Category: music

The orchestras of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland – the Big Five. “In a cumulative history totaling more than 560 years, these five orchestras have scrupulously avoided hiring American music directors with nearly complete success. The shining exception is a fellow named Leonard Bernstein, who ran the show in New York from 1958 to 1969.” – Sonicnet.com

Composers have always experimented with new ways of producing music. So today’s forays into interactivity come from a long tradition. “Yet these interactive inventions may someday put composers out of business, at least those who cling to the quaint idea that composing means one person in private putting notes and sounds together for later public performance.” – New York Times

A reporter decides to go legal and try to purchase downloadable music through the internet. “Even if Napster and Scour were shut down tomorrow, nobody in their right mind would spend this much time and frustration trying to buy digital music online. Lawsuits and copyright issues aside, the music industry isn’t anywhere near creating a system that customers will embrace; heck, it’s hard enough trying to get them to take your money.” – Boston Globe

If Deutsche Grammophon and EMI Classics and Sony Classical were then to bite the dust, the sun would continue to rise each morning even i,f it meant that no one could buy yet another Beethoven symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado or yet another opera starring Placido Domingo. More than likely, those little record labels that already dot the scene would become more significant, fill in the gaps and keep the fires of classical music burning. – Baltimore Sun

There are some terrific British jazz musicians. But getting noticed at home is difficult. “With a few laudable exceptions, the greatest appreciation of British jazz comes from outside the United Kingdom.” – The Observer (UK)

“She is 54 now, and past her vocal prime. Time has accentuated her tendency to sing sharp, and the sheer brazen splendour of the sound she once produced is irrecoverably tarnished. As if to compensate, she has developed a grand manner on the platform – complete with radiant smiles, gracious waves and a rapt pose suggesting fervent prayer to the Almighty – which forcibly brings to mind the Irish adage of ‘all gong and no dinner’.” – The Telegraph (UK)

“Part artist colony, part musical monastery, part summer camp, Marlboro is the place where 80 or so musicians, from teenagers to septuagenarians, come together in this tough-love utopia to explore music at the greatest possible depth. The musicians are often those who stand to make a difference: those in the United States’ Big Five orchestras.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

“Electronics and metal alloys, computer chips and state-of-the-art plastics: all have been applied to the piano’s design, but they don’t improve the original appreciably. It is what it is, a perfect articulation of an idea that occupies a kind of cultural cul-de-sac. It’s the ultimate expression of one strand of our mechanically clever culture (think of the typewriter or the computer keyboard) joined to our specific notion of music based on the diatonic scale. Its great genius is to translate the merely mechanical into the realm of music.” – The Guardian

Jonathan Harvey had an orchestral premiere in London this week. “Harvey’s music could well gain a cult following amongst the generation which spaced out to the wilder reaches of Pink Floyd or the more surreal moments of John Williams’s score for Raiders of the Lost Ark. In one of his most spell-binding works, One Evening, an Indian tabla rhythm speeds up and rise in pitch, as if the recording were being accelerated, until it actually transforms into a rising musical note which swoops from one speaker to another.” – The Independent (UK)

Does having kids play and listen to music actually make them smarter? An oft-quoted study said yes. But there has been resistance to the idea. “Researchers are mustering data to counter those who are intent on debunking the ‘Mozart effect” – the theory that classical music makes the brain work better.” – The Straits Times (Singapore) (NYT)