From the monthly archives:
[Notes from Wikipedia]
The Skeleton Dance is a 1929 Silly Symphonies cartoon produced and directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks. In the film, a group of skeletons dance and make music around a spooky graveyard. It was the first entry in the Silly Symphonies series. The musical score was adapted from the Saint-Saëns [...]
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Rufus,
I overheard some students working on their harmony exercises at the cafe last night. One said “No! You can’t do that; that’s parallel 5ths.” The other sighed in disappointment.
I don’t recall your telling me why you couldn’t tolerate being a music student, but if this is what they were feeding you, I don’t blame you! [...]
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[Scribbled on a postcard with a hand-cancelled French stamp on it]
Cher Rufus,
Knowing you to be the drama queen you are, you must promise me to write for the contrabassoon. It tone is an exotic utterance that is unique in the dark, murky underworld of the orchestra’s bass. There is nothing like it when you want [...]
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The BBC reports that virtuoso pedal steel guitar player “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow died yesterday in a Petaluma, CA nursing facility from Alzheimers. I knew and loved Sneaky as a pedal steel player who played with the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Flying Burrito Brothers, and a list that goes on and on (check out his bio on [...]
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That’s right, you read correctly. Here is Tricky Dick on Jack Parr playing an original composition with a string accompaniment by the Tonight Show arranger.
[Via growabrain]
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For many years I began my 2 year music theory classes with a so-called “commercial.” Very often these were litlle pieces of big-brotherly advice to college freshmen, still adjusting to being away from home. The students loved them as much as I enjoyed telling them. Nowadays, I find I am less interested in giving unasked [...]
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Nielsen SoundScan has just released its report on 2006 Year-End Music Report [Here is a .doc download of the complete report]. Glance over the statistics for album sales by genre this year. The Long Tail has an interesting analysis of this as well.
Anyone who knows anything about statistics knows that you can not always see [...]
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Swisher Pens has just given my drawer full of beautiful old pens and mechanical pencils a new life. These long abandoned writing instruments had no ink or lead, and my local Staples store couldn’t help. Now that I’ve found Swisher Pens, I have refilled ALL of my old pens and pencils. It’s nice to have [...]
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Daniel Wolf at Renewable Music passed this on to me in a kind of “tag you’re it” spirit, calling it a meme. OK, I’ll bite.
Name: (1) a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies, (2) a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music, (3) [...]
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I’ve had more thoughts on “You’ve got to Hide your love away” since I posted a video of their performance in the movie HELP! a few days ago.
This is yet another one of Lennon’s famous songs about love. He wrote about love throughout his entire career. The song appears to me to be about Brian [...]
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