Category: music

“Sales grew 11-fold between 2004 and 2010 to an estimated $4.6bn (£2.9bn), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said. But while revenues grew by 25% in 2008, that figure slipped to 12% in 2009 and to just 6% in 2010.”

“[In] announcing its new season on Wednesday, [Carnegie] is projecting unusually broad ambitions as a cultural force. It is becoming a national presence in music training, sending graduates of its Academy program to perform and teach around the world, unveiling 60,000 square feet of new space for music education and beginning a new broadcast series.”

“The ailing Brooklyn Philharmonic is hanging in there. Having halted most of its orchestra concerts over the last two seasons and cut staff because of money problems, it … [has] hired a new artistic director, Alan Pierson, and promised a ‘new era’.” Pierson, director of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, is a star of New York’s contemporary music scene.

Angus Grant, on his new chamber opera, Contact!, ”There’s something about the restrictiveness of netball. The rules, how you’re allotted a position and a function and you can’t go out of your prescribed zone. The tense female dynamic. It seemed ripe for the picking.” (Netball is a Commonwealth version of women’s basketball.)

John Robinson joins San Francisco Classical Voice having worked since 2002 as Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Symphony in Southern California.

“KDFC becomes a nonprofit, with ties to the people who run KUSC in Los Angeles, broadcasting on 89.9 and 90.3. The staff remains intact, and relationships with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Symphony will continue.”

“Our listening experience is dictated by technology, and just as the album was itself the product of one technological breakthrough (the long playing vinyl record) it is now threatened by the digital cherry picking and the rise of the iPod shuffle.”

“The organization, called Keep Louisville Symphonic, has tax-exempt status and will implement a fundraising initiative the musicians had proposed to the Louisville Orchestra last fall before it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.”

“Whether music is necessary or not, we still enjoy it first and foremost, and if it were taken away we would have different brains as a result. Music is at the very heart of what it means to be human, and we need science to help us understand this, not to explain it away.”

“The rules are strict. No talking. No texting. You must listen to every song on the album. This monthly club in north London is run by Colleen Murphy and for her it is a strike against “‘download culture’, the sense that music has just become an endless compilation of random songs used as background noise.”