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In the ongoing battle between the iTunes Music Store and Amazon’s MP3 store, Amazon is giving a 20% referral fee to their associates for each song sold through the end of the year. Wow. That’s $1.80 on a $8.99 album…I wonder if Amazon’s selling these for below cost (like they did with Harry Potter.) (via nelson)
A comparison of the Last.fm chart and the official UK downloads chart after Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released online last week. The top 10 on Last.fm: all Radiohead. Official chart: nada. (via adactio)
Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and the author of a new book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, “a history of the twentieth century through its music”. My interest in music skews toward the contemporary popular, so I recently took the opportunity to ask Ross a few questions about classical music from the novice-but-interested music listener’s perspective.
Jason Kottke: I’ve enjoyed classical music whenever I’ve heard it, but I don’t know too much about it. Where might I begin to explore further?
Alex Ross: My big thing is that classical music doesn’t really exist. When you have a repertory that goes from Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval chant to Vivaldi’s bustling Baroque concertos to Wagner’s five-hour music dramas to John Cage’s chance-produced electronic noise to Steve Reich’s West African-influenced “Drumming,” you’re not talking about a single sound. Whatever variety of noise you desire, we’ve got it at the classical emporium. I’d suggest plunging it at various ends of the spectrum - some Vivaldi or Bach, the Beethoven “Eroica” or some other big-shouldered nineteenth-century classic, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (which foreshadows so much pop music to come), and Reich or Philip Glass. The idea is to get a feeling for what composers were trying to express at any given time, and, of course, deciding whether you want to follow them. There’s no correct path through the labyrinth.
Kottke: I just received a copy of your book in the mail, and it’s got a “Suggested Listening” section following the endnotes with 10 recommended recordings and 20 more if you make it through those. How did you go about choosing those? Narrowing the 20th century musical landscape down to 30 recordings…that’s pretty cheeky.
Ross: It’s very hard, not to mention cheeky, picking recommended recordings, because so often it’s a matter of personal taste, both in terms of what works really “matter” and also in terms of which recordings are best. The almighty “Rite of Spring” has received any number of brilliant recordings over the years. Having picked one of Stravinsky’s own versions - he had such a great feeling for rhythm as a conductor - I immediately wondered whether I should have chosen the recent Esa-Pekka Salonen/LA Philharmonic version on DG, which is in gleaming modern sound and is as rock-solid as any “Rite” of modern times. So it’s subjective and leads to endless argument. But I was simply recommending a bunch of starting points, not the be-all end-all ultimate Top 10 of all time. I favored recordings that were cheap, that covered a lot of ground in 60 or 70 minutes. People can listen to excerpts on iTunes and Amazon and see if they really want to plunk down the cash. One thing’s for sure: you do need to own the “Rite,” no matter what kind of music you love. It’s the original sexy.
Kottke: Related to the first question, when I go to Amazon and search for “Beethoven”, there are over 10,000 results just in the classical music category. There are even more results for Bach. Are there significant differences between all the different versions of their music? How does the bewildered beginner pick the “right” version of Bach’s works to listen to? Should you look for brand names (e.g. Yo-Yo Ma), only buy music recorded by major symphonies or put out by certain record labels, or just get whatever is cheapest?
Ross: It’s definitely overwhelming - a serious glut. I’ve been reviewing for fifteen years and in the last year or two I seem to be getting twice as many CDs as ever - not to mention all the MP3s that composers and ensembles have put up on the Internet. There are definitely some significant differences among recordings. You have a lot of expert but boring renditions and then you have the ones that touch perfection or posses exceptional emotional power. Listen to Lorrane Hunt Lieberson singing the Bach cantatas and everyone else will sound a little wan. Certain people are always reliable - Yo-Yo Ma is ever eloquent, Mitsuko Uchida is a great pianist, Claudio Abbado makes one great or near-great orchestral recording after another. You can tell from Amazon reviews when a recording has really knocked people sideways. But live concerts are always better! I’m sometimes more moved by a not great but heartfelt live performance than by a world-class recording. In the hall you feel the weight of the cellos, the resonances of tones in space, the response of the crowd, all those intangibles. Tickets are less expensive than you may think. Particularly if you’re a student, you can get amazing deals - $12 tickets for the New York Philharmonic, for example.
Kottke: One of the things I’ve noticed about classical music recordings is how reasonably priced they are, particularly the pre-20th century music. Have you read any of Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen? In it, he suggests that to get the most value out of your music buying dollar, you should pay more attention to music that hasn’t been recently released, the idea being that there are more gems to be found in the last 200 years of music than in this week’s Billboard lists. I have a feeling you might agree with that view.
Ross: That’s an interesting theory. If you buy Maria Callas’s recording of “Tosca,” chances are it’s probably still going to deliver the goods twenty years from now, if CDs or MP3s still exist then. Fergie is maybe a riskier long-term bet. Also interesting is Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, which suggests that there’s more hidden commercial power in these thousands upon thousands of classical recordings than anyone suspected, even if they sell only a few times a year. The Naxos label says it gets 30-40% of total digital sales from albums that are downloaded 4 times a month or less. In any case, there’s now a huge catalogue of classical CDs that go for $10 or less. The Tashi recording of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” one of my top 10 picks, goes for $8 on Amazon. The Amazon download site was for a while offering Wagner’s entire sixteen-hour “Ring” cycle for $13.98. This turned out to be a clerical error, but enough classical-heads converged on the bargain that for a day or two Richard Wagner was the #1 downloaded artist on Amazon, beating out Kanye West. That amused me. Watch out for these classical guys - they start slow but beat you in the end.
Kottke: Let’s say you’re still around 80 years from now, writing a sequel to The Rest is Noise about music from 1980 to 2080. What contemporary music (circa 1980-2007) will still be important and relevant in 2080?
Ross: That’s a tough question! Critics often turn out to be very wrong about what’s truly important in their own time. George Bernard Shaw, for example, considered Hermann Goetz a great composer, a worthy successor to Beethoven. Though is “wrong” the right word? If Shaw had deep feelings about that music, he was, within his personal frame of reference, absolutely right. In classical music we maybe focus too much on the idea that the opinion of posterity is the only one that matters. In any case, here are twelve works that I believe will still matter to me, at least, if by some medical miracle I’m still around in 2080:
Steve Reich, Different Trains
John Adams, Nixon in China
Kaija Saariaho, L’Amour de loin
Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium
Gérard Grisey, Les Espaces acoustiques
Arvo Pärt, Da pacem domine
Louis Andriessen, De Stijl
Thomas Ades, Asyla
Georg Friedrich Haas, in vain
Michael Gordon, Decasia
Magnus Lindberg, Kraft
Osvaldo Golijov, St. Mark Passion
—-
Thanks, Alex. We’ll be checking back with you in 2080 to see how you fared. Ross has a piece out in the New Yorker this week about classical music and the internet that’s related to our conversation above. He’s also constructed a fantastic enhanced bibliography for the book that includes audio samples of some of the music written discussed in the book, presumably to reduce the dancing about architecture effect.
The Hype Machine is doing something clever with the new version of their site. They’re opening the beta up to the public but not until they get a “crowd” of 10,000 people with their browsers open to this page.
Marginal Revolution and CNN (and New York magazine and Reddit and etc.) asked their respective readers: how much did you pay for In Rainbows, Radiohead’s new album which is only available as a pay-what-you-want download. I paid around £8.50 (~ US$17), which splits the difference between a typical album price in the UK and the US. (Actually, what I did was download it from elsewhere because Radiohead’s online store was down yesterday morning and then went back to pay for it just now.)
Glenn from Coolfer took a spin through the NY Times recently opened online archive and highlighted some interesting news about the music industry, notably about how technology and the Internet changed the game in the late-90s/early-00s.
If someone likes an artist, they’re going to buy the CD. The number of those who download and opt against buying the CD is very small. There are plenty of libraries in this country, yet people still buy books. The Napster opponents underestimate the American fascination with ownership.
Radiohead has a new album coming out called In Rainbows. It’s only available from their site for now, either as a download (released Oct 10) or as a “discbox” that includes the CD, a bonus CD, two records, and assorted photos, books, etc. (released Dec 3). (via rex)
Update: Also, Radiohead is letting the buyer choose his/own price for the online album. This has been done before, notably by Magnatune, who offers albums for between $5 and $18 with a recommended price of $8…and people often pay more than the recommended. (thx, greg)
Update: Singer Jane Siberry does variable pricing for her music as well. Siberry also cleverly lists what other people are paying (currently $1.18 per song, a bit more than the recommended $0.99). Freakonomics explains. (thx, phil)
I’m thoroughly enjoying Kanye West’s new album, Graduation. Standout tracks so far: Stronger and Homecoming, although it took me much longer than it should have to recognize Chris Martin’s vocals on the latter.
Amazon has launched their mp3 music store. Files are in mp3 format, no DRM, high bitrate (high quality), and songs are mostly 89-99 cents. A compelling alternative to Apple’s iTMS.
Hometracked uncovered some musical history tidbits from the archive of the NY Times, including first descriptions of Edison’s phonograph and Marconi’s radio.
From the letters to the editor in the Sept 24 issue of the New Yorker, a letter from John Yohalem, New York City:
I enjoyed reading Tim Page’s essay on living with Asperger’s syndrome: the insomnia, the social puzzlement, the obsession with various subjects to the exclusion of more common ones — all are very familiar to me. (“Parallel Play,” August 20th). Then came this description: “In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of the subway stations.” I was the gentleman in question; although I didn’t care about clothes, I don’t think I was that ragged. I want to assure Mr. Page that I was never homeless or institutionalized (as he guessed), and I got only one ticket. Mr. Page and I had other things in common; like him, I was at the première of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” at Town Hall. Unlike Mr. Page, I did not find this particular music’s structure all-engrossing; I preferred to dance to it. At one performance of Reich’s music at the U.S. Custom House, I danced alone around and around the central musicians. For someone as acutely self-conscious as I had been, this seemed a moment of glorious emergence, of living my own life in everyone else’s world.
Here’s Tim Page’s piece on what it was like growing up with Asperger’s syndrome.
So preoccupied are we with our inner imperatives that the outer world may overwhelm and confuse. What anguished pity I used to feel for pinatas at birthday parties, those papier-mache donkeys with their amiable smiles about to be shattered by little brutes with bats. On at least one occasion, I begged for a stay of execution and eventually had to be taken home, weeping, convinced that I had just witnessed the braining of a new and sympathetic acquaintance.
Of course Yohalem has a blog — the 21st century equivalent to scribbling Hapsburg lineages on subway walls — which has a more complete version of the above posted there.
The lyrics for Around the World by Daft Punk.
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Etc., etc., and so on. (via chris)
Currently enjoying Diplo’s Pitchfork Mix 02 (track list). Also worth tracking down is Diplo vs. Shadow, the Megatroid Mix.
Legendary party Misshapes was held for the last time on Saturday night in NYC, its overness punctuated by an article in the NY Times on the party’s conclusion. My own personal overness was punctuated by not knowing about the end of Misshapes until I read it in the Times. A Mr. Cobrasnake has photos of the final night.
Apple may have announced their ringtone strategy for the iPhone (30-second ringtones cost $1.98 to make and you must purchase songs through the iTunes Music Store), but Ambrosia Software’s iToner utility lets you make ringtones from any mp3 or acc audio file with a simple drag/drop, all for $15 (free 30-day trial). iToner seems like the clear winner here.
Update: The just-released new version of iTunes (7.4) makes iToner ringtones invisible to the iPhone. Ambrosia is working on an iToner update. (thx, jim)
Apple is holding a special event today at 10am PT to announce a new product. Or something. No one knows exactly what but it seems to have something to do with music. Popular guesses include a 3G iPhone, a different iPod nano, a touchscreen iPod, and the availability of the Beatles entire musical catalog on iTunes. MacWorld, Engadget, MacObserver, and ArsTechnica (among others) will have live coverage.
Update: Jobs announced 99-cent ringtones, new colors for iPod shuffle, new form factor for iPod nano (fat vs. thin), renamed the iPod to iPod classic, introduced new iPod touch (basically the iPhone without the phone), new mobile iTunes Music Store that will work on iPod touch and the iPhone, odd partnership with Starbucks…click to buy currently playing songs in the store and free wifi for iTMS purchases (how about free wifi, period?), and the 8GB iPhone now costs $399. !!!!! I guess Apple’s plan on that was 1) gouge all the early adopters, and then 2) reduce the price to sell iPhones like crazy.
My iPhone bubble abruptly popped this evening when I tried my Shure E3c earphones (the best pair of earphones I’ve ever owned and far superior to the Apple earbuds) with the iPhone and they didn’t work. The ones that came with the iPhone work fine. On their site, Apple says:
iPhone has a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack, so it is compatible with most portable stereo headphones. Some stereo headphones may require an adapter (sold separately) to ensure proper fit.
The earbuds from a v3 iPod didn’t work either. The E3c plug is 3.5 mm and the earphones are about 2 years old. Is anyone else having problems with their earphones? I don’t understand why this is even an issue. Very irritating.
Update: Others are having similar problems with headphones not fitting. Looks like it’s the plastic sheath around the plug that’s the problem. (thx, sean)
Update: I cut away a bit of the E3c’s sheath with my trusty Exacto knife and it now fits in the jack. I’d love to know the reason for recessing that plug so much…besides pure aethetics of course; it just seems like too much of a trade-off.
Who knew you could play the theme song from Super Mario Brothers with a Tesla coil?
So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a “long” piece of fiber optics. What’s not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it’s firing.
More about Tesla coils at Wikipedia. (thx, mike)
And I don’t know what rock I’ve been hiding under for the past 33 years, but this Gnarls Barkley cover is the first I’ve heard of the theremin music machine:
In a great illustration of the sometimes odd path that innovation takes, Robert Moog found inspiration in the theremin after it had fallen out of favor in serious musical circles:
After a flurry of interest in America following the end of the Second World War, the theremin soon fell into disuse with serious musicians, mainly because newer electronic instruments were introduced that were easier to play. However, a niche interest in the theremin persisted, mostly among electronics enthusiasts and kit-building hobbyists. One of these electronics enthusiasts, Robert Moog, began building theremins in the 1950s, while he was a high-school student. Moog subsequently published a number of articles about building theremins, and sold theremin kits which were intended to be assembled by the customer. Moog credited what he learned from the experience as leading directly to his groundbreaking synthesizer, the Minimoog.
Update: Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey is a 1994 documentary about the theremin and its inventor. Here’s a trailer, a review by Roger Ebert, and the DVD from Amazon. (thx, jeb & mark)
Peter Saville, the British designer closely associated with Factory Records, is offering free downloads of some of the fonts he used in designing record sleeves and other work for New Order, Joy Division, and other Factory Records artists (see update below).
(thx, mark)
Update: Several Peter Saville fans from around the world have written in to say that the above site is not Peter Saville’s official site (this is). It’s also unclear whether those fonts were indeed made by Saville (probably not) or ever offered for download free of charge (probably definitely not). But they’re still neat fonts, so download at your own risk.
Update: Kai has identified some of the fonts offered as shoddy versions of the following:
Joy Division Closer - Trajan (Adobe)
Blue Monday - Engravers Gothic (Bitstream)
New Order 1981 - Futura (Bauer)
New Order 1993 - Handel Gothic (Linotype)
New Order Ceremony - Albertus (Mecanorma)
New Order 316 - BT Incised 901 (Bitstream) = Antique Olive (Linotype)
New Order Regret - Rotis Serif (Agfa)
In this case, you get what you pay for, I guess.
If you thought that Nevermind’s 15th anniversary made you feel old, try this one on: Radiohead’s OK Computer was released 10 years ago tomorrow. (via 6f6)
Partial lyrics for New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down from LCD Soundsystem’s latest album, Sound of Silver:
—
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, you’re safer and you’re wasting my time
Our records all show you are filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime
New York, you’re perfect don’t, please, don’t change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king
And so the boring collect, I mean all disrespect
In the neighborhood bars I’d once dreamt I would drink
New York, I love you but you’re freaking me out
There’s a ton of the twist but we’re fresh out of shout
Like a death in the hall that you hear through your wall
New York, I love you but you’re freaking me out
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Like a death of the heart. Jesus, where do I start?
But you’re still the one pool where I’d happily drown
—
Meant to note this a few weeks ago, but the Baltimore post put it back in my mind.
Is there a song for summer 2007 yet? Something along the lines of Crazy in Love in 2003 and, what, Since U Been Gone in 2005…a song that comes to identify the summer to a wide variety of people. There’s been some discussion of this question, but no definite answers yet. I’ve heard MIMS’ This is Why I’m Hot in a wide array of contexts…might be a contender, but does it have the mass popularity and longevity?
Clive Thompson on the new way to make it big in the music biz: spend hours a day communicating with your fans via the web. “Virtually everyone bemoaned the relentless and often boring slog of keyboarding. It is, of course, precisely the sort of administrative toil that people join rock bands to avoid.”
Update: Related: How to Be a Star in a YouTube World.
If you’re writing a song, you probably don’t want to use any of the following phrases: “serious as cancer”, “Serengeti”, “nuclear war”, or “Aztec priest”.
Photo gallery of heavy metal bands from the early 80s. These aren’t glossy magazine photos…they’re snapshots from the crowd, backstage, and at the afterparties.
The White Glove Tracking site needs your help in finding Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of Jackson’s performance of Billy Jean. “Rather then write unnecessarily complex code to find the glove in every frame of the video I am asking for the assistance of 10,060 individual internet users to simply click and drag a box around the glove in one frame.” Don’t stop ‘til you get enough (white gloves located).
Video of Rodrigo y Gabriela performing at PopTech. Here’s my writeup from October. What isn’t apparent from the video (at least through my puny laptop speakers) is how loud the bass was from them thumping their guitars.
Andrew of Songs To Wear Pants To makes songs from suggestions you send him. You can even commission a song from him for a special occasion like a birthday or anniversary. Recent tracks include a Tetris rap and a song written for a guy who likes a girl but doesn’t know how to express it (she’s got “beautiful light blue eyes, long brown hair, and great athletic body” which Andrew translates as “I don’t even care about her personality” in the song).
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