Performance and the Alphabet of the Brain
I recently posted on newmusicbox on music's slow, idealogical shift away from virtuosic performance. I believe we're in the middle of a long transition away from affirmed virtuosity; part of this shift...
View ArticlePoliticians' Open Mic!
I posted not too long ago on John Ashcroft's beautiful patriotic crooning, so I decided to put together a U.S. politicians' virtual concert and review! Recently, the conservatives seem to have the edge...
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Mozart's prophecy
While feeding my sci-fi addiction, I came across this internal monologue in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)...he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future...
View ArticleNeo-Dada at its best
Disclaimer: I don't support public pie-throwing. But I do support passionate, educated reactions to important issues, especially by 18-22-year-olds. If you want to know why, read the discussion in...
View ArticleTaste and Post-Genre
Many folks are talking about the most unwanted song: the 25-minute, schizophrenic work that only about 200 people on Earth are supposed to enjoy. I thought it was pretty cool and cackled to myself...
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Remix the remix of the remix of the remix
Right now I'm working on a remix for Remixin.com. It is an iterative remix project with three original 'parents' and three corresponding 'remix trees.' Now we're in the middle of Round 4. The original...
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Museum Music
The exhibition's outside, but the music's still the same:You can see more of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman's work here (like the duck below, floating in the Loire River in France). He designed...
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Recording Sample-Free
(Image from Evan Ziporyn's excellent solo clarinet album)In a recent post I wrote on putting electrodes in our brains and using representative computer code to guide machines in playing real...
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Human Redundancies
Here's a recent email I got from Zenph Studios:First, Sony’s new Tatum album with Zenph is getting remarkable reviews. For example, this review appeared in Sunday’s Buffalo News (page down to ‘Jazz’):...
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Girl Talkin'
New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) and Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) recently, about Spooky's Antarctic recording project and Girltalk's new album, Feed the Animals. Spooky's...
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THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU: Gabriel Prokofiev and Nonclassical
Sergei Prokofiev wrote Neoclassical, and his grandson, Gabriel, writes Nonclassical. The elder was and is still a huge figure in instrumental music, and the younger will certainly be hailed as one of...
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Materialism / Immaterialism
$80,451,178Hooray for Christie's. They've now sold some water lilies for the above sum. Monet's Le bassin aux nympheas went for double the previous record for a Monet, his Le Pont du chemin de fer a...
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Our politics suck but our tunes are good: Part 1
On Independence Day, which I normally celebrate only by drinking a few extra beers, I'm going to try something new: being thankful for many of the great things about this nation. Fortunately, my real...
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Let it happen, dude.
71-year-old Martin Bernheimer is up in arms at the diminishing number of music criticism posts in American print news. The bloggers (AC Douglas, Lisa Hirsch, etc.) are equally appalled at his...
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Music Critics (continued)...take a hint from Justin Davidson
In this heated conversation with myself regarding the current distress among classical music critics at their rapid loss of print jobs, I somehow didn't read Justin Davidson's remarks until now, which...
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NYC Graffiti Sightings This Weekend
I took a couple cell phone pics of excellent graffiti on Saturday. Just before a great tour of the Six Points Brewery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I caught this consumer culture statement on Van Dyke Street....
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Scrawls on the walls
Here's a remarkable bathroom at a dive I hopped into last Saturday night on Rivington Street in NYC. Peeing in this setting was truly an honor and caused me to completely ignore the rancid smells that...
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This Week's Bookmarks
A few World Wide Web links for the three to five readers per day who haven't arrived here via a Google image search. (I've never searched the World Wide Web for "world wide web" before. Why isn't Sir...
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Twin Cities
My favorite line from Hillary's speech tonight:"It's no surprise that McCain and Bush will be appearing together in the Twin Cities next week...it's pretty hard to tell them apart these days."And from...
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