Category: music

Alexandra Sopp was carrying a leather bag containing her instruments — worth more than $40,000 — only to notice the bag missing about 3 a.m. Her $25,000, 14-karat gold-plated flute — with an $8,000 one-of-kind headpiece — and $8,000 wooden piccolo had been snatched.

“Commerce starts at the point where people are happy with paying for something – and the fact that technology now allows people to choose to not pay for music has turned music culture into a service culture.”

“Instruments (the term now including computers and music-creation programs) that push the limits of possibility today may well be landfill three years from now.”

“The Recording Academy announced Friday in a statement to The Associated Press that the upcoming Grammys will feature 81 categories. It reduced the number from 109 to 78 last year.”

“Music makes life melodious–assuming that the music has a melody. But life is often jarring. Pop music suggests, by its easy, pleasurable repetitions, that life makes sense. We can pretend, for the duration of a song, that there is harmony in our lives. Life makes some sense to Beethoven and Coltrane, but it is a difficult, remote way that is not available to all and that can wink out in an instant.”

Board president (and bankruptcy administrator) Frank Giordano wants Nero – so identified with the Pops that his name precedes the orchestra’s in marketing materials – to take a 40% pay cut. Nero has refused, and now the board is asking the bankruptcy court for permission to terminate his contract.

“[The opera] lives right on the cusp between satire and the maudlin on the one hand, and something that’s quite visionary and, I think, quite genuinely and uniquely American. And I think the danger in staging it is to demean the characters; Nixon is so easily ridiculed.”

So what you hear might not always be what it seems…

“Local 294 of the American Federation of Musicians … union alleges that the orchestra has refused to negotiate a contract that would cover its approximately 127 musicians. A contract would be the first for the orchestra’s musicians who voted 50-34 earlier this year in favor of unionizing.” Orchestra management argues that the musicians are independent contractors and cannot unionize.

“Fresh off Memorial Day Weekend, about 6 a.m., [David] Itkin cut loose with an email to the L.V. Phil’s board of directors, which he copied to the LVP Orchestra Players Committee, stating that he planned to leave the orchestra in 2013. In that message, Itkin said that artistic differences and a lack of institutional transparency weighed in his decision to leave his post.”