“A music publisher has issued an unusual mea culpa in the digital copyright wars, apologizing over legal threats that led a software programmer to pull an application he’d written that automatically scours the web for song lyrics. Facing an upswell of protest, Warner Chappell Music on Friday formally apologized to Walter Ritter over a letter it sent to the software programmer earlier this month targeting a helper application for Apple’s iTunes called pearLyrics.”
Tag: 12.16.05
Met Opera To Slash Budget
Facing slumping ticket sales and rising costs, the Metropolitan Opera is reportedly looking to cut its operating budget by 5% for the current season. “In the late 1990s, the Met often sold more than 90 percent of tickets for each season, but the box office slowed after the 2001 terror attacks,” and has never fully recovered. Projections for the current season were made with an assumption of 80% capacity, but actual ticket sales have been closer to 76%.
The Importance of the Critical Eye
In today’s world of instant information and do-it-yourself media, the world of the critic, based as it is on an assumption of expertise and some vague notion of “the eye,” seems increasingly old-fashioned. But Jerry Saltz writes that the trend towards art criticism that is all ideas and no expertise is a dangerous one. “Having an eye in criticism is as important as having an ear in music. It means discerning the original from the derivative, the inspired from the smart, the remarkable from the common, and not looking at art in narrow, academic, or “objective” ways. It means engaging uncertainty and contingency, suspending disbelief, and trying to create a place for doubt, unpredictability, curiosity, and openness.”
The Overachieving Octogenarian
Japan’s Yomiuri Nippon Orchestra has named the Polish-born composer/conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski as its new principal conductor, beginning in spring 2007. What makes the appointment unusual is that Skrowaczewski, a former music director of the Minnesota Orchestra and of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra, will be 84 years old when his tenure in Japan begins.
Literacy Of American College Grads Falls
“The average American college graduate’s literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday. When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation’s college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills. There were 26.4 million college graduates.”
Atlantic Magazine Says Goodbye To Boston
The Atlantic publishes its final issue in Boston, where it has been for 148 years. It now moves to New York. “David Bradley, who owns the Washington-based National Journal Group of publications and bought The Atlantic from Mort Zuckerman in 1999, has built readership up to about 1.5 million, and doubled newsstand sales to close to 60,000. The latest audited circulation is about 405,000, but according to an e-mail from Bradley, the magazine is still losing about $3 million a year.”
Met Picks Up new Sponsors For 75th Radio Season
The Metropolitan Opera starts its 75th season of radio broadcasts. “Toll Brothers home builders has joined long-term supporters the Annenberg Foundation and the Vincent A. Stabile Foundation to finance the series, which this year includes 20 live broadcasts and a celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday.”
Washington Ballet Cancels More Nutcrackers In Labor Dispute
The union has characterized the situation as a lockout by management. But the Washington Ballet calls it a strike. “For them to be actually hurting the very income source that gives us the ability to do everything we want to do for them is incomprehensible to me,” said Kay Kendall, president of the ballet’s board of directors.
Czech Court Awards Nazi-Looted Art To Canadian Family
A Czech court has awarded a Canadian family a European art collection assembled by their Jewish grandfather before the Second World War and later confiscated by the Nazis and then the Communists. “The family has been fighting for more than 14 years to gain title to and possession of some of the estimated 140 art works — including paintings by Gustav Klimt, James Ensor and Oskar Kokoschka — owned by their grandfather, businessman Oskar Federer. Many of the works are housed in small public galleries in the cities of Ostrava and Pardubice.”
It Was The Monster Mash…
“An outfit calling themselves Dean Gray (ho, ho) had taken Green Day’s American Idiot and fused each one of its tracks with other pieces of music, ranging from Bryan Adams to Queen. Then they changed the album’s name to American Edit and set it loose on the Internet. This is a mashup, the on-line stepchild of the remix and the latest way to anger a music company. It’s true that the concept sounds improbable; when pairing two different songs, the line between mashup and train wreck can be thin indeed. But the Zen of good mashing isn’t about pairing random songs; it’s about picking up on the similarities between two tracks, and tweaking the songs to have them create more than the sum of their parts.”