08.19.11
Naxos posted on its tumblr this morning:
It is with boundless pleasure that we announce that the complete EMI Classics catalog is now available to NML and NML-Jazz institutional subscribers! This vast catalog of recordings includes EMI Classics, Virgin Classics, and Blue Note Records.
This is a great addition.
If you are not associated with a subscribing institution check with your local public library. If they don’t subscribe yet, ask them to consider it. As subscriptions go, it’s not very expensive, and the catalog is vast and varied.
08.12.11
Matthew Cole’s review of Boston Spaceship’s new lo-fi rock album, Let it Beard, contains this great observation:
There’s hardly a track on the sprawling album that begs to be skipped, and that’s largely because [Robert] Pollard knows that a song should end when its cool ideas have played out, not three minutes later.
Probably the best advice that can be given to any writer, producer, or composer. The music will tell you when it’s finished.
Four-bar bridge? No thanks. I’ll pass.
08.12.11
From Anthony Tommasini’s article about virtuosity in the New York Times, Gilbert Kalish has this great line:
[C]omposers always push at the boundaries: “Someone creates a work of extraordinary difficulty that seems unplayable and then, simply because it exists (and is excellent), people rise to the occasion, and we find that it was indeed possible.”
Nearly every instrument has seen this progression. To be honest, I see less of this progression in piano than in other instruments, such as cello, and saxophone.
Are the virtuosos of today really better technicians than Liszt, Paganini, and Clara Schumann? We’ll never know, of course. But given the above quotation, which I believe is true, I have my doubts.
08.12.11
Mode Records’s Brian Brandt laments:
The music business is reaching a tipping point. If one cares about music, then you should support the artists and labels you like: buy a real CD, or buy the album or track from someone like iTunes.
Spotify (which this article is about) is crowding out the smaller labels, yes. And that is a problem. But imploring the public to use a medium that is more profitable for the record companies, (or else…) is not a business model.
It’s not the medium’s fault.