As a new father, I am facing a dilemma that men before me have faced for generations: what songs should go into the first set that I learn to play on the ukulele to my adorable children? After some serious thought I’ve settled on: I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (Bright Eyes) It’s You I like [...]
I for one welcome my NPR overlords. I’ve held off commenting on NPR’s “Fifty Great Voices” series despite my obsession with the human voice because… well really because I didn’t care that much. I thought about saying something when someone objected that Iggy Pop was not, technically, a ‘great voice’ — never argue with a [...]
I think I like this idea mostly because the name is so rad, but TechCrunch blogged recently that the music industry has run the numbers and is tentatively planning the USD when they give up on keeping people from sharing music. Apparently “Ultimate Surrender Date is between 2011 and 2013″:http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not-until-at-least-2011/.
I have been listening to this piece (and the string quartet from which it’s been extracted) for a month now. You should pay a buck and listen to it too if, and only if, you want to listen to really really ravishingly beautiful music: Musica Celestis for String Orchestra is available on “iTunes”:http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=135478800&id=135478574&s=143441 and “eMusic”:http://www.emusic.com/downloads/emp/song/10915884/14013152.emp?gb=lm. [...]
I recently finished teaching Intro to Anthro, and for one of the last sessions I taught Kiri Miller’s conference paper on “Guitar Hero’s Rock Pedagogy”:http://guitarheroresearch.blogspot.com/2008/05/guitar-heros-rock-pedagogy-iaspm-us.html which is a great piece on an even more fascinating topic — Guitar Hero. As I was preparing for class I thought about how restricted our conversation about Guitar Hero [...]
This is me trying to post more often. Or maybe just having more free time to do so. The SEB and I are on a spree of judeo-baroque listening recently, including Salomone Rossi, Fretwork, Quire of Voyces (look past the spelling to the singing), and Phillippe Jaroussky. This hereby replaces our earlier Ravel/Milhaud/Poulenc Chamber Music [...]
There is now in existence an album of “Tom Waits covers by Scarlett Johansen”:http://www.imeem.com/scarlettjohansson. I approached it with an open mind. Honestly.
Besides having a crazily multicultural name, “Tarik O’Regan”:http://www.tarikoregan.com/ is one of the best new composers I’ve listened to in a long time. And best of all he writes extensively for Choir and does rip mix burn thing with chant and early music. Highly recommended.
This sounds promising: gracenote is “revamping the way it handles classical music metadata”:http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/press/article.html/date=2007010802 — and it has the support of a lot of labels and musicians. If you listen to classical music digitally, you know what a relief this (hopefully) will be.
I’ll be spending the next couple of days blogging about the Solomon Islands but I thought I’d post a link to a longish “piece on Matisyahu”:http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=225 over at “Nextbook.org”:http://www.nextbook.org/ which sounds like an excellent arts and culture website for 30-something reformed Jewish intellectuals, if 30-something reformed Jewish intellectuals like me had time to read all [...]
I’ve been listening recently to the “Ars Nova Singers”:http://www.arsnovasingers.org/ who are one of the few groups who exactly the music I like: Renaissance and 20-21st century. I seem to remember having sung with someone who had previously sung with them but I’m not sure now of his affiliation. At any rate their CDs are well-programmed [...]
I subscribe to RSS feeds, email lists, websites and every other conceivable genre of information that can be shoveled through my eyes and into my brain by the intarweb. Yet without a doubt my optic nerves tingle with glee from the informal email list that has developed between me and my two good homies “J [...]
MySpace has been about music and bands for some time now, and there have always been some hip young classical musicians with a MySpace page. But this is out of control — Naxos (which formerly demonstrated its digerati chops by signing up with Emusic etc. etc.) now has a “MySpace page”:http://www.myspace.com/NaxosLabel. Crazy, daisy.
I admit: like everyone else who plays Civ IV I am in love with “the opening track”:http://sushi-delight.blogspot.com/2005/11/baba-yetu.html composed by “Chris Tin”:http://christophertin.com/biography.html and performed by “Talisman”:http://www.stanfordtalisman.com/html/frames.htm. Sure, in a post-Graceland, post-Lion King world this sort of thing sounds derivative, and Talisman’s website has loud music playing by default. But “just listen to it”:http://christophertin.com/samples/BabaYetu.mp3 (link to MP3)! [...]
I don’t put too much store in these things, but it is worth pointing out that the “Grammy nominations for classical albums”:http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/Annual_Show/48_nominees.aspx#30 are up (but not easy to find) on the Grammy website. As a diagnostic of a very particular take on classical music it’s interesting enough. Naxos’s Penderecki and Bolcom albums get multiple mentions, [...]
The amazon.com reviews of “David Hasslehoff’s album”:http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B00005Q8UG/102-8716047-1531308?SubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82 are an inspiration to all of us. Very Guy Debord. A little bit ago I blogged about — or meant to — Reed’s decision not to cooperate with U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings because they were not actually a decent measure of, well, anything. Even so, [...]
D00d — Naxos has just licensed _it’s entire catalog to Emusic_. I signed up with Emusic back when it had a thriving social network attached to it and featured unlimited, DRM-free MP3 downloads for US$20 a month. Then they got bought out, wiped out all of the reviews and playlists we had written, and instituted [...]
Now at some level, _all_ Reggae is Jewish. But as the “Bookninja”:http://bookninja.blogspot.com/ points out, “some are more Jewish than others”:http://www.hasidicreggae.com/files/2005/02/07/22/11/33/kimmel_on_stage_2.jpg. But unlike some other novelty bands, “Matisyahu”:http://hasidicreggae.com/, So Called, and the other artists on “Jdubrecords”:http://jdubrecords.org/ are actually pretty quality. Similarly bending across genres is “Alarm Will Sound”:http://www.alarmwillsound.com/AWS-Home.html , whose latest album features “orchestral arrangements of [...]
In a strange and yet typical twist of internetdom, an “ancient post of mine”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=50 has become the home of a small but growing community of people desperately seeking the lyrics of Vivaldi’s lovely motet “Nulla in munda pax sincera” (known to most people as the theme song from the movie ‘Shine’). I often wonder what [...]
Once again, it turns out that “Nike is trying to take punk rock away from the kids”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/nikes_major_lift.php. Ian Mackay has been active in copyright reform stuff over the years — in fact I bet a lot of people who are interested in copyright reform have an elective affinity for it based on their previous experience [...]
My Scarily Erudite Beloved and I met in choir. Between the two of us, we have a total of over four decades of singing experience. Our guest list includes not only a choir’s worth of people — and I mean _real singers_ — a conductor, and an accompanist. So far, the only thing we’ve really [...]
“George”:http://allaboutgeorge.typepad.com/ points to “this British color story”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1658941,00.html, wherein Oboe d’amour is _not_ a reference to an instrument used in early music. It’s a little gratuitous, but not as untrue as you might think. It does raise the question, though, why we don’t seem to mind the idea of romantic hookups shaping the course of rock [...]
“Joel”:http://searchforlove.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_searchforlove_archive.html#200168801 writes: Today I spent seven hours in church. Tomorrow I will spend five hours in church. Sunday I will spend another seven hours in church. This week (Holy Week) is the only time during the year that I feel uncomfortable, as a Jew, singing in a church choir. When the congregation pretends to be [...]
I recently made a mix for a friend of mine based around settings of e.e. cummings poems. Here’s the play list with links to the individual artists. *Three Poems by e.e. cummings* i thank you god for most this amazing day | hope, faith, life, love | i will wade out By Eric Whitacre, performed [...]
Actually it’s been around for a while, but there is a new CD out from BCM international — a group of composers who are sort of a post-punk version of Les Six. I’ve not heard this CD but the last one was fun and is now available for download (check out “Uncle Sid” and “Godzilla [...]
O. M. G. — So I was recently checking out Stephen Paulus’s newly redesigned website and noticed that they sung his Pilgrim’s Hymn at the Reagen funeral! On second thought, maybe I remember hearing this on the radio and smirking? I can’t be sure. As someone who grew up in Reagen’s America I agree with [...]
There are things I feared about moving to Hawai’i. Living in a place where white people were a minority and race relations were an issue? I was fine with that. Dealing with the politics of indigenous landownership and Hawai’ian sovreignty? Hello: this is my dissertation. Eating with chopsticks constantly? Please. No. One of my biggest [...]
Here are the names of future bands I would like to be in, taken from that moment of inspiration in everyday life when you think to yourself ‘hey, that would be a cool band name’: 1. Boroko Food World 2. Snell of the Crushed Skull 3. Silverstein’s Dreams of Brie 4. Kneel Before Zod
I’m very excited to report that I’ll have the opportunity to interview Eric Whitacre and the other members of BCM International this week as part of a feature I’ll be writing for Gapers’ Block. The RMC homies and I just performed Lux Aurumque for our recent Advent Vespers and I must say it’s a remarkable [...]