“Since 1990, it seems that the average song length has sort of stabilized around 250 seconds (over 4 minutes). Maybe that’s because humans prefer 4 minute songs. Clearly there is no technological limit to song length anymore, right? So, did new technologies influence song length?”
“The German conductor, who is principal conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, made a sensational BSO debut in 2012.”
“We are told that ENO is being penalised for failing to meet audience targets. But a theatre devoted to artistic adventure is bound to risk occasional box-office failure: it was precisely to buttress such eventualities that the subsidy-principle was established. If we are back to measuring artistic success by the old bums-on-seats philosophy, then we are truly heading back to the dark ages.”
“The app’s premise is that it usually takes us time to focus because of the distracting effect of the environment. Their music has apparently been carefully engineered to reduce this distracting effect. The tunes go through “phase sequences” to ensure that they are neither too relaxing, nor too distracting.”
Dawn Fatale, who has provided some of the most trenchant commentary out there on the company’s current troubles, offers a ten-point plan (okay, a listicle) for turning the place around. (As always, Parterre Box’s cher public comes through with yet more ideas.)
General director Keith Cerny: “We have observed no measurable cannibalization of single ticket sales from either simulcasts or HD broadcasts.” What’s more, “whereas around 75 percent of the Met’s American HD broadcast audience is age 65 or older, only around 20 percent of TDO’s simulcast audience is 65 or older.”
“The conductor of the annual Welsh Proms will have to pay the orchestra fees for this year’s event in Cardiff himself unless most of the tickets are sold. Owain Arwel Hughes is having to act as guarantor for three of the festival’s four orchestral concerts after Cardiff council cut its funding.” (includes video)
And, as Billboard and other observers have noted, only three other albums have notched more than 500,000 in sales in 2014.
“A year ago at this point,” notes Billboard, “there were 11.”
“In the three years since the movement began, I’ve seen a definite shift in the tactics used by musicians, organizers, and other people working in the music industry as they attempt to build power and push for fair pay and conditions in the vast and strange landscape of contemporary composition, performance, and recording.”
Her Wall Street Journal op-ed professed optimism for the ways the music business is changing. But optimism isn’t a substitute for reality…
“Now, as the company tries to win concessions from its unions by the end of this month, the labor talks are laying bare new details of life at the Met, from what performers earn to the Met’s recent box office struggles – which, an analysis of ticket sales showed, led the company to sell as many as a quarter of its seats at a discount at a handful of performances.”
“If today people so often take Mississippi delta blues for heart of the form, it’s in no small measure because the collector-researchers of the ’50s and ’60s, and the blues rockers who followed their lead, taught us to think that way. In fact, those edgy, relatively marginalized, rural guitar players had, for the most part, been little-known artists with limited sales among the black Southern audience, which generally saw blues as dance music. But they presented challenging sounds and images irresistible to the white collector specialists.”
“Businessman Gene Kaufman made an undisclosed offer six months ago to buy ‘the people’s opera’ and salvage the venerable cultural institution. He now says the opera’s board is ‘stuck in neutral’ nine months after filing for bankruptcy and canceling the season, and should relinquish control of the process.”
“YouTube has postponed a controversial plan to block certain record labels from its video platform, following an outcry from the creative community and growing scrutiny from European regulators.”
A change of office space (saving about $400,000 annually), layoffs of 13 staff members (about one-third of the total), pay cuts for remaining employees, and other measures have reduced the upcoming fiscal year’s budget to $10.5 million, down from around $15 million in earlier years.
“What do Beethoven, David Bowie, Green Day, Mozart, *NSYNC, Pete Seeger, Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, The Supremes, Rihanna, and many others all have in common? The Andalusian Cadence!” (a/k/a the Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord). David Garland has assembled ore than 50 (short) examples as evidence. (audio)
“Labels like Fool’s Gold, Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian have signed on with the two-year-old Drip.fm in an effort to attract fans with exclusive music, a sense of community and an intimate connection with bands and artists. Other younger, digitally savvy musicians are starting their own services to appeal directly to their fans.”
“The Opera America ads taken as a whole tell a story. Is it the story of a groundswell of new works among a vast array of companies that would seem to no longer take their cue from the Met? Is it a story of the end of fear of the new driving programming decisions?”
Philip Smith. “For the past thirty-six years, Smith has presided over orchestral trumpet playing, with a resonant, clarion sound and a reputation for never missing a note.”
“The album is the biggest-selling film soundtrack since Mamma Mia!, and is on course to become the bestselling album of the year.”
“An agreement … went into effect this week, formally committing Metro to making sure that the sensitive stretch of its $1 billion downtown Regional Connector Project won’t add any audible vibrations. The agreement sets out a process for what will happen if those preventive measures fail – with a Music Center lawsuit to collect damages the worst-case scenario.”
“If you play with sheet music, playing [just] everything written, it’s really a bore, because you don’t know the way to do something different with that, to create some kind of fresh rhythms. It’s the way to move accents, the articulation when you play, and the very fresh manner, very tender with no rush. Most of the classical players play very square and rush.”
“[The study] shows new productions spearheaded by the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb have had mixed success. While they generally sell better than revivals, some performed poorly when brought back to the stage a season or two later.”
“Andrey Gugnin, 28, was declared the winner of the 16th Gina Bachauer International Artists Piano Competition on Wednesday night, capping two weeks of competition that brought 37 pianists, ages 19 to 32, to Salt Lake City from 14 nations.”
“The dominant music services act as if songs were commodities, more-or-less interchangeable digital files designed to be consumed and quickly forgotten. But if the sellers treat their products with such disdain and disrespect, why should consumers do otherwise?”
“The purpose of practising is so that we (offstage as engineers) make sure that we (onstage as pilots) are completely free to fly to the destination of our choice. That destination is one involving imagination and creativity and spirituality and danger and ecstasy of course, not merely the A to B of playing the notes, but without the nuts and bolts in place we will never be airborne. The greatest interpretative vision of the final pages of the final sonata of Beethoven will nosedive to oblivion if we can’t play an even trill.”
“In a lot of cases the halls are too big. I went to see a huge orchestra concert at Avery Fisher Hall, which is an excrescence in New York … and it’s like, let it close. That’s fine; it’ll be fine. They’ll find somewhere else.”
Sasha Frere-Jones: “Eno is widely known for coining the term ‘ambient music,’ and he produced a clutch of critically revered albums in the nineteen-seventies and eighties – by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2, among others – but if I had to choose his greatest contribution to popular music it would be the idea that musicians do their best work when they have no idea what they’re doing.”
“Opera ain’t what it used to be. More to the point, opera companies aren’t what they used to be. The art form is not standing still. It’s growing, uncontrollably, by leaps and messy bounds,” writes Mark Swed – who argues that the problems at U.S. opera’s flagship, the Met, are more about the Met than the art form, and that the controversy over The Death of Klinghoffer demonstrates opera’s innate power.
“Westergan said this week he and other musicians have been meeting with organizers of a ‘Save the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra’ Facebook page, to determine whether any of the nearly 2,000 supporters of that site are willing to explore fundraising options.”