For those of you with blogs or websites, or those who love to study logic structure, check out Websites as Graphs. This is what Red Black Window looks like. To put it in perspective, click here to see others. Here are some amazing ones.
Prof. Berlioz: For the next few sessions I will be introducing you to writing for the solo stringed instruments, and I don’t mean the guitar, bass and banjo, I mean the violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The first three instruments are tuned in 5ths; the cello is an octave below the viola; the [...]
Here is what appears to be an exercise video that doubles as a prefab description of being robbed for Chinese girls who visit America. Yeah, weird premise: I thought so too. Now, what I don’t get is, if these girls actually DO get robbed, will they uncontrollably go into this dance routine in hopes of [...]
I realized that one could probably start a religion by codifying the things that make us happy.
No, just kidding, but if we cut to the chase in life, isn’t it happiness that gives us that little internal buzz that make life so fucking fabulous?
Speaking of which, take a look at Citrus’s wise post on Happiness.
And [...]
For some strange reason, Grotrian has made available a cyber-piano-composition doohicky called a PIANOLINA that you can click on and drive everyone in your house crazy. It takes a piece of preexisting music and processes it one way or another, depending upon what it is that you do to it. I find it analagous to [...]
Here is the original video of “Once in a Lifetime.” It’s great fun and interesting to see where some of David Byrne’s bizarre body gestures come from. For me, the piece really comes into its own in the live performance on the movie, STOP MAKING SENSE, which I hope to find, post and present a [...]
Musicologist (or not?) Arthur M. Abell chats with many of our favorite turn of the [last] century composers in his book “Talks With Famous Composers.” I bring this to your attention not so much to endorse whether this guy was a charlatan or not, but some of the things Brahms supposedly said are quite interesting.
The [...]
Sketch of Igor Stravinsky by Roger Bourland (1971).
One cold, rainy November night in Madison Wisconsin, I decided to listen to an LP that I took from my parents before leaving home: Igor Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka.” I didn’t know the music at all. I knew my Dad listened to the FIREBIRD from time to time, and I [...]
When I was an undergraduate at UW Madison, I teased one of my classmates by, after telling me that she was moving to California, warning her that she might fall into the ocean after “the big one.” She stared at me with this icy glare and said: “ROGER, YOU CAN’T LIVE IN FEAR.” Very good [...]
Sinéad O’Connor’s electrifying performance of this great song by Prince, “Nothing Compares 2U” is thrillingly captured in this video. The arrangement as well as the chord choices in this song are Neanderthal — I wish someone would remix it, cutting out everything except her voice, and start over. The sleazy ah-aaahhh-ahh in the background is [...]
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