New York Times readers respond to Daniel Wakin’s story about classical music marketing: “Why are symphony audiences shrinking? It’s obvious. The majority of the public has zero connection to the standard repertory, and therefore little reason to hear it or care about it. Whereas video-game-music concerts take advantage of an emotional investment players make in characters and scenes which they not only observe, but actually control.”
Tag: 08.28.05
MTV For All Your Devices
Can MTV be an arbiter of mass-market music tastes in a world where entertainment flows from everywhere? The network is branching out from pure TV to other platforms. In addition to the traditional celebrity-studded ceremony of Sunday’s MTV Awards, “viewers will also be offered backstage shots and bonus content simultaneously on the MTV Overdrive broadband channel: while watching an acceptance speech from, say, Coldplay on live television, a viewer can also be logged onto Overdrive and see Kanye West in his dressing room or the Killers performing outside American Airlines Arena. It’s all about circulating people back and forth between the different screens,”
End Of An Era – The Last Opera Recording
A new recording of Tristan und Isolde with Pacido Domingo marks the end of an era. “No more spending hundreds of thousands of dollars coddling famous singers’ egos. No more waiting decades to, with luck, recoup an investment. No more recording works with singers who have never performed their roles onstage and are long past their primes. No more sessions spread out over weeks, months, years. No more relying on technology that permits a soprano and tenor to record a duet without ever setting foot in the studio at the same time. No more shifty studio magic. But then again, no more of that legerdemain to bring the music alive in ways it may never be in the opera house. This new “Tristan,” which EMI Classics will release in the U.S. in September, turns out — against all odds — to be glorious.”
King Tut – Icon Of International Politics
The differences between the first visit of King Tut to America and the second are instructive. Both visits served political goals. But “the Cold War is long since over, and the technique of cultural diplomacy that characterized the era has withered as a Washington pastime. Instead, corporatism is the new driving force. The change from public sponsorship to corporate packaging mirrors the political sea change in the U.S. between 1979, when Tut 1 finished its blockbuster national tour, and 2005. It brackets the Reagan-Bush era and the decline of liberal democratic ideals and the rise of corporatist political philosophy.”
A Rarity – Woman Wins Prestigious Comedy Prize
For the first time in 25 years, a woman has won the Perrier Prize for Comedy. “Laura Solon, 26, won the £7,500 prize for her show Kopfrapers Syndrome, in which she plays eight different characters. She was one of five acts shortlisted.”
Going Out In Style (Some Famous Funerals)
Not just anyone gets a funeral sendoff in a rocketship like Hunter S. Thompson. But “while Thompson’s pyrotechnic pyre last week must be one of the most extravagant and expensive funerals in recent history (price tag: $2.5 million, paid by Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the film version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”), it’s not unusual for people who lived in the limelight to shuffle off this mortal coil in some colorful fashion.”
The Super-CD
SACD’s offer superior sound. “Though the discs engulf the listener with sound from five different channels, delivering depth, dimension and ambience that were barely imagined 20 years ago, they have traveled the world for the last five years like cruise missiles, slightly below the radar but successfully seeking their small, specific targets (or consumers). Some quarters of the often-impatient recording industry appear to be giving up on the technology. Others, less committed to immediate profits, see vast potential and won’t let it go.”
The Soccer Mom Versus Big Recording Companies
“Record companies have filed about 13,300 similar federal lawsuits against Internet users across the country since September 2003. Nearly 3,000 of those lawsuits have been settled. The offending music traders have agreed to pay an average of $4,000 to $5,000 and promised not to illegally download copyrighted songs anymore. None of the cases has gone to trial. That may change. And it may change with a soccer mom who said she would rather pay a lawyer’s fees than give in to what she calls intimidation tactics by the record companies to get her to settle.”
Teachout: MoMA Is Like A Mall (Not In A Good Way)
Terry Teachout has tried to like the new Museum of Modern Art. But he’s decided it won’t happen. “The exaggerated scale of the building swamps the art it contains, and the austere décor is so rigidly uniform in its self-conscious simplicity as to make the museum seem even bigger than it is. As if to compensate—which it doesn’t—most of the galleries are as overstuffed with paintings as they are overcrowded with people, making it impossible to concentrate on any one work with anything remotely approaching ease. And while I’m hardly the first person to remark on the mall-like character of the new MoMA, I found it even more oppressive this time around.”