The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today.
The recordings are available for free download. The downloads are non-lossy FLAC files.1
This is gold.
iTunes users will need a converter before importing FLAC files into the iTunes library. I have been using SoundConverter for this with great success. ↩
Shawn Blanc conducted an informal study the other day that caused me to add a feature to this site that I might not have otherwise added. Shawn found that readers are more likely to read a story if it shows up in their twitter stream than if it shows up in their RSS reader alone.
And thus I have created a twitter account for this blog for your subscription needs. All it does is post the title and a link to this site for every post I make here. It’s impersonal and robotic. It won’t follow you back. It won’t retweet you. It’s essentially unmonitored.
If you crave a little more human(ish) interaction I encourage you to follow @timrosenberg. That’s me.
“How good it would be,” he once wrote, “to wake up and find that one had forgotten everything, absolutely everything.” We are now, he says, “in a civilisation of memory. It is important to know that if you press a button, you can have the reference you want, but it’s equally important to forget. There is too much memory, and people are suffocated by it, like in quicksands. Amnesia is hard, but it’s vital.” Vital, that is, for the creation of something new.
The Church of the Ascension in New York City has installed a 6000+ voice, French-built pipe organ. The inaugural concert featured three world premieres, plus the New York premiere of Marilyn Shrude’s setting of Psalm 84 How Lovely is Your Dwelling Place. Talk about adventurous programming…
The Future of Music Coalition recently signed onto an amicus brief (friend of the court) in Golan v. Holder, a case currently pending at the Supreme Court. The case challenges Congress’s implementation of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), which removes some works created by foreign authors from the US public domain and restores their copyright protections. Congress enacted this law in order to comply with an international trade agreement called the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
The group, including orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers, film archivists and motion picture distributors, is challenging the law on First Amendment grounds. They claim that removing works from the Public Domain inhibits free expression.
It seems rather shaky to me. I am not in favor of removing works from the public domain, but I am not sure this constitutional argument is the way to go with this case. I have almost no doubt that the Roberts court, who has recently ruled against female Wal-Mart employees, and against poor people, will laugh this one out of the courtroom. I hope I’m wrong.
It is abundantly clear that the fourteenth Tchaikovsky competition differs from its predecessors in one significant respect – its transparency. Every round can be watched live online, viewers are encouraged to cast their votes and several judges are using their cellphones and notebooks to tweet and email their emotions as the contest progresses.
The Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jeffery Meyer, was one of 26 American orchestras to win a 2010–11 ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) Award for Adventurous Programming.
Well deserved. I am very proud to be a part of this faculty.
And there’s a bit of hometown pride to be had: the Cornell University Orchestras took third prize in the same category. We’re doing it just a bit different here in the ten square miles surrounded by reality
For me, music is a scrim lowered into the world. A scene moves around me, and a separate group of thoughts and senses develops behind the melody inside a sheen of privacy. Fader on you, solo track on me. I listen to music to be alone.
I totally get that.
He writes about rock and roll concerts; but that is beside the point. He has a great perspective on listening intently and without distraction.
I am not saying that I avoid concerts; I like them. But I can sympathize with his want for listening alone.
The reason I was on the show is because David MacDaonald, of SoundNotion fame, and myself, of no discernible fame whatsoever, have started a new podcast on the SoundNotion network called Music is Hard. Each week David and I take on a topic in music and try to figure out how to make it better. You can listen to episodes 1 and 2 on the Music is Hard portion of SoundNotion.tv. The episodes are so new, we’re still playing with the bubble wrap; but, we have submitted the feed to the iTunes Podcast Directory, so you will be able to subscribe to it there soon.
David and I welcome your feedback in the comments section on the Music is Hard page. As always, you can send comments directly to me via email, or via twitter.
So what happened to the sax? In part, the answer might be that the 90s happened. The rock music that dominated in the decade of ironic detachment had little room for a shiny, curvaceous, elaborately valved instrument that its impossible to play while looking like you dont care. Your cheeks puff up. Your fingers flutter. There is an earnestness and a delicacy to playing the saxophone, an irreducible musicality that was out of step at a time when shrugged-off riffs alternated with bashed-out power chords on the rock airwaves. Its laughable to imagine someone smashing a saxophone into a stack of amps, like Kurt Cobain did with his guitar—the instrument seems too refined for the gesture, like trying to talk dirty in Latin.
Aside from the cheek puffing assumption, which would be indicative of poor technique in most cases, I think Weiner nails it. The image of a saxophone player in a rock group is not one of aggression or abandon. It’s an intimate instrument. It goes in your mouth. It has a wide dynamic range and a soulful flexibility in color and pitch. It was lost in the stacks of Marshall sound and and ninja star shaped stages prevelent in the late 80s and 90s. But it’s coming back along with Tower of Power style horn sections in Jason Mraz’s music, and others.
MIX is a work created at RECYCLART in Brussels as a part of impactsessions.1 It is “scored” for eight washing machines and lasts two hours and forty six minutes.
As the composers say, it is recommended that you listen in front of your own washing machine.
Contrary to what you might think, it’s not a joke. I found it very interesting and somewhat relaxing. That might be because my washing machine is front loading and the gentile revolution of my soapy clothes is mesmerizing.
Listen to it here or on their site, which includes photos of the multi-channel playback setup.
If you won’t listen to it in front of your washing machine because you feel like a weirdo, you can listen to it in front of my washing machine.2
This is from Anastasia Tsioulcas’s post on NPR’s Deceptive Cadence blog. The post is about the Supreme Court considering a copyright decision that might make it cost prohibitive for many groups to play music that is not part of the public domain.
Four years later, under lobbying by such industry superheavyweights as Disney, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Act, which extended copyright protection for 20 more years for individual creators and — not incidentally considering the lobbyists’ very targeted interests — 120 years after creation or 95 years from publication for corporate creators.
Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I don’t usually consider myself a strict constitutionalist, but on this one issue I think we have strayed far afield from the original intent of the law.
The law was created under heavy lobbying by Noah Webster who was besieged by second-rate counterfeiters of his spelling books. Webster wanted quality control for his brand, not an exclusive monopoly.
But the law evolved into what we know today as the unintended consequences were exploited by copyright holders. Even so, the point was to grant a monetizing period to a creative artifact creator for only a little while, after which the artifact belonged to the public. So you made a thing, sold your thing for about 15 years, in the mean time, you made another thing.
Being creative is not hard for creative people — they do it every day. I want creative people, I mean truly creative people, to become seriously wealthy and/or successful. What I don’t want is fakers to work the courts so their children can still make pennies from totally irrelevant material.
120 years is one and a half lifetimes. Should the heirs of a creative artifact creator really control the exclusive rights to something they never had a hand in creating? Does that promote creativity, exploration, and invention? Tell you what, if I invented bagels and copyright law was in place, I would have licensed the hell out of them for 120 years and my family might still be living off the fortune.
