Category: music

Online Relief For Listeners Isn’t Replacing Income For Devastated Musicians

There’s just nothing left, really. “The temporary halt to playing live removes the one dependable way musicians can make money. Royalties from music being played in pubs, clubs and shops are suddenly in jeopardy, and with advertising revenues down, the fees paid to music publishers by broadcasters may be cut. Given the long-term decline of physical sales, that only leaves streaming – at which point, let us remind ourselves that YouTube’s average per-stream rate has been put at a princely 0.13p, and that Spotify is reckoned to pay artists an average of 0.26p per listen.” – The Guardian (UK)

A String Quartet Is Crushed By The Virus

The Tesla Quartet, founded in 2008, was doing OK, even well, at last. “The four players, aged 34 to 38, have long relied on relatives, friends and concert presenters for temporary housing, while stashing their few possessions in a storage locker. Only during the past year did their advance bookings give them the confidence and means to rent their own apartments in New York.” Then … well, you know what happened. – The New York Times

Live Nation – That Is, Ticketmaster – Is Reconsidering The Policy That Had Everyone Furious

In other words, they weren’t going to issue refunds – but the “everyone” who was furious started to include lawmakers, things changed (to be clear, the company claims the change had been in the work for weeks before a request to the New York attorney general to look into Live Nation’s business practices). Suddenly, refunds will be available for canceled shows, and exchanges for rescheduled shows. – The New York Times

‘Reflective Nostalgia’: Alex Ross On Grieving For His Mother With Brahms

“Bach is undoubtedly music’s supreme companion of extreme distress. … But, on the plane to D.C. that night, Bach would have been too raw, too dire. With Brahms, everything passes through layers of reflection. He is the great poet of the ambiguous, in-between, nameless emotions: ambient unease, pervasive wistfulness, bemused resignation, contained rage, ironic merriment, smiling through tears, the almost pleasurable fatigue of deep depression. In a repertory full of arrested adolescents, he is the most adult of composers.” – The New Yorker

Not Only Is Albinoni’s Adagio A Movie Cliché, It’s A Total Forgery

A musicologist named Remo Giazotto wrote a monograph on Albinoni in which he claimed to have discovered manuscript fragments by the Venetian Baroque composer, fragments from which he reconstructed the overworked now-famous Adagio. “It sounds too good to be true. And it is.” Cinema and early music maven Donald Greig (who for many years sang with the Tallis Scholars) gives us the real story. – The Guardian