The Rambler

Well, I’ve just found out that I wasn’t successful in my funding application. Ho hum. At least they tell you how you graded, and I can rest easy in the knowledge that I didn’t just miss out – nope, I don’t think this was a close thing… So, the sober and considered stuff is out of the way for good – it’s blood and thunder right up to the line from now on. Hurrah!

Via Kyle Gann, this is the neatest thing I’ve seen on the web in a while: a DIY kit for producing your own La Monte Young installations at home (sans, unfortunately, a kick-ass sound system). Kyle’s advice on using the system:

For the late, complex installations, the base frequency should be 7.5 cps; for the others, something more in the 100-250 range, depending. Of course, to get anything resembling the real installations, you’d then have to run this through a big sound system with superb frequency response. … How can you tell whether you’re getting it? The volume level should be basically steady, without a pronounced regular crescendo/decrescendo beat, and you should be able to refocus your ears on different pitches by moving your head slightly.

My favourite so far is The Obsidian Ocelot, set at around 180 cps – seems to work pretty well with my desktop speakers – but the late works are a lost cause, particularly as low as 7.5 cps: you need a bass bin as big as your desktop for those. Also worth playing around with, from the same page, is an algorithm for Ligeti’s Poème symphonique for, in this case, 100 clicks of static.

Thoughts out to Jason Spaceman. Keep waking up, keep taking your medication. Get well.

My New Favourite Composer for the week. I came across her name as her piece Sula was last year’s selection by the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Her site includes .ram and .mp3 format extracts of some of her pieces, and I like them a lot. Rolling waves of sound, chant inspiration (although, to much relief, not copycat versions of her compatriot Arvo Pärt’s chant-inspired pieces), a gritty, tectonic approach to sound and structure, Eastern Europe…. In other words, My Kind of Thing. I can’t see any mentions of commercial recordings at this stage, but I’m sure Sula at least will be available before too long.

I’ll be honest – I can barely contain myself, and have been counting the hours until 10.30 tomorrow morning for some time now. I don’t expect us to win – they may be older and weaker than two years ago, but there are still 7 or 8 players in the Australia team who’d make most world XIs, and England can’t match that. 2-2 is our best hope, and I see most commentators reckon 3-1 to Australia, which seems distinctly possible. So I’m not looking forward to a series win – that’s for 2006-7 – but I am looking forward to some proper clashes, the best players in the world having to raise their games, that sort of thing. And I’m also looking forward to seeing Brett Lee come out to bat as Michael Vaughan chucks the new ball to Flintoff and Harmison. Oh, I am looking forward to that.

While you lick your lips for that particular encounter, have a nibble at this selection of doosras from the papers:

Fantasy test match in the Telegraph

Dream/Nightmare scenarios for each ground in the Times: Lord’s; Edgbaston; Old Trafford; Trent Bridge; The Oval.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins offers tips on how to play the Aussies; Matthew Syed offers tips on how to sledge them (funny, I don’t remember much sledging going on in table tennis…), also in the Times.

And in the Guardian, Allan Donald and Jacques Kallis respectively offer useful tips (“Matthew Hayden: You absolutely have to make the new ball count; if you don’t then he’ll settle quickly and hurt you badly. You have to bowl just back of a good length and try to get the ball slanting across him. He loves coming forward and playing hard at the ball, which is why you must give him as few genuine driving opportunities as possible”); and obvious banalities (“Glenn McGrath: He’s very competitive, and he likes getting up a batsman’s nose”) to help England’s cause. Very kind.

If anyone wants me, I’ll be on the couch.

Shout out to Fac-similé, who have just opened their web doors for the first time. Fac-similé is a site that collects links to online score reproductions (works out of copyright only of course; or at least while that still means something), and currently lists around 420 pieces by composers from Agostino Agazzari to Adrien Willaert. As explained in their FAQs, Fac-similé is not intended as a replacement for the long-established Werner Icking Music Archive; rather it is a way to find scores that you might be looking for. Certainly, on an initial spin round the site, it is laid out less intimidatingly than the WIMA, which will probably help many people find what they’re after. And, since it is a catalogue of links, and not a hosting service itself, many of the items listed at Fac-simile are held in the WIMA in any case; so a more manageable front-end does not necessarily come with a loss in number of scores. Worth a browse in any case. More info via the Fac-simile.org blog.

Rob Musicircus on form again on Thursday’s 2 silence. (Not just a London thing – I was observing it at home in front of the TV, and pictures of stillness and defiance were coming in from all around the UK.) Not for the first time recently (see also last Wednesday) I wished I didn’t work at home.

I’ve somehow completely missed the, ahem, furore, over the BBC offering everyone the opportunity to own some of the Single Greatest Achievements of Human Creativity (alright, the pop SGAHCs – we all know that String Quartets are the real bomb), and yeah, there are copyright issues here, because although Beethoven’s estate expired about 100 years ago, orchestral musicians of all people need feeding properly. Still, that doesn’t get you round the poor judgement of a music industry desperate to revive a rapidly dwindling sector (classical) then ringfencing some of their greatest assets… As Londonist music columnist Greg opines:

Could we please spend more energy on actually convincing people that classical music can matter, based on the vitality, energy, meaningfulness, and surprise in the music — both on records and in the concert hall — rather than arguing about a stunt that assumed the greatness of Beethoven a priori, and whose quote-success-unquote was predetermined by human nature?

Thanks to Rob for the pointer. Also, thanks to beepSNORT for linking the Independent story in the first place. In the same post, he has some good points to make citing Bach as the first mashup artist, and a link to DJ Earworm’s Stairway to Bootleg Heaven, which is worth a listen if you’ve not heard it already.

Congratulations to Jem Finer, sound artist and ex-Pogue, on winning the first New Music Award. The prize is a cheque for £50,000, which is to be spent on realising Score for a Hole in the Ground, his ‘post-digital’ submission piece.

Commiserations also to the two shortlisted finalists, Terry Mann and Craig Vear who – despite the size of the winning pot – get zilch. This seems like a bit of a flaw in the concept of the contest. The idea was – at least implicitly – to set up a Turner or Booker prize for composers, but the important difference between the PRS award and other examples in the other arts is that they are awarded for work already done; the PRS award is for the realisation of a proposed composition. This is, I’m sure, why the shortlist at least was made up of ambitous (read: expensive) sound art works, and not chamber music scores. If you’re bidding for a pot of up to £50,000, you want to spend it all, right? The shame about this is that both Terry and Craig’s ideas, dreamt up with this financial support in mind, have virtually no chance of ever being realised, and so all their compositional work has been for nought. £50,000 is a very large arts prize – it matches the Man Booker Prize for fiction, but since all shortlisted books get a big kick in sales, the love is spread a bit; the Turner Prize on the other hand is ‘only’ worth £25,000, and another £5,000 is available for the three runners-up. Again, all four artists also get the immediate benefit of a headlining Tate show in the weeks before the prize announcement. Other than some intangible press coverage, New Music Award nominees still get nothing. This is only the first year of the award though, and hopefully oversights like this can be ironed out. Congratulations again to Jem Finer, whose work will be presented to the public some time before September next year.

More details on the award are at the PRS New Music Award homepage, including Finer’s own film presentation of his piece.