Category: music

— Googoosh is touring again. “In Iran, Googoosh, 50, is not merely a pop star. She is a singer whose fame and post-revolutionary exile from the public eye have turned her into a national icon. For her thousands of expatriate Iranian fans, hearing Googoosh live after two decades of silence is a dream come true. Her fame has often been compared to that of Elvis Presley in the West.” – New York Times

“But a general malaise appears to have gripped consumers; in part due to what many consider unfairly priced CDs. Consumers have flocked to file trading networks such as Napster, Scour, and the nearly 100 other applications that allow users to trade and sample music for free. Even as a federal court prepared to shut down Napster for violating copyrights, 3 percent of the entire Internet home population logged on to the application in search of free music.” – Wired

Twenty-eight US states have filed a price-fixing suit against five big manufacturers of compact disks. The suit contends that because of  the manufacturers collusion, consumers have paid $480 million more than they should have for recordings over the past five years. – Variety

Since he took it over eight years ago, Daniel Barenboim has turned the former East Berlin Staatsoper company into Berlin’s leading opera house. But Berlin is broke, and Barenboim is demanding another 10 million marks for his budget as a condition of his staying. Last week drastic plans by the Berlin Senate were revealed to amalgamate the city’s three major opera houses with Barenboim to be offered the job of general manager, or “intendant,” of the new super-company. – Chicago Tribune

“When you add up the radio stations, the dingy used-record stores, the $1.3 billion market for rap and the $1.9 billion spent on revivified country and western, music ranks among the largest industries ever to exist. In the midst of this fantastic investment in an all-enveloping cloud of sound, hardly anyone seems to remember that music stands fairly low on the scale of devices by which we try to understand human experience. A people that takes music as its highest expression has cut itself off from narrative, epic, allegory – the explanatory arts that could put to use the emotions that their music represents.” – New Statesman

The world’s largest chamber music festival finishes up with a 20 percent increase in attendance. Most popular concert? The Canadian Brass. Least: Ensemble Intercontemporain. – Ottawa Citizen

Opera Australia is at a crossroads. “OA is saddled with a $5.9 million accumulated deficit, largely the result of its 1996 merger with the debt-crippled Victoria State Opera, and there has been a run of poor box office returns in Melbourne.” The company’s future is threatened, and the government is reviewing the company’s operations. But the “OA plans to sing and play its way out of debt.” – Sydney Morning Herald

Why is Canada’s National Youth Orchestra languishing? “The NYO is limping through the summer, barely recognized, tightening its belt at every stop. Its training period has been reduced from four weeks to three. Its annual summer tour schedule has been slashed virtually in half. Its government funding has been cut from 77 per cent of revenues to 48 per cent. And the size of the symphony has fallen from 105 members to 84.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s  ‘Helikopter-Quartett’ – just released on CD – “is just as it sounds. It’s a string quartet written to be performed with each of the four players hovering above the concert hall in a separate helicopter. A ‘click track’ helps keep them together, and their individual parts, plus the ambient noise of the helicopters, is beamed down to the concert hall, where it is reassembled by sound engineers. In an ideal performance, the actual whir of the helicopters above the concert hall would be just barely audible, blending into the electronically received individual parts. It has not had many performances, ideal or otherwise.” – Washington Post