Category: music

“Except for true jazz believers in his own country and throughout the world, this concept of Louis Armstrong as a most serious, stunningly innovative artist is unfamiliar. He was often seen in the movies and on prime-time television variety shows, and he had a number of hit records, but he was by no means held in awe by the general public. Yet this was the man who had changed the very shape of jazz as fundamentally and permanently as Beethoven had changed the shape of the symphony.”

“No heads will roll in Cupertino on account of these grumblings. The majority of the population that ignores classical music will shrug and go back to the new Jamie xx record. (I’m enjoying his track ‘The Rest Is Noise.’) Yet Apple’s unwillingness to accommodate – in this first iteration, at least – defining features of a thousand-year tradition is symptomatic of general trends in the streaming business.”

“Honey, we have no music industry. There’s 90% piracy everywhere in the world. They take everything. At the recent South by Southwest [an annual music festival in Austin], they had over 1,900 musicians, but fans didn’t know where to go. You can’t get an album out because nobody buys an album anymore.”

“After a second computer failure left him without a means to record his album and no money to buy a replacement, Prince finished recording the vocals and backing instrumental tracks for his new album entirely in that one Apple Store. Prince Harvey sang, hummed, and rapped into a display computer at the SoHo Apple Store every weekday for four consecutive months.”

“With respect to composers, said expectation goes something like this: child prodigy enters school already a mature genius; impresses all of his/her professors; then sets the world on fire with his/her youthful vigor, technical wizardry, and creative talent while winning all sorts of competitions; and proceeds to redefine an art form for the betterment of humankind. There may be examples throughout history where this fairy tale plays out in the likes of wunderkind composers such as Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven; but is this the most accurate representation of a composer’s path?”

“At the premiere two weeks prior, at the Kaufman Music Center, the grown-ups had shot down some of Paris [Lavidis’s] most rascally ideas: using firecrackers as percussion, smoking a hookah onstage. So he’d improvised, substituting a whip for the fireworks and handing out kazoos instead of pipes. But the compromise had stolen some of his thunder.”

“What’s more, when I die, people will say, ‘He was the most important composer since the beginning of music.’ It’s not just a work of genius – I did things no one ever dreamed of and I set up an approach to sound that parallels universal structure.”

“They play heroically, they play loudly, and they’ll play anything, from Beethoven and Brahms to Louis Andriessen and Gérard Grisey. They draw diverse crowds of around a thousand 20- and 30-somethings who pay about $8 and take advantage of a bar behind the stage (or bring their own drinks).”

“For American music fans, these festivals offer opportunities to hear top-flight musicians in idyllic settings much closer than, say, Salzburg, Austria, or Lucerne, Switzerland. But the festivals offer musicians not just extra work in the summer, but also changes of scenery and of colleagues and a chance to stretch out artistically — along with plenty of ancillary benefits.”

“It’s understandable why Joseph might have called the destruction of the demos the moral choice. Posthumous releases are a thorny subject in the music business. They can be seen as one final, exploitative attempt to wean money from an artist no longer around to cash the check — the musical equivalent of a creepy Tupac hologram. And also, they can be terrible, so rough around the edges that they can serve to undo a legacy.”