[A] musical composition — any musical composition or any musical performance, for that matter — is a process of isolating specific sonic events from the total possibility of what is audible. It asks listeners to treat certain sounds, your sounds, in a different way than everything else that is going on in the auditory spectrum — to listen more attentively to those specific sounds at the expense of all other sounds.
Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band are available for free download on iTunes. Maybe (probably) it’s because of my father and his wonderful Detroit-Rock collection; but, I can’t recommend this enough.
The Council today adopted by qualified majority a directive extending the term of protection of the rights of performers and phonogram producers on music recordings within the EU from 50 to 70 years.
This decision comes just in time to exited the majority of The Beatles records’ protection for another 20 years.
The council justified its decision:
Performers generally start their careers young and the current term of protection of
50 years often does not protect their performances for their entire lifetime. Therefore, some performers face an income gap at the end of their lifetimes. They are also often not able to rely on their rights to prevent or restrict objectionable uses of their performances that may occur during their lifetimes.
When somebody downloads an album from most places on the Internet, what they get is a file containing fairly decent digital representation of the music and a tiny image of the front cover. For those who come to music to expand their horizons, it’s essentially a dead-end. More than that, the absence of information sends a signal: The folks who were involved in the creation of this work are relatively meaningless, just a shade more important to the end-user than the factory worker who bolted the player together. We’re basically training this generation to think of musicians and recording and mastering engineers as interchangeable parts, anonymous and easily replaced.
Um… Wikipedia? Google search? Libraries?
The kids today look up stuff by doodling their information phones. The Internet is a much safer place to keep the information rather than a physical artifact that you need to find anyway.
Furthermore, outside of a few megalomaniacs, if a producer wanted his or her name to be well-known outside of the industry he or she would have learned to sing.2
Some brilliant reader of The Atlantic sent this in:
As they stare at the singer who has abandoned the melody in favor of melismatically emoting, or the guitar player who has put his foot on the monitor and thrown his hair back to squintily wee a mishmash of pentatonic drivel, people don’t understand that I’m making their backsides wiggle and bringing us all together in funky communion.
I began to listen to Schubert’s chamber music and I began to realize that this was another dear friend. I could sniff under his music, what was underground. I could sense, like a dog, or like a pig, what was going on. And I fell deeply in love with Schubert’s sonatas and quartets and piano pieces. Schubert is one of the most honest artists I know.
To be clear, he listened to late Verdi operas while drawing the book. But I like the way he speaks about Schubert better.
This season the New York Philharmonic will perform Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi live. The performances, which Glass will oversee, will feature the well-known film footage projected on a screen while the orchestra performs the score live. Concert dates are November 2 and 3 at 7:30 PM. If you are in NYC, you can’t miss this.
He’s even warned clients to be wary of traveling abroad with old guitars, because the [Lacey Act] says owners can be asked to account for every wooden part of their guitars when re-entering the U.S. The law also covers the trade in vintage instruments.
WFMU’s programming ranges from flat-out uncategorizable strangeness to rock and roll, experimental music, 78 RPM Records, jazz, psychedelia, hip-hop, electronica, hand-cranked wax cylinders, punk rock, gospel, exotica, R&B, radio improvisation, cooking instructions, classic radio airchecks, found sound, dopey call-in shows, interviews with obscure radio personalities and notable science-world luminaries, spoken word collages, Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks in languages other than English as well as Country and western music.
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.
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.
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.