L.A. OPERA'S PRODUCTION WOES: Los Angeles Opera is having a tough time getting its October opera together. First it canceled a $3-million Kirov production of War and Peace because of money problems. Now its replacement - another Kirov offering, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - is in trouble. Because of the lockout of West Coast ports, the sets, costumes and props for the production couldn't wait in LA's harbour, and now they've departed "on a slow boat to Tokyo." Los Angeles Times 10/10/02

MUSIC AMID THE MUDDLE: This week, Shanghai launched an incredibly ambitious international music festival, and predicted that the huge gathering would 'make history.' The reality, says one critic, was that the city and the festival organizers were completely unprepared to put on a show of such magnitude. "The level of incompetence is hard to understand in a city that resembles a bizarre cross between the sci-fi optimism of Dan Dare and the dystopian nightmare of Blade Runner... How many Chinese men does it take to change a light bulb? Eight. This is not a joke. I happen to know the answer because I watched it happen. China is a country whose full employment policy creates ludicrous levels of over-staffing and a pass-the-buck culture." The Telegraph (UK) 10/12/02

GREED KILLED THE RADIO STAR: With the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Lyric Opera both killing off their local and national radio broadcasts, the Second City's classical music community is in danger of losing cultural cache and national recognition. Critic John van Rhein, who this weekend celebrates 25 years of observing the Chicago music scene, is disgusted by the lack of vision from all sides. "The classical music world is reaping the bitter fruits of American orchestras having priced themselves out of the broadcast and recordings market. The free-spending '90s are dead -- musicians in other cities have swallowed hard and accepted it. Chicago has yet to do so." Chicago Tribune 10/13/02

OH, GOD, NO: "A Russian opera company is planning a comic opera that will tell the infamous story of Monica Lewinsky and the president. The Russian president, to be precise. The composer of Monica in the Kremlin is Vitali Okorokov, a classically trained musician who is well known to the Russian public for his pop hits. After a performance of one of his symphonic poems, Okorokoc was approached by the artistic director of the Saratov Opera, who asked him to write an opera on a contemporary subject." Andante 10/10/02 

NOTHING HAPPENS BY ACCIDENT: To hear many people tell it, you would think that the recent resurgence of opera as a popular art form has happened purely by chance, and that the increasingly young age of opera patrons is due to nothing more than youngsters wandering into the opera house by accident. Not so: in fact, opera companies across North America have been making a concerted effort to draw in a more diverse crowd. The Canadian Opera Company is a prime example, with an 'Opera 101' education program, as well as a continuing series of classic operas directed by famous names like Atom Egoyan. Toronto Star 10/12/02

X-RATED CLASSICAL: The New Zealand Symphony sent out 8000 promotional CDs to market its new season. But when recipients of the discs put them into computers to play, they discovered that someone had substituted the track titles with pornographic descriptions of sex acts. "It seemed the person responsible used an Internet media player to read the CD, made the changes and saved them on the database. This meant that whenever anyone else used a media player connected to that database, the X-rated version was displayed." The Age (Melbourne) 10/08/02

ACTIVE ANALYSIS: "To understand the significance of music for the musicians who created it and the society in which it was produced is a challenge to music-lovers. Perhaps no writer on music devoted more energy to this task than Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, and the translations into English of his writings on philosophy and music and their diffusion have been multiplying in recent years while, at the same time, his ideas have become widely influential in the US and Europe." New York Review of Books 10/24/02
 

Need to find a piece for wind quintet written after 1990? Wishing you knew of a new 15-minute chamber suite to round out that perfect program? Is your classical music station playing yet another Handel concerto grosso and you've had enough? 

For those with a need for new music, the ultimate source has arrived on the Internet. On October 9th the American Music Center officially launched www.newmusicjukebox.org,
a composer-controlled digital library of contemporary music offering detailed information about each included composer and piece, and often score and sound samples of the music. 

The sheer volume of information—all searchable by myriad criteria— housed under the site's umbrella can make a first visit overwhelming, but once the basic features are understood, it's a digital musical playground. 
Lyn Liston, the AMC's Information Specialist, calls it the "next generation" of the AMC's beloved score library, now a closed collection residing in The New York Public Library. George Boziwick, curator of the American Music Collection at the NYPL for the Performing Arts and also a participating Jukebox composer, agrees. "The Center’s decision to go digital was in my mind the most logical next step forward. Moving the original score collection to NYPL has shifted the emphasis onto the digital library, thus giving the AMC’s original mandate a new and powerful thrust." 

Boziwick also points out that the move to digital makes access to both the music and the composer more immediate and more global. "While this will never displace the traditional print repository, and it may be some time before performers no longer read from hard copy scores and parts, digitization gives new meaning to the word 'access.' "
AMC Board Members Larry Larson and Carl Stone (no longer serving) and Executive Director Richard Kessler drafted the original framework for the site. Their goal was to create a venue for discovering and promoting new music on the Web in a way that would at the same time adequately safeguard the work as intellectual property. 

The need to represent a healthy cross-section of American music is a top priority of the project. A fair share of established composers are represented, with more to come as the site moves out of the trial phase and major publishers upload more of their materials. But one of the distinctive aspects of the site is the way it does away with that hierarchy. Here all AMC member composers—regardless of style or celebrity—are created equal. Each participant is simply given a slot on the site to demonstrate their work as they see fit. 

On the user end, a key element of the site is the advanced search engine built into it, allowing visitors to track down the perfect piece, whether that's a work that uses text by Emily Dickinson or something for an oboe/harp/xylophone ensemble. For those who like what they hear and want to perform a work, contact information for the composer or publisher is provided. See it online @ JUKEBOX

Previous Articles/
Busoni The Visionary
The Composer of the Moment:  Mark-Anthony Turnage
Electronic Music
Voices: Henze at 75
Henze Meets Emenim
On Finding Kurtag
Charles Ruggles:  When Men Were Men
Ballet Mécanique
The Adams Chronicles
 

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