe-shaped auditorium – should be spent on such a project.” New York Times 1/12/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Thursday January 11

• BIG BAD RECORDING COMPANIES: US Senator Orrin Hatch told 500 music industry folk at the Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington DC that major record groups were ”content gatekeepers” that have “greedily, shortsightedly and perhaps even illegally roadblocked consumers’ access to music on the Internet. ‘I do not think it is any benefit for artists and fans to have all the new, wide distribution channels controlled by those who have controlled the old, narrower ones’.” Inside.com 01/10/01
• FAKE STRAD? The conservator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum has suggested that the world’s most celebrated Stradivarius violin is a fake. “The so-called Messiah, or Le Messie, is housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and estimated to be worth some $20 million. By implication Pollens has cast doubt on the very system of authentication and valuation that currently prevails in the market, a market worth $50 million per year worldwide by some estimates.” Forbes 01/10/01
• ROYALTY BROUHAHA: Britain’s Performing Rights Society has changed the way it calculates royalties to composers and performers. Classical musicians are furious because the new calculations have reduced the amount they receive. The PRS says it’s time to end what are perceived as ‘subsidies’ to the classical folk. “We no longer feel we have the right or the duty to redress the perceived undervaluing of classical music in a commercial environment.” The Guardian (London) 01/11/01
• NEW RISKS: New San Francisco Opera director proposes a five-year plan of innovation and adventure. Read the highlights. San Jose Mercury News 01/10/01

Wednesday January 10

• ESCHENBACH IN PHILLY: So what can Philadelphians expect from Christophe Eschenbach, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s new music director? “Eschenbach’s means of expression may challenge Philadelphia ears in ways they haven’t experienced from previous music directors, and they may not like it.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/10/01
  • THE LURE OF A NEW HALL? It would appear that conductor Christophe Eschenbach had his pick of orchestras to lead as music director. Why did he choose the Philadelphia Orchestra over the New York Philharmonic? Chicago Sun-Times 01/10/01
  • THE DEAL: “Eschenbach’s initial contract will run for three years, beginning with the 2003-04 season; there will be annual options to extend. Many details have yet to be worked out and financial terms were not disclosed yesterday, but Eschenbach will live in Philadelphia.” Philadelphia Orchestra 01/10/01
  • MUSICAL CHAIRS: “Eschenbach, a dynamic conductor with a mercurial musical sensibility, had been rumored as a candidate in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Over the past months, the likely pool of talent available to the three orchestras has narrowed to a handful of oft-cited names.” Washington Post 01/10/01
• THE DEATH OF NEW MUSIC? “New music is at an impasse—you can’t convince people it exists. There is a certain small culture around it, but it is impossible to get power brokers outside that culture to believe that anything is going on. The official line is, classical music is finished, a closed book, Glass, Reich, and maybe John Zorn the end of history. And it does not help that jazz is ever more officially referred to as ‘America’s classical music’. First of all, what is that supposed to do for jazz? Legitimize it, make it blandly respectable and therefore ignorable? And it slaps those composers whose training is classical out of the water.” Village Voice 01/09/01
• THE FUSS ABOUT “JAZZ”: “The ironic flip side to the notion that jazz is ‘America’s indigenous music’ is the fact that most Americans don’t listen to it. All of which has made Burns downright evangelical. His documentary is meant as a curative of sorts. But it also points to curious truths about the relationship between jazz and contemporary American culture, between the music as it’s heard today and its underlying, timeless ideals.” Village Voice 01/09/01
• TAKING IT TO THE HILL: After surviving a tumultuous year of litigation, copyright turmoil, and licensing debates, major players from the music industry are converging in Washington this week for a Future of Music Policy Summit. “Its speaker list, crowdedwith political figures, reflects the cutting-edge reality that Capitol Hill has become an increasingly important factor in the digital-music morass.” Inside.com 1/09/01
• MORE FAT THAN MUSCLE? Did developments in the classical and pop music worlds over the past two decades really warrant the Grove Dictionary of Music’s 50% bulk increase in its new edition? “Had this been a lexicon of genetics or co mputer science, the new data would have been essential. In music, the engorgement of Grove raises uncomfortable issues of cultural cringe and condescension.” The Telegraph (London) 1/10/01
• A YEAR OF FAREWELLS: Outgoing executive director Franz Xaver Ohnesorg announced Carnegie Hall’s upcoming 111^th season, as he prepares to leave to helm the Berlin Philharmonic. “Next season will offer a rare flurry of New York musical farewells by conductors who are ending long-held directorships with major orchestras.” The New York Times 01/10/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• CHARITY WALKOUT: Luciano Pavarotti, Tom Stoppard, and several other high-profile artists have walked out on War Child UK, amid accusations that the charity’s cofounder pocketed bribes and allowed excessive expenditures. Pavarotti had earlier been instrumental in convincing musicians like Elton John, Bono, and Eric Clapton to donate royalties from their concerts to the charity, which helps children rebuild their lives in war-torn countries. The Guardian (London) 1/10/01

Tuesday January 9

• PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA’S NEW MUSIC DIRECTOR: After a long search, the Philadelphia Orchestra has chosen Christophe Eschenbach as its new music director. “Mr. Eschenbach, 60, music director and chief conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra Hamburg since 1998 and music director of the Orchestre de Paris since September.” The New York Times 01/09/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• AFTER 28 YEARS IN BOSTON: Seiji Ozawa is moving on as he gets ready to leave the Boston Symphony. “In fall 2002 he assumes the post of music director of the Vienna State Opera once held by Claudio Abbado. He also is planning to devote more podium time to the Saito Kinen Orchestra, the Tokyo-based ensemble he co-founded in 1984.” Chicago Tribune 01/09/01
• WHAT CONDUCTORS EARN: “James Levine of the Metropolitan Opera was paid nearly $1.9-million (all figures in U.S. dollars) for the fiscal year that ended in 1999. Right behind him was Kurt Masur of the New York Philharmonic, who reportedly earned just over $1.5-million.” Globe & Mail (Forbes) 01/09/01
• ODE TO THE ACCORDION: “For all its ponderousness, the accordion is an instrument of suddenness. It can never be suitably introduced. It asserts itself as a kind of non sequitur. Dolorous and joyous within a turn, it is capable of unadulterated sentimentality. Yet its emotions cannot be savored exactly because they refuse to be modulated or adjusted. The accordion blurts.” Feed 01/05/01
• GLAMOROUS BUT CAN THEY PLAY? A new generation of female classical musician is taking to stages with more glamorous (and sometimes suggestive) marketing. Does it make a difference to how they play? “People say it’s because of what we look like that we get guff, but it’s not — it’s because we’re women. It has nothing to do with being attractive or not attractive. But somehow there’s an inherent sexism in classical music that has always been there. And finally, we’re breaking that down.” Sonicnet 01/09/01

Monday January 8

• MOZART’S VENETIAN FLING: A music scholar says he’s uncovered evidence that Mozart, visiting Venice at the age of 15, made a local girl pregnant. The researcher says the young genius “may have left a lasting legacy of his stay — presumably without his father’s knowledge — through local parish registers, which list the death of a five-month-old boy named Giacomo Gasparo Mozart in June 1819.” The Times (London) 01/08/01
• WHY EMINEM? The Grammys have been criticized for being too conventional. So how better to blow up that image by nominating Eminem? Indeed, the rapper’s 9-million-selling nominated album, as well as being violent, takes plenty of pot shots at the music industry. “What better way for the stuffy Grammies to take a walk on the wild side than rewarding somebody who regards them with such contempt?” The Guardian (London) 01/08/01
• WHO CARES ABOUT JAZZ? “By most contemporary measurements, the American art form once called ‘the devil’s music’ is dust-speck insignificant. It accounts for less than 3 percent of total recorded music sales. Its artists rarely rate among the top-grossing live performers. Its grip on the popular consciousness gets looser by the year – jazz artists are rarely seen on television (even if we count Diana Krall and Kenny G) and only slightly more often heard on the radio.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/08/01
• AT GREAT COST: John Eliot Gardiner spent the year 2000 recording the Bach cantatas. “The haul was long, encompassing 93 concerts at 61 churches in 12 countries, performed by his 18-voice Monteverdi Choir and 35-member English Baroque Soloists. The price tag was $8 million. The project will be held up as a model of either realizing the impossible or stretching a thriving organization to the breaking point, since there was one significant casualty: Gardiner’s longtime relationship with the recording company Deutsche Grammophon.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/08/01
• MUSIC AND THE ANIMALS: “Careful studies of bird song and whale song indicate that birds not only create original works of music, but they collaborate in singing complex songs. Whales compose veritable symphonies — complete with repeating themes and movements. Just how the brain, human or otherwise, processes and reacts to song is still being studied, but humans and many other animals seem to be born primed to understand, learn and enjoy music.” Discovery.com 01/08/01
• THE MARKETING OF “JAZZ”: “You wonder if jazz will forever be capitalized or quote-marked or both and prefaced by ‘Ken Burns’ from now on. Burns calls Wynton Marsalis ‘the star of this film’ and with ‘sole corporate underwriter’ General Motors, they appear to be hijacking the history of the art form.” Culture Kiosque 01/08/01
• PROTECTING THEIR RIGHTS: A group of independent musicians gets together to talk about the “the future of music manifesto” and musicians’ rights in the digital world. The Idler 01/08/01

Sunday January 7

• THE FAILURE OF THE AVANT GARDE: Pop music used to borrow liberally from classical music’s avant garde. But no more. “Perhaps the biggest failure of the current contemporary classical scene is that it has not fully embraced the most significant revolution of the past half century, the development of the recording studio. Rock musicians, and many of the early classical avant-garde experimenters, picked up ideas gained in studios and ran with them.” The Telegraph (London) 01/07/01
• REBUILDING LA: A year ago when Deborah Borda took over management of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra was in shambles, with a $7 million debt and attendance and morale problems. “By September, the end of fiscal year 1999-2000, the Phil’s operating deficit had been reduced to less than $200,000. To date, this season’s ticket sales are up an average of 13% per concert following 10 years of steady decline – good news, but still 25% behind ticket sales a decade ago.” Los Angeles Times 01/07/01
• BUM’S RAP? Controversial rapper Eminem had a schizophrenic week. He was nominated for a Grammy, but he also “faces felony assault and weapons charges in two Michigan counties, and in one of those jurisdictions, Macomb County, the prosecutor has pledged to seek ‘significant jail time’.” Los Angeles Times 01/07/01
• A FIXED IDEA OF JAZZ: Ken Burns “Jazz” documentary debuts Monday night. “The film will not change what jazz has become, not even a bit. But by the force of its marketing campaign (backed by General Motors), and also by the force of its storytelling and handling of images, ‘Jazz’ will fix in the minds of millions of Americans a particular set of notions when the word jazz is uttered. New York Times 01/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)
  • AND THE EXPERTS SAY: “Is the Burns series a fair representation of jazz? The question was put to musicians and others in the jazz world, who were provided with tapes of the series.” New York Times 01/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)
  • BEAT TREAT: “Burns makes no apologies for any gaps or omissions. Nor should he. His intent was never to create the definitive visual history of jazz, nor could such be done in 190 hours, much less 19.” The Globe & Mail 01/06/01
  • AGENT FOR CHANGE: “The great, sprawling behemoth of a documentary focuses on the central role jazz has played as a life-force counteracting racism and separatism in America. Jazz, in fact, has brought together more blacks and whites into cooperative, amicable, even loving situations than practically any other social force in America.” Hartford Courant 01/07/01
  • MISSING THE BEAT: ” ‘Jazz,’ a 19-hour film that feels about twice that long, lumbers, laboriously, from one leaden biographical portrait to the next, from one creaky cliche to a thousand more yet to come. Its chesty-voiced narrator doesn’t so much trace the evolution of jazz as issue ironclad pronouncements about it.” Chicago Tribune 01/07/01
  • AND WHERE’S THE HEAT? “More than its length, “Jazz” is, like those solos that reveled in their freedom from melody and chord progression and the like, at least a touch dissonant, jumping jerkily from segment to segment. There is beautiful music everywhere, but the feeling is of disjointed, mostly biographical stories assembled in sequence rather than a narrative whole.” Chicago Tribune 01/07/01
  • A BIG FAN: ” ‘Jazz’, is one of those rare, stunning TV offerings that pull you like Dickens into a superb, spiraling tale that lights up your mind – indeed, your whole body – and drops you back down on the couch at the end a more well-rounded, aware person.” San Francisco Chronicle 01/07/01
  • STATUS QUO: “And indeed, the Burns project, for all its many virtues, does perpetuate the notion of jazz as orthodoxy, as tradition not to be tampered with lightly.” Washington Post 01/07/01
• NOT JUST THE HITS: Why is orchestral programming so stuck in the past? “The message to audiences would be: You can count on us to sift through the centuries and present only the agreed-upon masterpieces of the past, with occasional, carefully commissioned works by living composers deemed capable of producing new masterpieces.” Don’t we need some freshening? New York Times 01/07/01 (one-time registration required for access)

Friday January 5

• GRAMMYS UNDER SEIGE: The National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences is under seige for having nominated rapper Eminem for Grammys this week. The “Detroit rapper known for both darkly comic wordplay and homicidal, gay-bashing lyrics, was nominated for several of the Academy’s highest honors, including album of the year. The news lit up phone lines and overwhelmed the e-mail system at NARAS’s Los Angeles office, with nearly everyone furious that the academy had put its imprimatur on an artist who seems to revel in homophobia and misogyny.” Washington Post 01/05/01
• ORCHESTRA TO ABANDON THEATRE PROJECT: The Minnesota Orchestra surprised Minneapolis Thursday by anouncing it would likely abandon its three year campaign to build a 19,000-seat outdoor amphitheatre. “The orchestra cited unexpected costs and the failure to secure a significant donor to help finance the $40 million project.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune 01/05/01
• A LITTLE APPRECIATION As Kurt Masur nears the end of his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, the orchestra has announced its upcoming season will be devoted largely to celebrating his 11 years at the podium. The schedule includes the release of a CD set drawn from his live broadcast performances; a retrospective book; and a three-week season finale, which the orchestra is calling “Thank You, Kurt Masur.” New York Times 01/05/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• MAJOR REWRITE: Next week marks the release of the latest edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It’s a major event in the classical music world, given the breadth of the project (it’s the largest single-subject reference work in the world) and its online launch. “It contains 29,499 entries. It weighs 68kg. Stand the volumes side by side and they measure 1.45 metres. It cost its publisher, Macmillan, £20m to create. It is hard to overestimate the impact of Grove’s publication on Monday, the first new edition for 20 years.” The Guardian (London) 01/05/01
  • GROVE ONLINE: A music critic ventures into the online version. “The alternative to writing out a check for nearly £3,000 (bookshelves extra) is now to subscribe to Grove online – a mere £190 a year.” The dictionary is rich in entries, but it currently does not provide sounds clips so it is not taking advantage of the full capacity of the internet. The Guardian (London) 01/05/01
• CROWD CONTROL: Michael Eavis has canceled the 2001 Glastonbury Music Festival citing safety problems. He is currently facing prosecution for allowing an alleged 100,000 fence-jumpers to crash last year’s concert. Mr Eavis hopes to spend the year determining a better way to control entry to the festival in 2002. The Independent (London) 01/05/01

Thursday January 4

• GRAMMY NOMINATIONS ANNOUNCED: “Unlike the nominations of recent years, which have been dominated by one or two albums (Santana’s Supernatural, Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill), this year’s field includes a wide range of talents, with no single work emerging as the top vote-getter.” Philadelphia Inquirer 01/04/01
  • EMINEM NOMINATION CONTROVERSIAL: “According to an executive at the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, their phone lines were jammed with angry calls moments after the nominations were announced.” Los Angeles Times 01/04/01
  • A BAD YEAR ALL AROUND: “The Grammys have joined with Rolling Stone, The New York Times and Spin in endorsing the musical hate crimes waged against women and gays on Eminem’s ‘The Marshall Mathers LP,’ nominating the sociopathic screed as album of the year.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/04/01
  • OFFICIAL GRAMMY ANNOUNCEMENT
  • CLASSICAL GRAMMY LIST: Murray Perahia, Evgeny Kissin, Leif Ove Andsnes, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic and the Emerson String Quartet are nominated for Best Classical Album. Grammy.com 01/04/01
• A STORY OF OPERATIC PROPORTIONS: The imbroglio over what should happen to the leadership of the Bayreuth Festival is epic. The personalities are oversized and the issues as dramatic and petty as it gets. And what should become of the home of Wagner’s opera? The Telegraph (London) 01/04/00
• BLIND AMBITION? “For the past year conductor Christian Thielemann has “been at the centre of a bitter struggle for power and money within Berlin. Thielemann is the outgoing music director of the Deutsche Oper – he resigned last year because he felt that he was not properly consulted over the appointment of the new intendant. He insists, contrary to some reports, that he has no masterplan to take over opera in Berlin by fusing the two main opera houses under his control.” The Guardian (London) 01/04/01
• COVENT GARDEN DELAY: The appointment of BBC exec Tony Hall to be the new director of London’s Royal Opera House was expected before Christmas. But the appointment has been held up, reportedly over money. “Mr Hall took home £250,000 last year in salary and other benefits while the last Royal Opera House head, Michael Kaiser, earned around £140,000 a year. Public sector arts administration jobs pay significantly lower salaries than their private sector counterparts, with the highest-paid arts administrator, the South Bank Centre’s Karsten Witt, believed to earn £213,000.” The Guardian (London) 01/04/01

Wednesday January 3

• THE LEGEND CONTINUES: When Ronald Wilford announced in November that he was stepping aside as president of Columbia Artists Management, the music world took notice. “A seminal and sometimes fearsome figure in the business, he has had an unequaled role in helping to shape the careers of many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors like Herbert von Karajan, James Levine, Kurt Masur and Seiji Ozawa. But WWilford says he’s not retiring. “I don’t want to step down. I have no intention of retiring or anything like that.” New York Times 01/03/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• THE LITTLE-GUY CONSORTIUM: Big recording companies are consolidating and folding up their classical operations. And small labels have a hard time advertising and getting shelf space. Now a new consortium of small classical labels hopes that by consolidating their efforts they’ll thrive. Sonicnet 01/02/01
• STILL THE BEATLES The Beatles album of greatest hits has sold more than 20 million copies in the past few months, putting it on course to be the best-selling album of all time. Why, 30 years after the group broke up, do its songs resonate for so many people? New York Times 01/03/01 (one-time registration required for access)
• JOHN ADAMS ON BEING A COMPOSER TODAY: “It’s been my impression that in terms of commissions there’s never been a more bullish period in American history. There are all these operas being commissioned. San Francisco Opera has commissioned 4 or 5 operas, and the Met is on a big commissioning program, Chicago, those are all the big ones, and the smaller companies are commissioning like crazy, and orchestras are commissioning works, so it seems like actually this is a tremendously good time to be alive as a composer of large-scale works.” NewMusicbox 01/01
• LAST SOLO: The principal trumpeter of the Trenton Symphony collapsed onstage Monday right after performing a solo and died before an audience of about 2,000. Backstage 01/02/01

Tuesday January 2

• THE PROBLEM WITH OPERA: Opera has enjoyed increasing popularity in recent years. “But the fact that repertory companies, overseas as well as here, avoid placing many of the great modernist works on stage for fear of alienating traditionalist audiences is almost a tragedy in itself. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century and three quarters of the major achievements of the last, are not performed.” The Age (Melbourne) 01/02/01
• THE GREAT CONDUCTORS: Who are the conductors set to define orchestral music in the 21st Century? Here’s a list of a dozen conductors under the age of 50. Culturekiosque 01/02/01
• GRAMMY’S TOUGH CHOICES: The Grammy Award nominations are to be announced Wednesday. The credibility of the organization is on the line this year. If N’ Sync gets a nod, it will be because of their sales record and not their music. On the other hand, “Eminem would be a bold choice because many of the 12,000 voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, which sponsors the Grammys, will feel uneasy endorsing an X-rated collection filled with violent, often hateful imagery.” Los Angeles Times 01/01/01
• WHO’S KILLED JAZZ? Jazz critics have been lining up to take pot shots at Ken Burns new “Jazz” documentary – and that’s before it’s even been shown on PBS. Burns himself blames jazz critics for ruining jazz. “Are you familiar with the American comic strip Peanuts? And the character Pig Pen who trails around a cloud of dust with him wherever he goes? The jazz community has done that to jazz, making it very off-putting for the rest of us who think you need some advanced degree or to be a member of this cabalistic jazzerati to understand it.” National Post (Canada) 01/01/02
• THE POOR VIOLA: What’s the difference between a viola and an onion? People cry when they chop an onion to pieces.” Why do people tell so many jokes about the viola? Dallas Morning News 01/01/01