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"

Is This The Real Life / Is This Just Fantasy?

Fourteen women / fourteen accordions: The Main Squeeze Orchestra.

Quote member Kelly Alba: "You put it on your chest and you wear it right next to your heart. You squeeze it, and it's like a big musical hug."



They also competed on America's Got Talent. America hated it.



[Now, if only the press (I'm looking at you, Village Voice) would stop calling this an "all-girl" orchestra, and if only America's Got Talent would take back comments like "[the (male) director is] kind of like the Hugh Heffner of the accordion world" and "for some reason I thought this was going to be sexy."
Respect and equality, wouldn't that be novel?]

Bum Dadada Bum Bum / Two Bits

And now for something totally mindless. Ha(i)rebrained, would you say?

A Visual Compendium of Notable Haircuts in Popular Music


(roll your cursor over the poster for the zoom)
(via notcot)

You / Light Up My Life

This is...just the coolest.

Dr. Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist from Johns Hopkins, is conducting experiments trying to get at the neurological basis of musical creativity. Specifically: he put jazz musicians and freestyle rappers in an fMRI machine to learn how activity in the brain changes when musicians improvise v. when they perform memorized material.

I know this TED talk is 17 min, but you can hack it: you're on spring break!
No? Okay fine, here are the results highlights: 10'30" and 15'40". (But it really is worth watching the whole thing. And besides: what a charismatic otolaryngologist!)




(via metafilter)

Let's Start A Union / Calling Every Human

I didn't even go looking for this; youtube suggested it, and aren't we all glad?

Louis Andriessen
Workers Union (1975)
20'
for any loud-sounding group of instruments

bonus: performed by eighth blackbird!

Can You Hear The People Sing?

Hello friends! I apologize about the hiatus - I've been having trouble coming up with something that adequately represents what's been going on in Wisconsin over the past two weeks. Believe that I'm not trivializing anything when I say: PLENTY OF MUSIC, guys.

Day 13: Flash Mob in the Capitol Rotunda




Fight on, Wisconsin!

So Long To Good Times

No more Guitar Hero? What will Kiri Miller study now?

Football Fight

Superbowl + Classical Music
(or: Let's all just get along.)


Previous Super Bowl Ads That Feature Symphonic Music

Can Music Predict the Super Bowl Winner?

Jay-Z and the Rutgers Symphony 2010

And then there's my favorite: The Super Bowl Classical Collection
Who even why what?



Bonus: basketball gets in on the action.

Can't Fight The Moonlight

Sara Naim: Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata (2008)

The artist's statement:

"This body of work looks at translating sound into a photographic image. Ludwig Van Beethoven’s symphony vibrates through milk. He composed this piece in the early 1800’s for his blind pupil and lover, Giuletta Gucciardi. Gucciardi said to Beethoven that she wished she could see the moonlight. Beethoven then composed a piece about the moonlight’s reflection off Austria’s Lake Lucerne, called Moonlight Sonata."

The series of twelve photos begins here. Sound and spilled milk together at last.

(via tasteologie)

The System Is Down, Yo

The Cairo Opera House is closed until further notice: WQXR reports.

Problems / Problems / Problems All Day Long

Retrospective diagnoses: epilepsy, depression, cystic fibrosis.
CHOPIN'S HALLUCINATIONS

It's brand-new research/speculation, so you can't find it in a book.


(moburns gets all the credit for that last link)

It Is The Future / The Distant Future

Pianos with 102 keys.

This is real life!