Classical Convert

More MP3s: I heart you, Deutsche Grammophon!

Holy crap, DG just started a new online music store, and it’s almost perfect:

• 320kbps MP3s with no DRM limitations -  this is easily the highest quality music you are going to get from any of the online music stores. If you can distinguish this from CD audio you have extraordinarily good ears and an extremely expensive stereo.
• Liner notes - You get a PDF download of the liner note booklet with each album you buy. Hooray!
• Out of print CDs - They have over 600 out of print CDs available for download.
• Web-based download system - No stupid front-end program is needed, so you can download stuff directly from the webpage, using any operating system you like.
• A-la-carte shopping - It’s not subscription based, individual tracks vary depending on length (but not using stupidly directly proportional pricing, there are a few tiers, just as I hoped) but pretty much everyone will probably download a whole CD for around $11.

It looks like the last few nails are getting hammered into my CD buying activities. This gives you almost identical sound to a CD, as well as the liner notes, but it’s near instant and already encoded as MP3. Thanks DG!

More mp3 goodness: eMusic

Well, the lure of 25 free songs did it’s job. I am currently signed up for a trial period with emusic, which will probably segue into a full subscription next week. One of the biggest dealbreakers was that the client runs quite happily under Linux. The other dealbreaker was that they have a load of audio books. This doesn’t come under the same payment umbrella as the music does, it’s $9.99 extra per month (for 30 music tracks a month it’s an additional $9.99) which lets you download a full book each cycle. You also get one free book when you sign up for a trial.

Of course, the absolute most bestest important thingy (am I overdoing it?) is that all the downloads are proper, un-DRM-crippled mp3s. You can copy them to whichever device you like, burn them to mp3, whatever. They’re properly yours.

The book obsession is linked with a gym revival. It’s about twenty billion times easier to zone out on the cardio machines when you are having a story read to you, especially if you limit listening to it only to gym periods. That way, if you want to know what happens next you have to keep on running.

There is also a pretty wonderful selection of classical CDs to download, though I haven’t explored this in enormous detail yet.  The only one sitting downloaded currently is something by Balada, which hasn’t received nearly enough attention to be validly and/or verbosely commented on.

Back to Bach on a full stomach

Thanksgiving has reached its triumphant conclusion. I have been over fed and over-boozed and over-emergency-hamified by my girlfriends family, and am now plummeting into a Sunday evening over which the rest of the week is looming heavily, largely. All kinds of eventful events happened in my November absence, but as I didn’t get to sleep until five this morning those’ll get saved for future typings. Until such time as they are etc etc, take a gander at this performance of the ubiquitous but ever awesome toccata and fugue in D-minor… on an accordion.

Haydn is a slow infiltration (and how to tell him apart from Mozart)

Some pieces are puppies, after a glance they are hugging the legs of my listening habits and chewing away at my head when it’s supposed to be sleeping. Other pieces hover around at the periphery, waiting for their chance to unexpectedly leap in: a warm bath that you unexpectedly find has crinkled your fingers. Hmmm. The metaphors aren’t exactly on par tonight, are they? Puppies… bathwater… Perhaps if I deliberately try to find horrible illustrations, fantastic ones will magically manifest themselves all over the screen. But don’t count on it.

So why the bathwater allusion? Well, Haydn has been doing that recently. Franz Joseph is such a cheeky, sneaky fellow. It’s mostly the fault of the “Military” symphony, which keeps getting played because of its prime placement at the start of a CD that has lodged itself in the stereo. As mp3s dominate the sonic surroundings in my milieu, the poor old compact disc player doesn’t get much love, and thus doesn’t get its innards swapped out very frequently. This means the Military is getting a lot of playtime, a large amount of background exposure, when play gets pushed to fill in the silence. Recently, however, it’s far exceeding its role as background and leaping right into the foreground.

I’m liking Haydn more and more. As I mentioned previously one of my all-time ultimate tip-top life goals is to be able to reliably distinguish Mozart from Haydn. That last time Miss M. gave me a few hints for separating them (can you imagine it being in an opera? Probably Mozart) and I just explored a link my Dad emailed me to a Slate article centering on the differences in style between the two. It’s got audio comparisons of each of the points they illustrate and everything. Briefly their ideas are 1) Haydn is more rustic than Mozart 2) where Haydn is heartily funny, Mozart is craftily witty 3) Mozart is generally more ambiguous.

Maybe in a month or so I’ll be a bit more qualified to cast my own differentiation opinions.

Oh Schnittke, why are you so fickle?

A reason I think Schnittke is awesome (from the concerto grosso no. 2):

Or (from the viola concerto)…

And why he kind of pisses me off (also from concerto grosso no. 2):

Arrrgh! I can’t stand that strident, single-stringed rapidly falling motif which he uses in almost every movement of everything I have by him. It drives me crazy. I love the funky polystylism and weird stops and starts, and even a dash of microtonal whining, but he always ends up pushing it too bloody far. Pretty much every time I hear a Schnittke piece I wonder why I am not listening to it more, why it isn’t one of my favorites - and then it gets really painfully strident and I turn it off because my brain starts crying.

He still kicks arse though.