Category Archive for 'Music miscellanea'

Mama, don’t let your children be rock stars

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

The Smirking Chimp dug up a marvelous piece of reseearch from Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, is entitled “Elvis to Eminem: Quantifying the price of fame through early mortality of European and North American rock and pop stars.” Why am I not surprised that rock stars’ health is not as robust as they get […]

Hard times for studio musicians in LA

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007

I went to a party for our good friend Steve, just back from 6 months away, doing special effects for an upcoming movie about John Adams (the president, not the composer). During the party, he kept a looping slide show in the living room of candid snapshots of various places they worked around the world. […]

Choralicious!: A new choral blog

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

I founded a publishing company thirteen years ago called Yelton Rhodes Music, which publishes choral and chamber music. Our front page had a tendency to become stale easily, so we have recently launched a new blog called Choralicious! devoted to promulgating new choral music by our group of composers and arrangers. Our company started as […]

Vegetable Orchestra

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

Frank Zappa wrote a song that said “Call any vegetable, call him by name…” The Vegetable Orchestra decided to play any vegetable and regularly bands together to show off the fruits of their labor. They were kind enough to share this video with us.

Apple surpasses in Amazon in music sales

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

I read with interest that Apple is now the number three top seller of music in the world, having just passed up Amazon and trailing Best Buy and the number 1 music store, Wal-Mart. I also read that Apple is one of the worst, or shall I say, most selfish corporations in terms of non-profit […]

GP to Country Hall of Fame?

Monday, June 18th, 2007

Reblogged from LISTEN UP:

Hardcore Gram Parsons fan Will Harnack has started an online petition to get his hero into the Country Music Hall of Fame. It won’t do much good this year, though – the petition went live a couple days after the first-round voting for this year’s Hall of Fame class ended. Besides, Parsons […]

Support your local music critics (?)

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Timothy Mangan writes in his Orange County Register classical music blog about music critics’ need to prove themselves through their rankings or face losing their jobs, or abandon any hopes of security of employment. He encourages us to subscribe to our local music critics’s blogs, read them, click all the links, and leave comments. His […]

Stravinsky: Sketches for Petruchka

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

A veritable treasure trove of manuscripts are now available online. The Juilliard Manuscript Collection is a flash-based website with images of 99 manuscripts, and 8000 pages of high resolution scans of manuscripts by “famous” classical composers. I immediately gravitated to Stravinsky, finding early sketches for PETRUCHKA, which started out its life as a piano concerto, […]

Cute and ugly composers

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

Tonight I entertain a serious issue: who were the most handsome (dead) composers, and who are the ugliest ones? Better yet, let’s be specific:
Who was the cutest (dead) composer?

Henry Cowell

Who were the most handsome (dead) composers in their youth?

Schubert and Paderewski

Who were the most handsome (dead) composers?

Busoni and Bernstein

Who was the geekiest young (dead) composer?

Gershwin, […]

Music textile

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

“Music textiles” is a large tactile interface for playing electronic music. It was developed by Vincent Roudaud and Maurin Donneaud.
My fantasy runs wild: I imagine a new line of clothes where each piece of clothing is programmed to make a sound when touched. I could imagine my pants being a soft rain that fades […]

Christian Marclay

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

Christian Marclay is a remarkable sound artist who has a passion for unloved sounds (watch video). He used scratching LPs as sound makers before Hip hop was a gleam in Grand Wizard Theodore’s eye. This YouTube video gives an excellent overview of Marclay’s talent and is worth watching, regardless of your musical tastes.
Christian Marclay is […]