Category: music

“If other artforms are in a constant scramble to reinvent themselves, opera gives the singular impression of a maiden aunt cast upon a desert island, clutching her trousseau of frocks circa 1910 and a pile of 78s of ‘Great Voices of the Century’ ready to play ‘Desert Island Discs’. It is a source of some anxiety to opera companies, not just locally, but around the world, that their audiences are getting older.” – The Age (Melbourne)

The all-female string quartet Bond has been banned from the classical music record charts in Britain for sounding too much like pop music. “There’s a classical supervisory committee and they felt it more of a pop record than a classical record.” – BBC

In London, an attempt to discredit Shostakovich. “The essence of the attack is that Shostakovich is unfit to stand comparison with Beethoven, and that placing them side by side merely emphasises Shostakovich’s shortcomings. But the campaign runs deeper than that, for what is being claimed is that few of Shostakovich’s works are worth performing at all, and that recent attempts to find coded anti-Stalinist messages in them – thereby making them seem emotionally ambiguous and thus more ‘interesting’ – are simply a waste of time.” – The Herald (Scotland)

The St. Louis Symphony has achieved a great measure of artistic success. But its bank balance seems to slip a bit further with each season. “Over the last 17 or 18 years, the orchestra has accumulated a potentially crippling deficit of $7 million. (Its annual budget is now $26 million for the orchestra itself with an additional $3 million for its music school.)” – New York Times

What’s the best concert hall in America in which to listen to music? That’s easy – Boston’s Symphony Hall. – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“During the past decade, new American performing arts facilities have been popping up like mushrooms after a rain, but architecturally they’ve been a pusillanimous lot. When not actively nostalgic, as in Fort Worth’s Bass Performance Hall, they’ve tended to favor a kind of buttoned-down corporate look, as in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, or shopping-mall lite, as in Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center and West Palm Beach’s Kravis Center.” – Dallas Morning News

Where would our musical cultural have been without Pierre Boulez? “Important works by a vast number of other composers — Elliott Carter, Gyorgy Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle — would never have been commissioned or recorded. And there would have been no one to keep contemporary music in the public eye, especially in the public eye represented by the television camera.” – New York Times

“On behalf of the classical music world, I’d like to say sorry to anyone who plays, listens to or cares about jazz. For the past 20 years you have been subjected to attitudes from this high-brow side of the fence that range from the patronising to the exploitative to something akin to a hostile take-over.” – The Telegraph (UK)

For years, British composer Harrison Birtwistle lived as a recluse on a remote French hillside. Now, at 66, he’s moved back to Britain, with some strong ideas about English culture. “I believe we have in this country the best musicians in the world, but we don’t have the best orchestras because we don’t give them the money to rehearse. It’s spread too thin. So second-rate becomes good enough, and we don’t know the difference any more.” – The Telegraph (UK)

Women divas dominate the Australian pop charts. But the power in pop music is still male. “For a business that sells itself as hip, liberal and progressive, key aspects of the music industry remain as much of a boys’ club as they were when Elvis Presley moseyed into Memphis and signed up with Sun Records. It begs the question: if 50 per cent of all record producers since Rock Around The Clock had been women, how different might the catalogue of western pop sound? Would we have landed elsewhere musically in 2000?” – Sydney Morning Herald