FMC 1789-1914 site
Francophone Music Criticism is an online collection of just that, from the period 1789-1914. Lots of stuff very well organized and all searchable and browsable. Because of the period and the country, it means that there is a significant amount about ballet. Oh – and it’s free, at least until the present government pull the rug on the humanities.
Interesting article from Mix, proclaiming the end of the loudness war,
Mastering engineers often aim to make songs sound louder because louder equals ‘better’ when you’re fighting for listeners. Radio stations use the technique it at the broadcast stage, Classic FM included, to beef up the sound that comes out when you’re competing with motorway traffic. What this article is about though, is the kind that goes on at the mastering stage of a CD. The Mix author Greg Reierson argues that this is no longer necessary in a world where we have playback software which can dynamically adjust the sound of songs as you play them back, and that audio engineers can go back to making stuff sound better, rather than louder.
Interesting, but I’m not yet entirely convinced - what’s the point of making stuff sound better, if the listener then applies an algorithm to it before they hear it?
Interesting article from ArsTechnica Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no. Researchers from LSE have looked at some of the claims about the negative effects of file sharing and the digital economy on the music industry, and found some of them just don’t wash.
One of the most interesting conclusions is that many of the figures conventionally given to show the demise of the industry don’t factor in musicians’ income from live work, which recently is for the first time greater than from sales of recordings.
So what is emerging is an increasingly “ephemeral” global music culture based not upon the purchasing of discrete physical packages of music, but on the discovery and subsequent promotion of musicians through file sharing. The big winner in this model is not the digital music file seller, but the touring band, whose music is easily discoverable on the ‘Net. As with so much of the rest of the emerging world economy, the shift is away from buying things and towards purchasing services—in this case tickets to concerts and related activities.
Interesting short blog about the history of Pavillon d’Armide (music by Tcherepnin) from Artifact Suite.
The Serag's Hornpipe, from 1721 (17th edition) Playford
A while back I started collecting examples of ‘dance rhythms to annoy your music teacher with’. Nothing makes me more frustrated than the term ‘dance rhythms’. There are several generations of dance teachers who’ve been told somewhere along the line that a hornpipe goes like this, a waltz goes like that, and a tango goes like that. One of the reasons that music for ballet classes is so often as terrible as it is, is because pianists try to recreate music based on these formulas, and then this music becomes the model by which the theory is ‘proved’ and exemplified. For some reason, whoever started this decided to ignore all kinds of uncomfortable truths about dances that were really danced, as opposed to being clapping exercises.
For this reason, one of my favourites pastimes is to collect examples from the real world of dances that buggers up the theory. Here’s a nice one from the 17th (1721) edition of Playford’s Dancing Master, a hornpipe in 9/8. Stick that in your hornpipe and smoke it.
I’m so sick of seeing ‘Keep calm and carry on’ stuff, and all the unfunny variants of it (like ‘Keep Calm and Carry’ on an M & S bag, the latest atrocity), that I thought I’d add my own version, before the overworked marketing idea finally curls up and dies. I love carillons, and one of my favourite pieces of music is the Carillon from Bizet’s l’Arlèsienne. So keep calm and carillon. There are plenty of carillon clips on youtube, including music of Lady Gaga and the Super Mario Bros theme, but here’s a sonatina by Flor Peeters played on the carillon at Iowa State University.
It might seem such a small thing, but I’m thrilled to see that someone has recently uploaded Czerny’s School of Legato and Staccato Op. 335 to the IMSLP. The interest in Op. 335 for ballet people is that it has several of the exercises that feature in Riisager’s ballet Etudes, including the silhouette barre and the adage, plus several other great bouncy pieces suitable for allegro. For my taste, one of the most underrated dance music composers of the 19th century.
I’ve already posted about my joy at finally tracking this down at the University of London Library (The Joy of Libraries & My Czech mate Czerny) but it’s so frustrating that unless you do that kind of sleuthing, you’re left with the same few sets of exercises circulated by publishers. The IMSLP is probably one of the greatest resources in the world for music, because it helps to bring such perfectly preserved, rare and usable materials to a worldwide audience, all free of charge.
Despite my enthusiasm for new technology, nothing beats my enthusiasm for books and libraries when it comes to materials. The other day at the RAD library, I had in my hands the orchestral parts for a variation from Giselle that belonged to Karsavina, all written by hand, perfectly preserved, and making as much sense to me as music as they did to the orchestras that would have played them nearly a hundred years ago. I could give them to an orchestra now, and we could recreate the music at a moment’s notice.
Wot not books?
It frightens me when libraries are threatened with closure (see the Wot No Books campaign for a wonderful protest). Who fills the gap and controls the information flow and culture when they go? Rupert Murdoch? A political party? Wikipedia? Microsoft? And if access to books is no longer free and shareable (welcome to Kindleworld), what does this say about who may learn?
PDF 