“The instrument with no name” by Iner Souster
If you have a very high speed connection and patience, log on to Iner Souster’s website. (He needs to break his blog into pages as he’s got far too many files and downloading data that will make you wait forever.) If you have the patience to wait, you […]
I’m not sure whether you know it or not, but there are a hell of a lot of blogs devoted to ripped LPs and CDs. What do I mean? They have digitized LPs and made them into mp3s. Or they have turned the AIFF files on CDs into mp3s. The mp3s are of course […]
Lest you think that Finland is the only country that turns out zany and nerdy music videos, watch these crazy Korean girls get down.
Korean madness
I found an excellent example of Chladni patterns on YouTube. You’ll see sand scattered on a plate. The plate is likely on top of a speaker, and as the pitch is slowly raised you see Chladni patterns appear! (You might want to keep the voume down as it gets a bit loud.)
Chladni patterns illustrated
Check out Scott Blake’s barcode art. You can download large poster size pictures of your favorite personalities like Martha Stewart, Bill Gates, Marilyn Monroe, and many more. You can also buy T-shirts, coffee mugs, flip books, and participate in a 9/11 project.
Organists are becoming scarce
I’ve seen the number of students who study organ decline over my years of teaching. I hear rumors from organists that there aren’t enough players to go around. The Chicago Tribune confirmed this in an article today.
When the National Association of Schools of Music began surveying accredited colleges and universities in […]
I’ve put quite a few of my analytic essays up on this blog as well as excerpts from some of my transcriptions. I shouldn’t be surprised to see bleeding chunks of my analyses as well as my transcriptions showing up in student term papers. Someone called sunny_storm has written a posted this essay on Live […]
Timed Out New York has been publishing tasty articles about Rufus’s upcoming Carnegie Hall concert featuring the music from Judy Garland’s 1961 Live at Carnegie Hall concert. He tells us it’s not a drag show, or a female impersonator evening, but Rufus Wainwright’s own performances. That being said, Stephen Oremus is “resurrecting” the the original […]
Last night I happened into a ticket to Madonna’s Confession Tour. I must confess that I like a lot of what she does. This show features a neo-disco Madonna. Now 47, she works out 3 hours a day and she looks it. Her moves are not as acrobatic as the old days (whose are), but […]
You know how everyone has different abilities in tolerating pain. Here is a very interesting video by Alberto de Michele that illustrates our different facial reactions to receiving a mild shock.
“Shock” by Alberto de Michele
Check this out: a Japanese acoustic locator (2 of them). That’s Hirohito on the right, and some AA guns to be used with the locators. Wow, what we won’t dream up in the name of defense!
My second favorite band of the 60s behind the Beatles is the Byrds. Nearly everything they did from 1965 to 1970 in their various incarnations was interesting, although after Crosby, Clark, Clarke and Hillman left my enthusiasm wained. Gram Parsons and Clarence White were two post-Byrds mega-stars that put in time. I’m pretty sure I […]
There are some marvelous harmonic details in Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” It was Mark Carlson who pointed out to me that there is no dominant chord in the song. I was incredulous. He was right.
Look at the chart of the chord progression for the song. I laid out the harmonic analysis so that the line starts […]
From the creator of Sequenza 21, Jerry Bowles, has created blognoggle, a compendium of RSS feeds about music, mostly contemporary and classical music. It has two cousins, that focus on Politics and Business as well. Several of my posts have appear there, along with a bevy of other thoughtfully curated posts. Red Black Window is […]
Gram Parsons and Nudie Cohen
I’m amazed: who’d a thunk it? CMT, or Country Music Television, has a website, and featured in it is a tribute to one of my old heroes, Gram Parsons.
I think the argument can easily be made that Gram Parsons was to country-rock what Hank Williams was to mainstream country. Each simultaneously […]
I hold onto old software, especially when I used it to create music. I have on old IBM PC-AT with tons of Sequence Plus files on it that I am holding onto until I can figure out how to get them off that old hard drive. As a publisher, I have many files that […]
The Composers in Red Sneakers was and is composers consortium founded in Boston in 1980 by Robert Aldridge and Thomas Oboe Lee followed by Christopher Stowens. I was invited in, as was Amy Reich and Gary Philo. That was the original group, and it has gone on and morphed into an entirely new group where […]
[Rufus hands in a CD of “Lux aeterna” a part of his larger work “Bloom.”]
Berlioz: What is this?
Rufus: My “Lux aeterna”
Bz: Is this a notation file?
RW: No, it’s a sound file of my performance.
Bz: Where is the score?
RW: There […]
“Puerto Vallarta Alley” by Roger Bourland
When I applied for my sabbatical from the UCLA Department of Music, my employer, I had originally planned on starting an opera about a famous Mexican opera star who had an amazingly tragic life. A book on Rufus Wainwright shoved its way to the front burner and sits half-done on […]
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