Category: music

Whew, don’t forget 8-tracks! The important bit is that, after a precipitous and intense decline, music sales are inching upward again.

Theory: “McCartney may have made more people happy—gapingly, tinglingly, mind-cancelingly happy—than any other artist, alive or dead.”

Gupta founded the Street Symphony in Los Angeles, working with homeless musicians and audiences. He says the audiences “would raise their hands and say ‘Well what was the composer feeling when they wrote that because I heard this.’ And then they would tell us a story or anecdote of their life that exactly reflected where the composer or where we as performers exactly were in our emotional life. … So this was actually one of the most astute and emphatic and engaged audiences that we’d encountered in our lives.”

Alert: All of the songs are – if you like pop music, of course – pretty good. “The album has been the gift that keeps on giving.”

Mitch Winehouse said his daughter’s fans have “been clamoring for something new from Amy, but really there isn’t anything new,” so he and the rest of her family “felt this would be a tremendous way for Amy both to revisit her fans through a hologram, and also an incredible way to raise money for our foundation.”

It’s very hard to write about music in fiction without ending up sounding like a music critic or a musicologist. What can you say? “The adagio was sublimely moving”; “Everyone who heard the symphony acknowledged it as a work of genius”; “His technical dexterity at the keyboard made the audience gasp.” It doesn’t quite fly – the author is asking the reader to take too much on trust.

When the violins glissando, they’re the answer to the question posed by his left hand. It’s like he’s squeezing the music out of the air. Then the moment is gone. His left hand is back to supporting the right hand with small, occasional jabs in the air. The violins play thousands of other notes that night. But for those two seconds, because of this little gesture that nobody asked for, the music feels just a little bit like magic.

Intended to update music copyright law for the digital era, H.R. 1551 (formally the “Orrin G. Hatch-Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act”) accomplishes three key things: making sure songwriters and artists receive royalties on songs recorded before 1972; allocating royalties for music producers; and updating licensing and royalty rules for streaming services to pay rights-holders in a more streamlined fashion, via a new, independent entity.

“In a press release sent out Thursday evening, the company bitterly criticized the musicians’ union for rejecting the proposal and, for the first time, raised issues about the company’s financial stability and future viability. … The musicians responded by calling the offer ‘a bogus PR stunt.'”

“Abandoning its past practice of adding competitive routes and bigger planes on a whim, the likes of American and United now have figured out that in order to be profitable they must limit capacity. Better to charge more per seat than risk a half-empty plane. … That’s exactly what the Lyric Opera of Chicago has been trying to do” — and it’s what its orchestra musicians are striking over. Chris Jones points out that, when it comes to culture in a city like Chicago, the economic arguments for limiting supply are not the only important factor.