Contemporary composition in Charm City. This is how we do it now. … [Read more...]

The whole "classical music to sell cars" trope is not news, but somehow the fact that a high-gloss coat of candy apple red backed by a drawing room-ready piece of piano noodling is still an effective way to move product fascinates me.* We should not ignore this pop culture fantasy, people! But, wait. Are we supposed to get off on the technical details? Oooohh, b flat major. Sounds positively scientific! *More than that Lost episode did, at least. … [Read more...]

Maybe it's best to listen first and ask questions later when it comes to appreciating music? That's what a recent study published in the Psychology of Music journal seems to suggest. In "When program notes don't help: Music descriptions and enjoyment," Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis (University of Arkansas) explores the reactions of non-musicians to samples of Beethoven string quartets. Those participants who listened without first wading through program notes found the experience more enjoyable. … [Read more...]

Well, it certainly wasn't Grocery Store Musical... ...but the singers from the Washington National Opera's Young Artist Program had a little of their own fun in the produce section last week. True to the "we are all members of the media" times, it appears that there may have been as many cameras as people on hand to observe the action. … [Read more...]

I've been seeing an unusual amount of cool music-meets-science news of late, but this video presentation of Marcus Coates' installation Dawn Chorus made the biggest splash in my birdbath by far. Seriously, the sounds alone left my mouth hanging open, but then check out the movements and the breath rate that's visible in the clips of each subject. On fast forward, it's as if these humans actually turn into super-sized birds. (Click on the image to go to the full off-site video) How did these … [Read more...]

Since I seem to be in a poetic mood this week, here's another delicate thing of beauty I stumbled across once again while wandering around on the internet. This bit of stop-motion somnambulance has had plenty of play in the past year, but the artists are now selling off the pieces of this dream, image by image. Talk about memories that disperse through the intertubes and embed themselves in other people's lives. Her Morning Elegance music video was made of exactly 2096 still photographs, shot … [Read more...]

Confidential to the composer who needed a little encouragement: A finished trailer for an unmade movie about a real artist's imaginary struggles. Whose unmade biopic would you want to see on the big screen? … [Read more...]

We might be remembered forever. All our Twitter updates, our email, our Vimeo movies, our Xbox Live profiles, our wormy FourSquare maps. They won't be important. Not to most people, anyway. But they'll be there if the sysadmins take care of us, if the corporations and machines to whom we've entrusted our records do not fail or are not destroyed. We won't matter to most. But our memories will be cataloged, indexed, made available along with our stories, our names... If you didn't catch any of … [Read more...]

I don't think I've mentioned this here before, but I am obsessed with This American Life. If Ira Glass called tomorrow to ask if I'd be the show's unpaid intern, I would be on a bus before the line went dead. But seriously, what I love about this show, and what I want to learn to do better in my own media production, is how well they bring stories about the most average of people to bold, colorful life. (Their TV series was also great, but somehow their approach comes across even more vividly … [Read more...]

Okay, kids, let's put our heads together. To save classical music, what viral video ploy would you use? (That is, of course, unless you think current classical music marketing is doing the job just fine the way it is, thank you very much.) Yeah, I'm not being altogether serious, but a lot of viral videos do capitalize on some bit of musical, um, ingenuity. Two cases came across my desk this morning that seemed worth noting here in MTG, however. Instead of cats playing keyboards, hipsters playing … [Read more...]