Music industry losing money? I blame the children.
Mwanji keeps finding those blogging jazzers.
Scott posts on music in other disciplines.
Kyle posts on meter and postclassicism, and includes a surprising András Schiff exposé…
And Matt previews some of the graphics he's done for the Practice Hours 2 DVD. Cool. Plus there's some characteristically heartfelt introspection on the state of Grime at the minute.
I’ve just read on Sequenza21 that György Kurtág has won this year’s 200,000 dollar Grawemeyer award for composition for Concertante Op.42 for violin, viola and orchestra. A very deserved winner – David Salvage on Sequenza21 calls him “the best alive”, and I don’t think he’s far off the mark. The already illustrious list of previous winners has been further enhanced.
God bless WFMU, who have posted a video of Mark E. Smith reading of the football results, as noted back in September. In an experience familiar to all us fans of League Two clubs, you have to wait a while before you get to the good bit – which in this case is Ray Stubbs floundering (no! surely not!) as Smith slags off his haircut.
Bonus track: Mark E. Smith removes his dentures on a Newsnight tribute to John Peel. It’s all at WFMU.
This has been running for more than a year now, but I thought it required some sort of explanation and clarification for new visitors to the blog.
The list is a regularly updated feed, drawn from musician obituaries I post to my del.icio.us account, and processed for presentation here by the very fine Feed digest. When I see that a musician has died (via any number of sources), I post an entry to del.icio.us, and soon afterwards it appears here. At the end of the year, I post the full list for that year. Links to these may be found in the sidebar.
The name of the deceased musician is in bold, and clicks through to a recently published obituary; their principal profession is in italics. Note that many newspaper articles expire or disappear behind paywalls. It’s always worth searching Google Groups to see if anyone has posted a copy to any mailing lists – some fabulous people are very assiduous about doing this, and we love them for it.
I can’t claim anything close to comprehensiveness about this list – because of the nature of the world and my sources, the vast majority are American and European musicians, an imbalance I’ve not yet been able to correct. I have a pretty broad notion of what constitutes a professional musician, so patrons, promoters, publishers, recording engineers and the like all get in, as long as they have had made a professional impact of some distinction.
Note – if you are looking for more details of musician deaths, you could do much worse than visit the Washington University in St Louis’ Gaylord Music Library Necrology. This is an awesome, regularly maintained, scholarly resource.
Here's a free new music event that slipped under the radar for November's cheap new music post, but it looks good enough to warrant a post of its own. This Sunday, Vladimir Ashkenazy will be performing Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony (plus some other stuff) with the Philharmonia at Bristol's Colston Hall. Should be a splendid do, but it hardly qualifies as new music (and it's a full-price evening). But then, in the bar after the concert, audio-visual collective I am the Mighty Jungulator will present a remixed version of said performance, a so-called 're-imagining', through an octophonic sound system and dual video projections. This sounds like it could be ace (could be awful, too, but the group sound like they've done their homework, so I hope not). IatMJ are going to discreetly film the evening's Shostakovich performance for their basic materials, which will then be remixed live. And this is what intrigues me, because the source material for the reworking will be so site- and time-specific. It won't be a remix version of a temporally/spatially orphaned pre-recording, but of the events that the audience in the bar have just been listening to. IatMJ are drawing several (slightly ropey) comparisons between Shostakovich's Stalinist Russia and contemporary Britain as a way of approaching Shostakovich, but at first these seems at odds with – or at least tangential to – the key modus operandum of the project. Other than providing a convenient hook (and some top notch primary material to work with), why choose this concert over a recording? Why Shostakovich? Why the Sixth, for that matter? Something about time and memory and musical construction and concert hall convention will emerge, surely, but what, and how does this fit with Nathan Hughes' remarks on the project that "in this piece [the Shostakovich symphony] the parallels with the present day are inescapable. Russia was falling into a state of degeneracy; millions of people died at the hands of Stalin; yet you had the paradox of the media saying everything was great. It made you feel mad, yet you had to keep going, in a kind of coping mechanism"?
If anyone reading is going to be in Bristol this weekend, do go to this – the bar event is supposed to start at around 9.45, and it's free – and then let me know what you made of it. Ta.
[This Independent article has more. Colston Hall homepage]
Sony rootkit mini-special:
The BBC report that uninstalling Sony's XCP copy protection system could leave your computer vulnerable to malicious hackers.
Wired unwraps the real story of the Sony rootkit, and finds "extreme hubris", "incompetence" and "collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us".
Yikes. Luckily, Sony – aw, bless 'em – have been lovely enough to release a
list of their products that will install dangerous, borderline-illegal, Windows-crashing, poorly-written, unwanted software on your PC. So if you're not one of the estimated half-million users already infected, you have been warned.
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In other news:
This is more like it: the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project of the Donald C. Davidson Library, UCSB, has posted a library of more than 5,000 cylinder recordings, available for download or streaming. Jolly good show. Available until the next round of copyright extensions.
This is just a silly article about jamming on trombone with McFly, but I like it.
The Guardian's John Harris reports on New Orleans musicians hoping to bounce back
The Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies has announced the discovery of two fragments of Beethoven's skull
And the awesomely geeky Pace has statistically determined – once and for all – what the funkiest year ever was. There is even a spreadsheet of data… This would command respect on its own, but Pace goes one further on the riddim method blog and posts a Preamble for Ethics in Beat Research. This is serious ethnomusicological business, and I love it.
Madonna has lost the plagiarism case made against her by Salvatore Acquaviva. Acqauviva's claim that 'Frozen' uses 4 bars of his song 'Ma vie fout l'camp' has been upheld by a Belgian court, with costly implications for Madonna and her record companies. The judge has ordered radio and TV stations in Belgium to stop playing 'Frozen', and EMI, Sony and Warners must withdraw the single, and Ray of Light from sale in the country.
Personally, I find these court decisions fascinating, from a musical point of view, because they push music into a strange role – as forensic evidence (worth large sums of money to whoever wins the case). This is a completely new sort of listening that – as intellectual property rights are warped closer and closer to the physical property model – is becoming ever more prevalent. It's a modern phenomenon that gives sounds considerable responsibilities (that they cannot always bear), and that is pretty much alien to my own experience of music. I therefore find it absolutely intriguing. Does anyone know any more details about this case – in particular the four bars Madonna has been judged to have nicked?
Most frequent word in my comments at the moment? ‘Oops’, perhaps. Standards in the Rambler editorial pool have got sloppy. Bananas have been witheld and things should get better…
Frankly peeps it's far too cold to go out for anything less than a great bargain at the moment. I love my radiators too much and have a stack of DVDs to catch up on, so I'm not getting up to much this month – but you could do worse than head along, with gloves and hat, to some of the following. You'll still have plenty of change left for Christmas shopping:
Tonight! Impressively-haired, media favourite jazz drummer Seb Rochford and electronica bods Leafcutter John and Martin Morales are playing for free – for free, I tell you – at the Hayward Gallery tonight, 6.30-11pm in the foyer.
Other than that, I've been a bit slow this month so missed a bunch of things, but you can still see:
Very young composers at St Lukes, 161 Old Street in the LSO's Sound Inventors Series tomorrow evening, 7.30pm. From the website:
This concert showcases the best of the next generation of composers. The music has been selected from over 1,000 young composers who have participated in the award-winning young composer initiative Sound Inventors. Featuring new music for an ensemble of 14 musicians conducted by Scottish composer and Sound Inventors Creative Director Alasdair Nicolson.
That one's free too.
If you're in Portsmouth on Sunday, catch the Maritime Brass Quintet at St John's Cathedral, Edinburgh Road, playing works by Andrew McBirnie, Judith Bailey, Michael Dawney, David Penri-Evans and Philip Drew. This one's 5 pounds, it starts at 8pm, call 023 9283 0995 for details.
Monday sees the second of the Philharmonia's Music of Today series, featuring three works by the young Japanese composer Toshio Hosowaka. The conductor is the not curly-haired Diego Masson, who you might have seen doing Xenakis last month. As ever, this is a free event by the Philharmonia, and one of my favourite little corners of the London music scene. 6pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall (smaller than the Festival Hall, so it doesn't feel quite as subversive, and you will probably have to sit next to someone, but we're stuck with it until the building work on the RFH is finished).
And if that's not enough free new music for you, next Wednesday you should poke your ears into the RAM, where Lisa Moore, piano, and friends will play four works by Martin Bresnick, and two of Ligeti's piano Etudes – 'Fanfares', and the dripping, glutinous 'Automne à Varsovie'. Details here if you scroll down to 'Mainly New' on the 23rd November.
That'll do you for the week.
Sony are facing at least three lawsuits over their dodgy DRM system;
The Independent talks to Kano and Wiley looking for another angle on the 'why isn't Grime huge yet' question;
Alex Ross writes on Scelsi – plus behind-the-scenes material at the blog;
the always-excellent Kid Kameleon has a new mix at riddim method – a Peter K tribute special;
WFMU links to this great nostalgia site – pictures of apparently every make and model of blank cassette made in the last, oh, ages. You will, like me, squawk "I had that one!" at your monitor at least five times. Bonus points if you can remember what you had recorded on them.
And last and least, look away now if you don't want to read the worst music/internet article ever. (N.B. When I first read this yesterday, all the links to pitchforkmedia.com originally pointed to indie farmyard equipment retailers pitchfork.com. Oh, the hilarity!)
