A new musicology blog – is it a blog about new musicology, or a musicology blog that is new? Only one way to find out. (Either way, it’s looking very good, and certainly worth your eye-time.)
Wall Street Journal article on declining record sales; a follow-up in the Economist. Meanwhile, this story that DRM hurts online music sales is entirely unrelated…
Still on a copyright tip, Matthew has a round-up of reactions to the US Copyright Royalties Board’s current project to kill web radio; Kyle Gann is essential reading on this score and how it relates to his own Postclassic station. Sick of all this copyright business? Well, me too. As Matthew puts it: “Message from an actual working musician to the industry organizations allegedly working on my behalf: cut it out, will ya? I’m trying to make a living here.”
Sideblog for Ligeti reception nerds (ie, me) – Underworld’s Karl Hyde on Kubrick’s 2001:
This conclusion may be obliquely expressed (I remember thinking ‘what was all that about?’ and having to read the novel to find out) but the mesmerising symphony of sound and vision which constitutes the film’s final act clearly suggest a metaphysical encounter way beyond the realms of rational explanation. Dubbed ‘the ultimate trip’, Kubrick’s psychedelic movie used music by the avant garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti, which Underworld’s Karl Hyde admits profoundly influenced his own work on the music for Boyle’s new film. ‘I’d never heard anything like it,’ says Hyde of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, which sounds for all the world like choirs of alien angels ringing throughout the heavens, investing 2001’s baffling denouement with undeniable overtones of religious ecstasy and unearthly transcendence
The Rambler 