Austin’s SXSW Festival attracts 1,300 bands and 10,000 music industry people. “The conference makes clear that the music business is not just the recording business, and the recording business is not just the major labels. As the large music conglomerates bemoan a world of digital downloading, decreased sales and tight radio playlists, independent bands and labels have simply gone about making music. For musicians who don’t expect their careers to rise and fall by radio hits and blockbuster albums, major labels have less and less to offer.”
Tag: 03.21.05
Da Vinci Code Recluse
Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown has become the kind of celebrity who has trouble going out in public. “Gone are the days when he could sit undisturbed in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, sketching out the murder scene that opens his blockbuster novel. He has stopped taking commercial flights because of the commotion that usually accompanies him, with people lining up in the aisle to get his autograph on books, cocktail napkins, even the occasional air-sickness bag.”
Mayne Wins Pritzker
Thom Mayne has won this year’s Pritzker Prize for architecture. “In its citation the Pritzker jury acknowledged Mr. Mayne’s countercultural roots, calling him a product of the turbulent 60’s who has carried that rebellious attitude and fervent desire for change into his practice, the fruits of which are only now becoming visible in a group of large-scale projects.”
Slaughter At The BBC
As much as 20 percent of BBC staff are expected to be laid off in director general Mark Thompson’s radical remake of the venerable public broadcaster. That includes “the loss of 1,500 jobs in programme-making divisions such as news and sport. Initial estimates of up to 5,000 job cuts are being hastily revised upwards by broadcasting unions, which are threatening strike action if compulsory redundancies are enforced. Including jobs that will be lost as a result of redundancies, the outsourcing of some roles and the sell-off of commercial divisions such as BBC Broadcast and BBC Resources, up to 6,000 jobs are now expected to go in the biggest ever cull of staff at the corporation.”
Remembering Bobby Short
Pianist Bobby Short was the best at what he did. “To dismiss Mr. Short, as some did, as a plaything of the rich and the chic is to overlook his contribution to jazz and to New York cultural life. He was one of the last exponents of an ebullient dusk-till-dawn nightclub culture that flourished in Manhattan until it was done in by television, rock ‘n’ roll and its own inflationary pressures.”
Recreating Bach…
A musicologist has receated the instrumental parts for a lost cantata by JS Bach. “The 1728 composition, called Wedding Cantata BWV 216, was found among the papers of Japanese pianist Chieko Hara, who died in Japan in 2001 aged 86. The work, written for the wedding of a daughter of a German customs official, was missing for 80 years.”
Parsifal In NY Doesn’t Cut It With Berlin Opera Fans
Director Bernd Eichinger’s new production of Parsifal was booed at Berlin’s Staatsoper this weekend. “Eichinger’s version, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, is set in a landscape of buildings collapsing from fires and explosions and relies heavily on video. Mr Eichinger is an acclaimed German film-maker. He wrote and produced Downfall, about Hitler’s final days, which was nominated for an Oscar this year.”
Shock And Movement (Or Not)
If choreography isn’t choreography, and dance isn’t dance (and yet it all is), what to make of Matthew Bourne, asks Tobi Tobias? “I’m left wondering if Play Without Words isn’t simply a sign of our times, in which the creative powers that be assume their audience needs to be lured by shock tactics—the raucous, the garish, the forbidden, extremes of novelty for novelty’s sake. Surely the insistent use of these means, which quashes the virtues of sincerity and subtlety, is self-defeating. Most of today’s audience is already beyond shock and, what’s more, benumbed by the ever-escalating onslaught.”
Mayne In The Spotlight
“The size and prominence of the commissions for Thomas Mayne’s firm, based in Santa Monica, Calif., and called Morphosis, have increased dramatically in the last decade, from private homes and restaurants in Los Angeles to public, educational and commercial buildings in the United States, Europe and Asia.” But he’s not broken in to star ranks until his Pritzker win. “It’s a really serious reward and I take it with huge humility and honor. My career has been so much outside the mainstream that I can’t help but view it as a vindication of what I’ve tried to do.”
Who Is Thom Mayne?
Well, he won this year’s Pritzker Prize for architecture. “Thom Mayne’s taste tends to the shocking; if he were a filmmaker, he would be Roger Corman. His buildings have jagged, fractured forms and haphazard compositions that make them look, at first glance, as if they were not quite finished—or were falling apart. This is a subterfuge, of course, since they are solidly built and carefully detailed, but their appearance leaves the distinct impression of chaos.”