Category: music

Lavish soundtracks have become an increasingly integral part of movie-making and movie-promoting. Madonna, Metallica, and U2 have all contributed new songs to big-budget movies recently. “Soundtracks have been the sleeper album chart success story of the last decade. In 1996 US music buyers were snapping up four times as many soundtrack albums as they had been 10 years before.” – The Guardian

A long-lost opera with music by Mozart will receive its first European performance this weekend in London. “The Philosophers Stone,” discovered in a library by an American musicologist four years ago, was co-composed by Mozart and three peers in 1790. “Contrary to the popular image reinforced by Peter Schaffer’s 1979 play “Amadeus,” “The Philosopher’s Stone” shows that Mozart was happy to work with other composers.” – BBC

BBC Music Live – Britain’s largest music festival ever – gets under way this week. The five-day event includes a 24-hour broadcast music marathon and a call for an “instrument amnesty” – an appeal for people to donate unused instruments to the UK school system’s many underfunded music programs. – BBC

No other flutist did as much for the instrument as Jean-Pierre Rampal, who died earlier this week. – Boston Globe

College students are downloading music from the internet rather than buying it. A new study shows that “sales of recorded music near college campuses declined by 4 percent between the first three months of 1998 and the same period this year. Sales at all stores went up 12 percent during the same time. “This demonstrates the importance of protecting artists’ rights on the Internet.” – Washington Post (AP)

A four-line amendment to the copyright law inserted into a Congressional bill last year has incited a passionate debate between musicians and recording companies over ownership of recordings. The amendment added sound recordings as a category of copyrighted materials that can be considered “work made for hire,” a term usually reserved for collective works, like movies, that are commissioned by studios. “U.S. recording artists are the most unprotected segment of the entire world of copyright.” – New York Times

Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu – who first made her name at Covent Garden in 1994 in La Traviata – has been winning over opera fans ever since. “At a time when opera houses are in thrall to cost-cutting initiatives, she offers a glimpse of a previous era when passion and glamour were written into a diva’s job description.” – The Telegraph (UK)

An interview with composer/conductor Pierre Boulez, who received Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize for Lifetime Achievement this week. – Haaretz (Israel)

One of the big promises of the internet is that it will allow fairer better deals for recording artists. Says a record exec: “Cathartic as it is to vent at record companies and carry the banner for artist empowerment, it seems to me that many of the attacks on the inequitable sharing of the pie have been overstated. The problems most artists have with record companies (and there are many legitimate problems, don’t get me wrong) have nothing to do with how the money is divided up, so long as we are talking about acts that actually sell enough records.” – Inside.com

A Cleveland orchestra splits in two. “Previously a 40-member ensemble that played repertoire for small orchestra, the Ohio Chamber Orchestra is set to become a 13-member, concertmaster-led group. The society also will sponsor a larger ensemble, the New American Orchestra, to play ethnic, educational and themed programs.” – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)