The News Review:

- Codejocks power Net radio for indie music
- Music Review | jai Festival
- Classical Music News: Daniel Meyer to lead Erie Philharmonic

Codejocks power Net radio for indie music
Livemint – Jun 11, 2007
According to a survey conducted by the firm sales of Indian music will reach Rs4100 crore by 2009 with 90% of this coming from digital music. The survey also predicts online music sales and sale of music for mobile devices will together earn Rs3601 crore by 2009 up from Rs450 crore in 2005. Radio Verve began as an experimental radio station Infinity Radio that played an hour of Indian independent or ?indie? music mostly rock and metal every night to a group of 8-10 listeners rustled up from Vaz and Srinivasan?s personal chat lists. The idea was to promote music the duo enjoyed. Bands that went on air included LBG?short for Little Babooshka?s Grind?from Chennai Avial (named after a vegetable stew that is an integral part of Kerala cuisine) which plays Malayalam rock Phenom and the Raghu Dixit Project groups Vaz jams with. Infinity was collegial and hip until irate listeners started complaining about missing or late shows and broadcasts disrupted by power cuts. Looking for a way out Vaz and Srinivasan turned to Atul Chitnis an open source software entrepreneur rock music aficionado and Srinivasan?s colleague at Geodesic Information Systems Ltd a Mumbai-based IT company.

Music Review | jai Festival
New York Times – Jun 11, 2007
June 10 — Behind the rise of the all-powerful Romantic movement was the piano and its essential paradox: a percussion instrument (hit it and it makes noise) that would be tamed and stroked until it sang like the human voice. By the 1920s music had had enough of this romance and returned the instrument to its primary nature: hit it and it sounds like a drum. The French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard who thought up this year’s jai Festival has made the piano-as-percussion one of his principal policies. A duo-piano concert with Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams on Thursday night spent half its time doing violence to the instrument’s lyrical tradition and the rest acknowledging the closeness of nature in these unnaturally beautiful surroundings. The two pianists sat on their hands for Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” in which a reported 100 metronomes (I didn’t count them) were set off around the edges of Libbey Bowl’s outdoor premises and allowed slowly to tick themselves to death. Those less interested in deep thoughts about the passage of life and its alternative had the coarser pleasures of a passive demolition derby… Every device and gesture tugs at the listener’s sleeve for immediate attention. Eotvos’s “Sonata per Sei” on Friday confirmed his complex somewhat verbose and unashamed theatrical style racing keyboard parts set against a department store of exotic percussions effects: gongs chimes cymbals scraped sheets of metal. Perhaps setting Mr. Eotvos’s music next to some of Bartok’s greatest was unfair. Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion manages monastic dignity and unassailable economies of means even as his music moves from wild to abrasive to tender. (Never forget that Bartok considered himself in the tradition of Liszt.

Classical Music News: Daniel Meyer to lead Erie Philharmonic
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Jun 11, 2007
Meyer 35 will begin a three-year contract with the $1. 2 million budget orchestra beginning in July. “It is an excellent orchestra” said Meyer also music director of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony rchestra and the Ashville Symphony rchestra. The Erie Philharmonic comprises freelance musicians with a core of regulars and principals. “It is in a geographic area that pulls from Cleveland Pittsburgh Buffalo SUNY Fredonia and more” he said. “For my career as a music director it is an exciting step up but it is also an opportunity to get a community fired up about classic music. Meyer intends to honor all of his commitments to the PS PYS and Ashville although discussions have yet to take place on his future in Pittsburgh… At Little Brothers club there it beat out 10 other bands to advance to the regional final at Peabody’s Down Under in Cleveland on June 23. “It was a tough competition” said Cellofourte’s Tate lsen. “It was a more diverse grouping of bands than in Pittsburgh from reggae to metal to Latin dance. It was all over the place. ” He said the judges voted unanimously for the quartet of classically trained cellists based in Pittsburgh. The group which plays original rock instrumentals on amplified wooden cellos scored high even with the unfamiliar fans. “We had this theoretically hostile crowd and we got 84 audience votes — and we only brought four people with us” lsen said.