Losing the game

Are downloading killing recorded music sales, or is it the competition from games? 

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Ignoring the Music In Our Own Backyard

Mark Swed gets it absolutely right . Music Festivals in California have been doing a terrible job of paying attention to music from California and the West. I have previously complained here specifically about the Cabrillo Festival, founded by Lou Harrison, Robert Hughes, and friends, which had a long history of taking local composers seriously. While the present directorship has, to its credit, put the focus on contemporary music right up in the name of the festival, it has largely focused on the same set of middle-of-the-road names that can regularly be found in East Coast regular season orchestral programs. Indeed one gets the impression that the music director uses Cabrillo as a try-out for her own regular season repertoire. The complaint that West Coast Experimentalists are not welcome at Cabrillo has been met with the line that these composers don't have enough experience working with orchestras. I call BS and I call this a bad bit of vicious circularity: They don'...
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