The Copyright Royalty Board, promulgators of the recent we’re-just-the-lapdogs-of-the-RIAA decision to drastically up licensing fees for Internet radio, have agreed to reconsider. Well, kind of. They’re accepting additional written comments on the decision until April 2, but whether they’ll actually hold additional hearings or change their minds on the rates they already set is still in a bureaucratic haze. (See this story from the useful clearinghouse blog Save Our Internet Radio.) There’s a petition online, and a call or e-mail to the most muckraking of your local congresspeople might be in order.

If you’re wondering what this is all about, Kyle Gann and Doc Searls can get you up to speed on the whole eye-rolling fiasco. (And get in your listening to PostClassic and Counterstream while you can.) Message from an actual working musician to the industry organizations allegedly working on my behalf: cut it out, will ya? I’m trying to make a living here.

My lovely wife and I had occasion to drop in to our local Barnes and Noble printed matter monstro-mart over the weekend, and, out of habit, I checked the Classical Music book section, which seemed to be, how shall I put it, somewhat less buxom than I remembered. Out of curiosity, I counted, and found that this particular store was offering eighty-three different titles related to classical music—and I’m charitably including books concerning Il Divo, Andrea Bocelli, and Joe Volpe in that total.

Eighty-three is not a lot of books. To put it in perspective, I could have, two shelves over, picked from twenty-nine different tomes on the Beatles alone. (This too is wrong, especially considering that there were only six books about Elvis. But I digress.) Ten years ago, this would have been a cue for much hand-wringing over the red-headed-stepchild status of classical music in American culture. Now, though, I think it says more about the Internet’s inexorable pressure on bricks-and-mortar corporate balance sheets than anything. It’s a fair guess that a large portion of classical music practitioners and aficionados have shifted their discretionary spending to the Web; it only follows that big chains will be less inclined to devote valuable real estate to books and CDs that the target audience is probably browsing via computer.

The online world is still not terribly friendly to browsing, but I imagine that will change, and soon. What’s more, an encyclopedic selection won’t be a loss-leader, like it was in the pre-Internet dark ages. I can remember spending lunch hours at the Barnes and Noble in Evanston, Illinois, while I temped at Northwestern for a summer. I liked to hang out in the Literary Theory aisle. Once, a saleslady asked if I needed help, and I said no, I was just browsing. Her disbelief was indignant. “Nobody just browses in Literary Theory,” she said. I was polite enough not to scold her for mistrusting a customer that was on the verge of buying a book that had probably sat on the shelf since the store was built. But that was the attraction of those stores when they opened: they were liable to have everything, a tempting thought even if it meant pockets of product that were rarely, if ever, picked over. With the Web, though, every niche and category is equally served, and maintaining such a large retail selection is a fool’s errand.

So I wasn’t particularly put out at the paltry classical offerings. One way to read Alex Ross’s summing up of the current state of classical recording—nobody knows anything, basically—is that small but viable revenue streams have sprung up too fast and too numerous to be tracked with traditional metrics. Marketers won’t be able to try and shoehorn all music into one particular distribution model—a recipe for classical disaster in the 90s—because no one model will be demonstrably more successful than any other. Ignorance is bliss.

Still, though: c’mon, guys. Eighty-three? I’ve come out of yard sales with more books than that.

Quiz time! This idea is a total rip-off from the excellent movie blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Then Handel was quite the narcissicist.

Anyway, here’s ten questions to kill your Friday afternoon. You can leave your answers in the comments, or else leave a link to wherever you’re posting. Do please include the questions when submitting your answers.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don’t particularly like the music.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

4. Name a piece you’re glad Glenn Gould never played.

5. What’s your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

6. What’s a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you’d love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn’t seen.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

West Side Story turns 50 this year, which, when you think about it, is pretty old for a juvenile delinquent. If you’re in Boston, you can celebrate by taking in a production of the show by On Broadway, the student musical theatre group at Boston University. Shows are tonight and tomorrow; tonight, there’s also a pre-concert talk by Jamie Bernstein, the composer’s daughter.

Music director is our good friend Brett Abigaña, who somehow managed to get his snazzy website up before I did (warning: auto-loading percussion music).

Alexander Temple Wolkonsky Rachmaninoff Wanamaker is the great-great-grandson of Sergei Rachmaninoff. And the 21-year-old University of Arizona student is about to take over Rachmaninoff’s legacy—and that includes rearranging Sergei’s works so they can be re-copyrighted.

“It’s as little rearrangement as possible, preferably,” he explained.

Wanamaker said the family already has approached a few composers about doing the rearrangement. “We’re in the process now of having the music rearranged so that we can re-establish the rights and generations can enjoy it for futures to come,” he said.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would think that generations would be able to enjoy the music for futures to come regardless of whether anybody’s making any money off of it. Sergei died in 1943—that means his post-1923 works (including the Symphonic Dances, the Paganini Rhapsody, and the Fourth Piano Concerto) already won’t start going into the public domain in the U.S. until 2019. And now, four generations removed, they’re trying to make sure that the royalties on those—and everything else—keep coming for another 95 years? (Actually, based on the fact that any “rearrangements” would probably be “works for hire,” they might fall under the 120-year corporate copyright term.) That’s pushing copyright’s “temporary monopoly” to possibly over two centuries, in some cases. From the article:

Wanamaker is quick to dispel concerns that the family will increase the fees for orchestras to rent and play Rachmaninoff. Actually, he says, the cost will be less because there will be fewer hands in the pot.

“What we would like to do is actually lower the prices,” he said, noting that over the past 30 years, royalties have generated at least $50 million in income that’s divided between the family and the publishing firms. Without the publishing firms, the family would get a bigger cut and could afford to drop the price, he reasoned.

Even a two-percent cut of that is more money then I’ll ever have, ever. Can’t he just invest what he’s got, and use the interest to pay for scotch and Jay-Z albums? The ridiculousness of the copyright regime in this country never ceases to amaze me.

I have an article over at NewMusicBox today on Baumol’s cost-disease and what it means for the economics of live performance and recording. My lovely wife pointed out something to ponder while you read: if you’re one of those who thinks that the steady wane of school arts programs is big trouble for the future of jazz and classical music, keep in mind that the education sector is also unusually affected by the cost-disease.

(How to play with your money.)

Things are continually Yeatsianally falling apart, which is why I grab good news where I can find it.

If you’re not already aware, a fire gutted the offices of the Oregon East Symphony in Pendleton, Oregon on Thursday. They’re in a bad way, and if you have a few bucks or other stuff that might be useful, they’ve set up a fire recovery fund. They do a lot of educational outreach in areas that don’t always get that kind of attention—they’re the good guys, in other words.

Most links are to the blog of Kenneth Woods, Oregon East’s conductor, who, in the midst of crisis, still manages to read minds. I was thinking about a post on Hans Rott for this week, but Woods got there first, and I was going to defend Elgar from his own countrymen, but Woods is already on it, quick and funny. Just like a good conductor: a beat ahead of you, ready with a cue.

Update (3/21): Donations can now be made via PayPal.

Lisa Hirsch points out a Bernard Holland review of Nico Muhly that makes me green with envy: I’m just a freelancer now, but my dream is to get to that level in the criticism hierarchy where I can be lazy enough to express my bafflement in print at a question that had been answered in my own paper not a week before. Lexis-Nexis is for the rabble.

(Full disclosure: as a TA at the BU Tanglewood Institute, I gamely tried to teach sight-singing to a crowd that included, among others, Nico, Judd Greenstein, and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum. That took a lot of coffee.)

I had a hard time getting up this morning—maybe I could get some help from English schoolkids. As part of Manchester Metropolitan University’s celebration of National Science and Engineering Week, students from three Manchester-area schools, St. Paul’s (Walkden), St. Barnabas (Clayton), and Wyche Primary (Nantwich), composed wake-up music for the residents of the International Space Station, with some help from the members of the Manchester Camerata: “The musicians… worked with the children composing new music for the wake-up calls based on astrophysical data, such as the radio waves emitted by celestial bodies, and visual images of space.” (They also had an Internet improv session with astrophysicist/rock musician Fiorella Terenzi.)

The three entries were judged by Russian rocket scientist Alexander Martynov and legendary cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, with the Camerata recording the winner for future early-morning duty (though this news report was coy as to who that winner actually was.) In the words of MMU Science Week organizer Conway Mothbi, “The call will be heard 250 miles above the earth by Expedition 14 cosmonauts under conditions of weightlessness. This is a great honour as it is a UK first.”

Update (3/21): Wyche Primary took the prize (see comments). I’ll make sure to provide a link as soon as the recordings are posted.