Classical Convert

Hot Pre-Retreat Thursday Type Linkage

Well, my presentations are sort of done and I am half packed. And we are leaving tomorrow morning. Clearly this is an excellent time to be blogging! I dunno how internetty it will be out in the Catskills, so there might not be anything new up here until Sunday. In the meanwhile, get your teeth into the following morsels:

• There’s a piece in the Guardian about what makes a good riff (From Beethoven to Deep Purple) which seems particularly relevant given the comments in one recent post.
• Also related to that post (the bit about classical music relying on scores whereas pop/rock relies on performances) is this story about a band called Deerhoof deciding to “leak” the sheet music in advance of the actual recording. The video is kind of annoying, but the idea is kind of interesting.
• Speaking of Deerhoof, NPR has a stream in which a performance of theirs was paired with “The Rite Of Spring Remixed” by the Metropolis Ensemble. The concept behind this Rite of Springing is that the sound from a live orchestra is altered in real-time via laptops. Although I think the idea is really neat, I have to admit that on the whole the sound seems a bit too spiky and unbalanced. There are some stand-out moments though (like around 8:40-9:30, and 18:00ish). You can listen to a stream of it on NPR here.
• The Chicago Sinfonietta are doing a concert-by-vote. What if everyone writes in 4′33″ and the helicopter quartet?

See write/you all again soon…!

Tags: chicago sinfonietta, deerhoof, metropolis ensemble, rite of spring remixed

The Further Demise of Physical Media

Continuing the saga of the slow demise of CDs is this poll of the online readers of Stereophile magazine, indicating that only 45% use CDs or SACDs as their primary method of listening to music, compared to 50% who use either an MP3 server or iPod.

I was previously unaware of Stereophile magazine, but it’s one of those magazines targeted at people with more money than sense audiophiles, which reviews things such as these $2999 interconnects using language like:

Silences and spaces between notes and sonic “images” weren’t even black: They were just dead-empty. Tunefulness, rhythm, and musical flow were all superb.

Although to be fair, the author does blatantly point out that it is a ridiculous price.

Regardless of how prodigal the publication is with their praise for expensive audio, the point is that their readership is well-biased toward the audio snob — not the casual top-40 downloader — and these guys are now more inclined to play via hard-disk than CD. I think with both of these ends of the audio listening spectrum covered, storable-audio is well on the way to completely wiping out physical formats.

In fact, the only time I use CDs these days is in my car stereo… and those are only for storing MP3s on. I kinda miss the collection browsing, but don’t miss the dust and taken up space. How about you? Do you still have a collection of CD jewel boxes cluttering up the shelves?

Tags: cd, mp3, music, server

Hot Wednesday Linkage

Whoah there tiger, we haven’t had Wednesday before. Are you excited yet?

• Nintendo announced the impending arrival of Wii music. Well, impending in about 5 months. I know some of you are pretty familiar with the system, but for those living in caves and under rocks and stuff, the Wii lets you control stuff on screen via the motion of your hands and (recently) feet. This will allow you to virtually “play” various instruments, or more accurately, as one commenter put it: “you can just spaz around, and the game makes it into music”. If it’s anything like Wii sports it’ll be completely unrealistic, but hugely fun. Did I mention that there will be a conducting game in there as well?
• There’s a new (?) classical music video site in town. The styling looks very sexy and Web 2.0, but after discovering that everything costs a very un-Web 2.0 sum of money I promptly ran away. Those of you who aren’t stingy graduate students might be interested, though.
• We’re proud to be number 29

Tags: classical music, linkage, wii music

Building Played

Yo dudes. This weekend was another one of those jaunt-down-to-the-city type deals, hence the lack of posts being stuck up here. G’s square footage is only just large enough to contain a bed and inflatable mattress, so that doing things such as extracting ethernet cables or finding a spot to perch a laptop are a tad more challenging than expected. However, this isn’t terribly problematic since most of the day is spent exploring things in the Av.’s and St.’s.

One particular extravaganza which caused (somewhat) zany hijinks to ensue was the successful meandering of us into that aforementioned installation, Playing The Building. Yes, yours truly totally got his hands all over that particular organ. The instrument, you filthy so-and-so.

The building which contains the exhibit — the Battery Maritime Building –  is also the terminal for the Governor’s Island ferry, and sits right next to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. After signing a waiver (!) you traipse up a flight of appealingly disheveled stairs and through several cavernous rooms which look out over upper New York bay. Through the final doorway emanate the whistles and rattles of the instrument, punctuated by short periods of silence as the next performer takes their place at the bench.

The organ room itself is huge, and hot. The organ is under a spotlight, with the words “PLEASE PLAY” stenciled in front of it in white paint on the concrete floor. There are about twenty people waiting in line to play, and just as many wandering around examining the devices attached to the pillars and pipes and radiators as they are activated by the current guy or gal behind the keyboard.

Some people are clearly pianists. They sit down and attempt to play a rendition of a familiar piece, but quickly give up after a few bars. The low keys control generators attached to beams in the roof; the keys in the middle control airflow through pipes on the wall; and on the right you can activate solenoids which smack steel bars into the metal pillars. The pipes are reminiscent of a diatonic scale, but the pillars and generators are certainly not.

The couple in front of us try to hold down all the keys at once, but it seems as though only a certain number of objects can be activated simultaneously. When it is my turn I try to alternate between playing all of the generators — which give off a threatening low grinding roar — and rapidly running through all of the percussive pillar actuators. When I get up someone applauds, just a little bit, which makes me smile.

It’s quite a bizarre experience: oddly not so much the actual playing of the instrument but the experience of performing in front of a roomful of people on an instrument which you have no idea how to play. It actually feels kind of intimidating when you are at the front of the queue, but almost as soon as you sit down you are consumed with discovering what all of the keys are connected to, and what kind of sonic environment you can string together.

If you are in the area I totally recommend it. Did I mention that it’s free?

Tags: manhattan, playing the building

A Dose of Self-Doubt

Do you ever write a bunch of paragraphs and then look back and decide that they are quite horrible and should never be seen by anyone ever again, including yourself? Yeah, I did that several times over the weekend. So, instead of trying to be unsuccessfully creative again, here’s a play-it-safe, YouTubey type post. This time it’s a synthesizer which while not sounding terribly fantastic has a sort of cunning input mechanism, which reminds me an awful lot of beaming around lasers in lab:

It’ll be very interesting to see what other pseudo-physical/visual music systems crop up with the immenent take-over of touchscreens.

Tags: music, touchscreen