Classical Convert

I Want Realtime Liner Notes

Yeah yeah, I know you know I love liner notes. Since I’ve recently been lamenting and revising my previous lament on the lack of them on a certain classical web-radio type dealie, I thought I’d finish off my current whining with a more structured post.

This is what I’d like to see: while playing my exciting and varied classical playlist (in ultra-extreme quality, with the option to download and to donate money to the composer/performer/conductor, but that’s another story) there’s a little expandable link to click, which on activation gives me a couple of options. I can find out general information about the piece (the standard “Smith’s Opus fifty was composed in blah blah blah and is in five movements”) or the composer (”Smith’s first serious exposure to music was when he began glockenspiel lessons at the age of three”). That kind of thing.

Pretty standard so far.

The cool bit would be when you dig down further. The more technical stuff that is sometimes chucked into liner notes (”the third movement starts in D and, unusually, finishes in G#”) would all be interactive - switching on this technical mode would enable something like a status bar, which would constantly update with information about what was going on in the piece (”Listen as he modulates to G#, led by the winds… now”).

Ideally you could have a couple different levels of in-depthness with this. The simplest one would indicate when the different themes were present in the piece, for example, and point out different instruments. The more serious ones would bring in more subtle things: key shifts, inversions of melodies, etc. You could even make it graphical, with colors indicating various qualities (themes, instruments, etc.)

I know if I had had something like that when i started listening it would have been fascinating, and I bet it would encourage a lot of people to start listening to classical, once they realized all of the little games and complexities going on - that its not just music which keeps on going and doesn’t have any noticeable structure. I don’t think non-classical people appreciate all the structure that’s in there, and by that I mean they aren’t aware it exists. I wasn’t.

If there was something like these hypothetical real-time liner notes which illustrated that underlying structure, I think there would be quite a few more classical converts.

Liner Notes on Naxos Radio

Aha! I just discovered that actually there are liner notes on the Naxos radio player thingy, but it’s in a not very obvious place. You have to click the identification number below the album name (and so if it’s changed since you started listening you have to click the “click here to view currently playing track” button first) and then in the new window that comes up, click “about this recording”. Not all albums have it, though.

This should be better labeled! Actually, there should just be a direct link from the player, but I already complained about that.

A Short Review of Naxos Radio

Well, I caved into yet another temptation (that’s the only way to deal with them, don’t you know) and spent the ever so princely sum of $20 for one years worth of access to naxosradio. It’s a classical music streaming service from, unsurprisingly, naxos, the much beloved, progressive and (best of all) cheap classical music label. While I have a few gripes about it, I basically love it. I’ll try and explain why:

The Good

• Variety - 81 channels of classical music goodness, each targeted toward a specific (and in some cases slightly arbitrary and esoteric) subgenre: British music, 20th century orchestral, romantic chamber music, etc.
• Quality - It’s streamed at 64Kbps which sounds very decent with my headphones at work (you can try it out for free to hear what the quality is like if you think 64Kbps sounds too low for you, you might be pleasantly surprised). It definitely sounds better then standard FM.
• Continuity - They play one CD from their catalog after another, no advertising, no talking. It makes for a very different experience from a regular radio station because you get to hear several meaty pieces from one composer, instead of multiple small-scale pieces from lots of different ones. This is great for getting to know each one well - especially valuable when you are trying to identify new composers that you like.
• Variety… again - There are a lot of composers on there who I had never heard of, particularly the extremely modern ones. Naxos is good at that. If you are especially interested in the up-and-coming classical heroes-to-be, this is a real bonus. Today I discovered Balada.

The Bad

• Media player - You need bloody windows media player to use it, which means I’m completely screwed at home, where I exclusively use Linux. I know this affects a minority of users, but it’s very frustrating and offputting for those of us who do use it.
• No skipping - You are stuck with their streams, just like a radio station. If you notice that they just played a CD you really wanted to hear, well, tough luck. Related to this is the fact that you can’t pause the stream, so if you need to run off somewhere you’re not gonna be able to pick it up again later.
• Dodgy interface - Now this is something which they could fix relatively easily. When you first start listening to a channel you get a nice window which shows the playlist with the current track highlighted. However, as the tracks change, the highlighting does not update. You have to click on an “update” link (which is weirdly slow), and then scroll down through the playlist again. Euggh.
• No liner notes - I have a real penchant for these. It’d be awesome if you could just click somewhere on the interface and it’d give you a commentary on the piece. It would be really great for beginners. You could even have different levels of notes, from a brief overview to a detailed commentary on the musical structure. Oh, I can dream. (Edit: actually, there are liner notes, you just have to get them in a roundabout way)

The Ugly

Oh come on, you weren’t expecting me to pull that hackneyed reviewing trick were you?

The Conclusioney

Totally worth it if you are around a computer for long periods of the day, and want to explore all kinds of composers you didn’t know existed, or learn the more famous pieces by the more famous guys in more depth. It’s way better than the regular radio - mostly due to hearing 60 minutes of an individual composer at a time, instead of mostly 10-15 minute pieces. Highly recommended!

My mp3 Player and Stereo Should Chat to Each Other

Today I was listening to (one of my utmost, blab on about favorites) Shostakovich 15, as I walked back in the depressingly early twilight. The first Sunday in November is way too soon away. That particular symphony has a huge mother of a build-up and climax in the last movement. It’s a kind of dreary passacaglia based on the invasion theme from the seventh symphony lasting something like five minutes, before screeches in the woodwinds push it over into an even more morose conclusion.

It started on the far side of the bridge, and so by the time I pranced up the road to my front door (well, prancing really isn’t so appropriate here, what’s a bit more apt… dragged, limped, something droopy and miserable) the music was almost peaking… and then I’m home. Bad timing. Closing the door should coincide with a natural stopping point in the music, not the middle of a crescendo. I don’t like keeping my headphones on indoors as I can’t hear any flatmates or assassins.

However, this time it wasn’t a problem. As I reached my room my mp3 player vibrated to let me know that it’s successfully made contact with the stereo over wifi, and now they both know which piece I am listening to and where in the piece I am currently at. I just have to press a button, and bam - the stereo starts playing at exactly the same point as the mp3 player is up to. It’s a seamless handover of music.

Well, actually of course that isn’t what happened at all, because neither of my music systems are that sophisticated. However, it would be pretty trivial to set up something like that with the newer stereos and mps. In a few years when you have your friends over, you’ll all be able to take turns ordering the stereo around with your iPods, picking and mixing across all the playlists floating in waves through the room.

Google shows a classical downtrend. Sorta.

If you didn’t already know of it’s existence, Google has a fascinating little toy called trends, which shows how the volume for a particular search term has changed over time. For example, if you search for tennis, you get a series of peaks corresponding to each of the grand-slam tournaments. Depressingly, if you search for classical music, you can see a pretty steady decline for the last few years. Incidentally it also lists the regions for which this search term is the most popular. In this case:

1. Philippines
2. India
3. United Kingdom
4. Australia
5. United States
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. Germany

Since I often pretend I am a proper scientist it’s only fair to compare this against the search term music, which also has a decreasing trend, Given that I don’t think music itself is dying out, perhaps we should treat these results with caution (well, we blatantly should anyway, since we don’t really know how the volume is measured)

Looking at the individual composers is sort of interesting (and I emphasize “sort of”). Apparently, Spain and Australia are pretty fond of Shostakovich, but not quite as much as the UK. Some are predictable: Poland likes Chopin; Austria likes Mozart; Britain likes Britten. But Norway likes Stravinsky.

Searching for mp3 is also interesting. See the peaks around Christmas? I bet that’s everyone who just got an mp3 player and are trying to work out what it does and where to get stuff to put on it.

Anyone else find any interesting trends?