It Ain't No Sin To Take Off Your Skin And

Dance around in your bones!
Overtone singing in an x-ray machine.
(excerpt from INLAND (2002) by Pierre-Yves Borgeaud)

Overtone singing with X-ray (extract of INLAND) from momentum_prod on Vimeo.

(via notcot)

They Called Him Crazy / When He Started Out

1950s news footage: Mills College students play Harry Partch's instruments. You'll like it!



(via openculture)

The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes

That's pianist Yuja Wang performing in a dress that - gasp! - shows her legs!

It turns out people care about (lady)Musicians' Fashion Choices:
Mark Swed at the L.A. Times cares.
Amanda Ameer at Life's A Pitch cares.
Anne Midgette at the Washington Post cares (that other people care).
Sue Gilmore at Mercury News cares.
And of course the Youtube commenters care.


You know what I think? I think she plays the piano beautifully:



(via therestisnoise)

New Slang / When You Notice The Stripes

A little late to the game on this one, but Q2 and NPR released a crowd-sourced 100 Composers Under 40 list way back in April.

Generally I don't buy into Lists, but I do think it's interesting to see what "the people" have come up with as representative of today's musical culture (ahem ahem: a lot of music that might fit in the much-disputed indie-classical genre). I'm a musicologist and I actively search for music by young composers - and even so, I've only heard works by 37 of the finalists. New music: not dead yet!

How did you do?

One Of These Mornings / You're Going To Rise Up Singing

Porgy and Bess is getting a fresh coat of paint à la Broadway: a new (happier) ending, extra dialogue, revamped music, modernized sets and costumes, the works!

Not to show my hand too soon, but based on the New York Times preview I think this production sounds amazing:
It seems as though the impetus for the makeover was a fleshing out of Bess' character - and, in fact, the musical is directed by Diane Paulus; Suzan-Lori Parks modernized the libretto; Deirdre L. Murray adapted the music; and Audra McDonald signed on for the title role. Despite the fact that this will be a commercial musical designed to appeal to a variety of theatergoers, the production team is in no way skimping on the issues written into the plot, including rape, drugs, poverty, and racism.
In other words: a group of strong, mostly African-American women are re-examining what has always been a (beloved, but) problematic opera, they are introducing an entirely new audience to an old work, they are making it relevant to the 21st century, they are pushing at the boundaries of how we interact with "the canon," and in the process they are making new art.


But Stephen Sondheim hates everything about it, so.

I could get on my soap box and write about how adaptations do not debase the original - but it may be enough to say that I would hate to live in a world without gems like these:

So Tell Me What To Do Now / When I Want You Back

52 reasons boy bands were better in the 90s.

They really were, weren't they?

via buzzfeed.

Waitin' On The World To Change

Something you never knew you always wanted to do:
New York Polyphony's Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity

It's a contest (deadline June 20, 2011), and there are some pretty major prizes (including $500 and a release on Sony's Classical Music Online label Ariama). Not to mention the everlasting glory.

The best part about all this, though, is that there are already more than 600 entries - many of which you can hear on the contest's website here, here, and here. Some of these entries are clearly by professionals, and some are (clearly) not. Some are heavy on the synthesizers and drum kits, and some are simple a capella arrangements of the stem chant. In sum: there's a huge variety of work being submitted, and much of it is tagged with encouraging comments from other entrants. [Gregorian chant: bringing us together since Pippin the Short?]

"We like to have something of an urban vibe to the way we’re bringing this really ancient music to modern audiences,” Geoffrey Williams, New York Polyphony’s countertenor, said in a WQXR interview. These remixes may not be conducive to strict performance practice, but I think the excitement this contest has generated - and the community it has (even temporarily) created - is well worth the lapse.


(via WQXR)

For The Record

I adore this photo-essay by Dangerous Minds: Famous People Hanging Out With Their Vinyl

Do you know what you get when you type "famous people hanging out with their cd collection" or "famous people hanging out with their victrola" into google? (Actually, you get that photo-essay.) Point being: there's something about a record.

(via dangerousminds)

I'm Sittin' On Top Of The World

This is a today-only kind of blog post, friends, because Today Only google is celebrating what would have been Les Paul's 96th birthday with a guitar logo you can strum with your mouse. Even better: using the little black box, you can record thirty seconds of your very own Les-Paul-inspired guitar(computer) song.

Also courtesy of google: everything you ever wanted to know about Les Paul.


Oh, there he is.

(Forever link - to prove it really happened.)

Shocking Blue

Musical Tesla coils, Zeusaphone, Thoremin - call it what you want, it's an instrument that digitally modifies lightning sparks to produce music. Lightning. Unfortunately, it looks like the only currently-touring lightning orchestra is a corporate-event-for-hire kind of affair, and the company that used to rent out these instruments over the internet (?!) has disbanded. Good thing there's youtube:






Check out: The Tesla Orchestra; Steve Ward; Open Spark Project; build your own(?).
(via all songs considered)

Popular / You're Gonna Be Popular

If you've ever browsed the Amazon mp3 music store, you've run into X5 Music Group. Definitely. (99 Most Essential Relaxing Classics. 99 Most Essential Mendelssohn Masterpieces. etc. etc. and so on and so forth. etc. ad infinitum.)

My initial reaction was to write them off as one of those cheap labels that aggregates second-rate performances for the unknowing masses. MY BAD. I haven't looked into every album, but the 99 Most Essential Opera Classics (which unfortunately no longer seems to be available) was worth every penny of the $1.99 that I spent: Kiri Te Kanawa, Joan Sutherland, the London Phil and Placido Domingo - these are big names.

A little research: X5 boasts 1,116 albums in Amazon's digital store, more than half of which are classical. In three years, the Stockholm-based company has become the best selling classical label in the US.

Alright! Someone is selling classical music in the US! Except: 99 Most Essential? Every. single. album. has a gimmick. A few favorites:

Classical Music As Heard in Hip-Hop


The 99 Most Essential Classical Pieces For Your Mind


AND OF COURSE:
Classical Workout - (you guys: I'm seriously considering it.)

An album titled 50 Greatest Hits of Opera! (exclamation point included) makes me a little queasy; on the other hand, the slick graphics and, yes, the themed gimmick seem to be working. If this is what it takes to get Americans to listen to classical music, I can be behind that 92%.



Bonus: they're starting a new series: Rise of the Masters. The chosen composers are marketed à la PiratesoftheCaribbean, and you can get an iphone app that "composerizes" your photo into "what you’d look like if you were a classical master composer." I am not even kidding.

I Love To Laugh / Ha Ha Ha Ha!

#Operaplot2011! Winners!! Announced!!!

(Runner-up Nixon Goes to China: you'd get my vote.)





(More about #operaplot from The Omniscient Mussel so you can play next year.)

Teach Me How To Dougie

Yo Yo Ma, Lil' Buck, and Spike Jonze.
Cello, Jookin, and Film.
Teaching kids about creativity.
All in a day's work.


"We can build community like nothing else," Ma said in a radio interview. "All it takes is imagination, attention and empathy -- that we care."



(via colorlines)

Won't You Play That Pretty Music?

In which a ball run xylophone plays Bach's Cantata 147.

Full disclosure: I'm fairly certain this is a commercial for a cell phone - but that doesn't make it any less clever/mesmerizing. (I think it also brings up some interesting questions about music and marketing. It's "high-class" Bach on a homemade instrument, it's a familiar melody in an unexpected setting: the juxtapositions are intriguing, yes? All I know is: if this is what all commercials were like, maybe I'd watch more tv.)





(You might also like Rows of Tones.)

(via metafilter)

Float On

Historical flutes floating in space! Next, I would like to see space tubas, please.





(via metafilter)

Cause The Way You're Steppin' Around / You're Steppin' Out Of Line

Not tone rows exactly, but definitely rows of tones.


"Czardas on 146 bottles"





"400 drums in 1 minute"






(via christoph and haveyouseenthis?!)

Melody / It Was A Second Name

If you can't appreciate a 35-year-old man playing Josquin on multi-tracked melodica, then I don't want to know you.



(check out James Howard Young's youtube channel.)
(via metafilter)

People Call Her Sassy / That's Her Attitude

So why was I looking up musical affects mid-semester?

Readers, meet The Detritus Review.
I've been waiting for the right moment to introduce one of my favorite blogs, and this is it.

You know how sometimes you read concert reviews in newspapers and you wonder how someone who clearly knows nothing about music is not only getting paid to write about this Thing You Love The Most, but Is Simultaneously TAKING AWAY JOBS FROM LEGIT AND UNEMPLOYED MUSICOLOGISTS? (I feel strongly about it.)
Anyway: the three bloggers responsible for "Detritus" don't just wonder about these things. This is the mother of all music-criticism-deconstruction blogs, and it is guaranteed to make me laugh out loud no matter where I am (sorry, other library patrons) and to fill my daily snark quota. Maybe yours too?

I'll let it speak for itself: the 3/19/11 post.

I Second That Emotion

Musical affects: they used to be kind of a big deal.
Enter equal temperament and all of a sudden they didn't mean so much anymore - but no student is going to get through a music history class without some mention of "emotions associated with individual keys."
On the other hand, very few music students are going to take the time mid-semester to look up which emotion goes with which key (cough cough: I'm guilty) - and that's too bad, because there were some IMAGINATIVE music scholars when it mattered.

According to Schubart: Ab major is all about putrefaction, Db major is a leering key, and f# minor "tugs at passion like a dog biting a dress." And of course our theorists had their differences: Schubart was convinced Eb major was the only key for representing intimacy with God, while Charpentier labeled it "cruel and hard." Oops?

[French] Compare treatises by: Charpentier (1682), Mattheson (1713), Rameau (1722), Schubart (1806)
[Not-so-good English translation]

[English] Schubart's Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst ca. 1806

An excellent overview of "Characteristics of Musical Keys"