Phil (with some cracking YouTube action) and Jonathan continue the discussion of music and the primary campaigns.
Which together tie rather nicely to Ryan Raul Bañagale’s thought-provoking call for a Millennial Musicology. I say there’s a connection because while Phil’s post is an example of the advantages of web resources to musicology (the subject of Bañagale’s proposal), Jonathan – who evaluates some of the relative production values of the music Phil linked to – points to one potential current limitation of YouTube and similar technologies. And that is that the quality of such videos (not to mention the pre-upload editing that may have taken place) is pretty low-grade: they’re small, loading can be jumpy, the images aren’t crystal, and the sound is rarely up to much. A lot of ‘noise’ is one thing in manuscript studies – where most critical evaluation is taking place ‘behind’ the surface scribbles any case – but I wonder about its methodological implications for the critical study of contemporary or recent phenomena, like pop videos. In such cases the YouTube experience is already several steps removed from the originally broadcast experience, even before we start thinking about horizons of expectation, historical context and so on. Do such limitations on the quality of the musical/visual experience matter if one is intending to write serious criticism or analysis? Even if not, that’s kind of interesting in itself…
Scott Unrein’s nonpop podcast is back broadcasting selections of the great and good in (mostly) American experimental, postclassic and minimal music. Subscribe now.
And this is a great video, excerpted from Tadeusz Konwicki’s 1965 film Salto, featuring music by Hollywood’s favourite Polish film composer, Wojciech Kilar. Big thanks to Music for Maniacs for the link.
Too much to do – real content will be forthcoming. Until then, here’s an article on Psappha’s upcoming webcast of four pieces by Claude Vivier. The Vivier concert is the central item in a series of three concerts by the ensemble being broadcast online in February and March: the first focuses on György Kurtág and the third includes pieces by Gordon McPherson, Edward Cowie and Steve Mackey. More info on all three here.And, if you wish, you can come and see me at the Barbican Centre giving the pre-concert talk on Penderecki’s 8th Symphony, which receives its UK première with Jiri Belohlavek and the BBC SO next Thursday, 28th Feb. More info and booking here. I may use the words “stylistic environmentalism”.
Apophenia has a great post on boycotting locked-down academic journals. I might have mentioned it before, but as a humanities scholar, I’m completely in awe of how sorted the sciences have got themselves over open access publication – just look at arXiv.org. Amazing.
Until we get something like that, here’s a list of open access music journals, compiled by DOAJ. One that they don’t include, because issue 1 has only just come out, is Search, a journal for new music and culture. Contributors to this first issue include Frank Cox, Wieland Hoban and Martin Iddon, so you have an idea on its aesthetic focus, but it looks like an excellent new publication.
Update: In the comments below, Mike van Eerden draws attention to another open access journal resource, and one tailored specifically for the humanities: Search Pigeon. SP isn’t quite the same as arXiv, which parallel-publishes articles otherwise available only in commercial journals, but it looks like a well-organised and growing resource for seeking OA publications.
Elsewhere, the UK government quite fancies the idea of forcing ISPs to police the internet, obliging them to cut access to anyone found to be illegally downloading. “A bit like asking the post office to check every letter it handles for evidence of illegal activity” protest the ISPs. I think it sounds like a perfectly reasonable demand to make of ISPs, which won’t in any way infringe civil liberties, be impossible to administer, or catapult the cost of internet access through the roof. The IPKat muses:
Once unlawful downloaders are cut off, there will be enough people left online to make the internet worthwhile? Or will an alternative internet develop, to cater for those who seek out the forbidden fruits of copyright infringement, pornography, unregulated gambling and so on?
The amount of online “chatter” about an upcoming album release directly correlates to higher physical album sales, according to two researchers with New York University’s Stern Business School. Professor Vasant Dhar and former student Elaine Chang observed the trends of 108 albums released during the first two months of 2007 to see how different outside elements affected (or predicted) sales once the albums became available, and found that all of them had some effect or another. But certain elements of online chatter—namely blogs and social networks—seemed to be fairly accurate predictors of future success.
The Concert Programmes Project Online Database (Phase 1) has been
launched at the culmination of a three-year project to document the
programme holdings of major libraries, archives and museums in selected
regional centres throughout the UK and Ireland. The database currently
offers descriptions of some 5,500 collections of music-related
performance ephemera held by 53 institutions, including the British
Library, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, the
national libraries of Scotland and Ireland, the Bodleian Library and
Trinity College, Dublin.
The project has unearthed programme material dating from 1690 to the
present day, with the majority of records inevitably relating to
material from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Many collections have
been arranged, catalogued and made available to the public for the first
time during the course of the project. In terms of geographical
coverage, the database covers material from venues in some 80 countries
worldwide, revealing the full diversity of institutional holdings and
making this a truly international resource.
CPP descriptions outline the significance and content of each
collection, with details of the physical arrangement, content date
range, performers and venues. Users may search the dataset free-text or
browse by time period, venue, name (of performers, concert series,
ensembles, and collectors), subject, or holding institution. We thereby
hope to facilitate improved access to an important category of research
material that has previously been inadequately served by library and
archive catalogues. These largely hidden – and therefore significantly
underused – documents will be of enormous interest to performers,
musicologists, local, economic, social, cultural and theatre historians,
and to librarians.
Phase 1 of the project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council and hosted by Cardiff University and the Royal College of Music.
The database is available free of charge at www.concertprogrammes.org.uk
But it turns out there are lots more, springing up like mushrooms. Time to start collecting.
Props to Beyond Academia (another new one for me), whose blogroll I strip-mined for these. No doubt there are more to come. Update (26/2/08): I’m going to keep adding to this list as I run across new blogs; keep an eye on it!
