Category: music

“The Louisville musicians union has withdrawn its charge of unfair labor practices against the Louisville Orchestra board and management, saying it wants to work on resolving the problems.”

“The Philadelphia Orchestra Association has made incremental but encouraging progress in the campaign to finance its reorganization and operations for several years beyond an expected exit from bankruptcy. But it still has a ‘mountain of money’ to raise.”

When Swiss conductor Baldur Brönnimann was a student 25 years ago, “if you had more than 30 people at a concert it was a failure because it was populist crap”. Today, there are growing signs that contemporary classical music is shrugging off its elitist reputation, with audiences flocking to work previously regarded as austere and impenetrable.

“The New York Philharmonic and its musicians agreed a two-year contract, which leaves pay unchanged this season and raises it two percent for 2012 to 2013 … Management ‘dropped its plans for drastic cuts to health insurance and a radical reduction in pension benefits’.”

“The soprano Angela Meade won the Beverly Sills Artist Award, a $50,000 prize for singers from ages 25 to 40 who have already appeared in featured roles at the Metropolitan Opera … Previous winners include Nathan Gunn, Joyce DiDonato, Matthew Polenzani, John Relyea, Susanna Phillips and Isabel Leonard.”

“On top of the basic, if sometimes seemingly insurmountable, difficulty of crafting a good sentence, writing about music has a serious built-in problem, which is that the only thing worth doing is also nearly impossible: to convey something of what the emotional experience of listening is like.”

“SoundExchange is a non-profit that’s rapidly growing to become one of the most important organizations in the music industry. For many labels, it’s the No. 2 source of digital revenue only behind iTunes.” And it’s a nonprofit – which is both its salvation and a possible source of problems.

“Broadly speaking, consider the divide in the string world to be between the True Believers and the Debunkers. On the true believer side are collectors, dealers and superstar players who perform on the valuable instruments,” writes Daniel Wakin. “The debunkers include scientists, modern luthiers and some younger soloists who can’t afford old master instruments and make a virtue of the new.”

“What would it be worth to provide a path to sustainable success in the music industry? I think that’s worth a lot. Strip-mining the low end, selling less and less quality to more and more people — there are limits to that model, and the music industry has done about as much of that as can be done. It’s time to try something new.”

“What a musician’s stardom means for symphony orchestras is simple: it enables them to achieve their twin goals of making great music and selling tickets. It comes at a price.”