Category: music

Last week Napster capitulated to heavy-metallers Metallica by yanking the accounts of its users accused of downloading Metallica music illegally. But if the outsider music downloader gives up too much, it’ll lose its rebel outsider status – and its fans. – Wired

Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki was one of the more adventurous and radical composers of the 20th Century. Now he’s written a piece that sounds like it could be Mahler or Brahms. “It is, though, a curious state of affairs when the composer who, more than any other, was identified with that scandalous way of writing should become the one who most saliently repudiates it.” – Sunday Times (London)

• International tours are expensive for orchestras. Though they may seem glamorous, there’s some serious business going on. “International, highly rated orchestras travel and play in great halls and great places. If you are playing in Musikverein [in Vienna] or Amsterdam [Het Concertgebouw], this is the cream of the music world. If the orchestra is invited, it speaks that the orchestra is of great quality, because a not-great orchestra wouldn’t play in the Musikverein.” – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the face of court challenges over copyright, Napster and MP3.com take a step back. The battle’s just beginning over the future of selling recorded music. – Philadelphia Inquirer (Bloomberg)

“There was a time, little more than a hundred years ago, when operas, like plays, got themselves on without the help of a producer and there was, as yet, no distinction between the work and how it was put on. The reason is that throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century a large proportion of the repertoire consisted of works appearing for the first time, and since their staging was unconditionally determined by the theatrical conventions which the composer and librettist would have had in mind when they wrote the work, production as we now think of it wasn’t an issue.” – New York Review of Books

A big $5.5 million funding boost from the federal government has enabled Adelaide’s South Australian State Opera company to announce plans for Australia’s first-ever homegrown production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. “We are doing it one-off, the whole thing, so it is a massive undertaking.”- The Age (Melbourne)

— will likely begin to fall now that the FTC has banned minimum-pricing laws. Minimum pricing rules were enacted several years ago because “mammoth discount chains such as Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and Circuit City were selling CDs at prices lower than those found at music-specialty retail chains such as Music-land and Tower Records.” Independents say doing away with the rules will hurt them. – Variety

Remember last week when Metallica presented the names of some 300,000 people it says had illegally downloaded the band’s music? Yesterday Napster terminated the accounts of all those on the list. Look for the lawsuits to start flying. – Wired

After losing its copyright case over music downloading last month, MP3.com says it will remove major-label music from its site. The company is said to be negotiating with recording companies over a million-dollar settlement. – Boston Globe

There was a time when orchestras programs looked like smorgasbord menus – a little of this, a little of that – you got yer meat, you got yer potatoes, and let’s not forget the veggies. Now, the marketing people need a good hook. Everything’s got to have a theme. “Anything but a trendy caprice, theme programming is widely perceived as an answer to numerous ills in the performing arts.” – Philadelphia Inquirer