Category: music

The longest-tenured stadium musician in Los Angeles sports history confirmed that at the end of her 27th year as Dodgers organist, she would be unhappily walking away

“I think the digital world makes us hungrier for the real world. The digital strategy has been very important in communicating the health of our organization, which is important to people making decisions to attend and to invest.”

“Medici.tv is in a comfortable place in the online universe: on the one hand, classical music is a niche interest unlikely to attract crushing competition from the giants such as Google and Apple, on the other, its audience is passionate, loyal, and affluent.”

“Total listening volumes are up but the depth of engagement with the majority of those listeners is low. So choice abundance is leading to casual fan relationships. This wide rather than deep approach is great value for music fans and for labels and publishers it translates into revenue diversified across their rosters, often with strong focus on more profitable back catalogue. But for an artist this means more people listening to your music but fewer times. Artist – fan relationships are moving from long term liaison to short term flings.”

“While, historically, the curator was the person at a museum in charge of caring for that museum’s collection of artwork, this has only been a partial description of part of the profession for some time. Now, art curators are often at the forefront of enabling creative innovation and audience interaction. In the world of new music, on the other hand, curating is mostly a word we’ve usurped for use in funding applications and marketing materials.”

The American conductor, currently music director of Los Angeles Opera, has been named the new principal conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI in Turin, beginning in 2016.

“Musicians don’t agree on much, but they tend to concur that the note A in the middle of the treble staff should be tuned to 440 Hz. The International Standards Organization even issued guidelines to this effect back in the ’50s. But the conspiracy theorists will tell you that this pernicious tuning was promoted by the Nazis—Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Third Reich, imposed the 440 Hz tuning as part of a heinous plan to warp the consciousness of the masses.”

“Of all the highbrow tastes, all but jazz are disliked by lower class people, and of the lowbrow tastes, country, easy listening, and golden oldies are concurrently disliked by higher class people.”

“‘What does Apple bring to this?’ Morris said. ‘Well, they’ve got $178 billion dollars in the bank. And they have 800 million credit cards in iTunes. … I think that will have a halo effect on the streaming business.”

“They approached the Williamsburg City Council, which indicated it would kick in about $23,000 to pay for the orchestra. And they launched an online Kickstarter campaign to raise another $31,000 to pay for the staging, audio set-up and large video screen. But this year’s efforts weren’t successful.”