Chasing Rabbits the High-Tech Way
I love teaching with my external hard drive, which now contains 6844 mp3s, perhaps something like ten percent of my record/CD collection. Today we were analyzing Ives's Concord Sonata. I wanted to make the point that Ives didn't invent the tone cluster (or at least wasn't the first to invent it), and so I plugged in my hard drive, pressed a couple of keys, and played the Combat Naval for harpsichord by Michel Corrette (1707-1795), which uses forearm clusters to simulate cannonfire. The students expressed surprise that something so wild could have been written in the 18th century, so I assured them that the Classical Era was a lot more varied than standard music history admits and, to illustrate, played a jew's-harp concerto by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809), who was Beethoven's composition teacher. (Having been a record reviewer for Fanfare magazine for many years, I know quite a bit of repertoire never run into by those whose education is primarily academic.) The downside of teaching this way is that I digress considerably more often, and for longer periods.
I have to say, though, that my first Maxtor hard drive suffered a very light fall onto a soft carpet, and quit working altogether, after I'd had it only five months. Maxtor made it extremely difficult to return: I had to download some voluminous instructions in fine print, and wrap it in foam (styrofoam peanuts were not acceptable for honoring the warranty) and an anti-magnetic wrapper that was difficult to obtain. Since then, the Maxtor's icon sometimes fails to appear on my desktop when I plug it in. I've been told that La Cie makes the best external hard drives, and I'm thinking of getting one.
Categories:
Sites To See
American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects
Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station
New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking
The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross
William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer
Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation
Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown composer
Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings
Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site
The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer
Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues
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For immediate release: the arts are marketable
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Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
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