CCSinM Log

27 September
From Jon Udell's blog, quoting a story in Wired: "The tagline of the Wired story nails it: "Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts,' it says. 'The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream'." (Canonical URLs and network effects) [n.b.: this was later identified as "the long tail"]

6 October
Ethnomusicology 1953-1999 via JSTOR!! Also British Journal of Ethnomusicology 1992-1998

15 October
The rap-hiphop-etc constellation has the great advantage of being relatively comprehensible without extensive semantic crossover and translation, and it raises many of the Big Questions of anthropology and ethnomusicology. There may be people at W&L who are authorities on specific subparts/facets, who can help us to understand the codes, the real significance... And there are many mp3 sites and public domain/Web commentaries and analyses.

The intent isn't to make rap "intellectually respectable" as a topic, but to see it for the communication conduit it is for its communities and communicants --to explore its messages AND its technologies, its chronotopes and architectonics. And surely there's a literature of that, some of it by earnest whitefolks (a phenomenon worth exploring in and for itself).

One of the intentions is to introduce students to musics AND technologies they aren't already familiar with --to present methods for appreciation and analysis, to pose questions of significance and procedure. Some of those are applicable to domains that have nothing to do with music --and indeed it's less the music that's the focus here than the place of music as a vehicle for the exercise and delivery of culturally significant materials and messages.

One might well inquire how a particular performance works to get a message across, and analyze how the melodic and harmonic and organological magic happens so that listeners are drawn in and galvanized. Sometimes the understanding of such complexities requires a good deal of background in genres and stylistics and techniques and influences.

16 October
From FirstMonday: Grey Tuesday, online cultural activism and the mash–up of music and politics (Sam Howard-Spinks)

History of the mash–up

The mixing of musical styles and texts has a history that far predates the first mash–up, or even Western popular music. In Cassette Culture, Manuel (1993) writes about the legacy of parody and tune borrowing in Indian music, in which familiar "texts" are laid over borrowed tunes and melodies, mixing folk and popular styles. This takes on a new life with the arrival of cassette technology, which ironically helps to reinforce tradition through a shift of control from the centre to the periphery, rather than the other way around. (One could argue that today’s mash–ups also draw on and to an extent reinforce traditional "folk" uses of music — as well as appropriating older songs — and with a corresponding shift in control).

Mash–ups, in a Western context, are not a revolutionary new musical invention but a branch on the musical family tree that can be traced back to at least the early days of hiphop. DJs such as Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash combined drum breaks on vinyl records to produce extended tracks that could then be rapped over by vocalists, and the first hiphop hit — "Rapper’s Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang — uses the instantly recognizable bassline from a Chic hit. From these roots one can trace the phenomenon of remixing, which became a standard way to expand the lifespan and sales potential of pop hits through the 1980s and 90s.

Taking vocal tracks and combining them with musical tracks from completely different genres was a new bud on the sampling/remixing branch. In his book Words and music, British music writer Paul Morley (2004) describes mash–ups in his own idiosyncratic way:

"The bootleg mix ... whereby anonymous raiders of the twentieth century, or ‘bastards,’ armed with a decent hard drive, a lust for life, a love of music that borders on the diseased, and a warped sense of humor mash up tracks taken off the Internet, twist genres across themselves, and rewrite musical history in a way musicians would never think of. Access on the Internet to a capella vocals and instrumental backing tracks means that homebodies, who are all in the mind, can ignore legalities and logic and all manner of niceties and splice together any music that takes their fancy."
Within the mash–up community, legend has it that the first true "mash–up" as it is understood today was a 1994 track by the Evolution Control Committee that combined a Public Enemy rap over a Herb Albert instrumental (Manriki, 2003). Some time around 2000, this new underground style found a home at a small club in London’s West End, where the Cartel Communique began a mash–up (or "bootleg" as it was called then) night called "King of the Boots". The name was changed to "Bastard," adopted from the term "bastard–pop," another early term for mash–ups. The popularity of the genre spread to clubs around Europe and eventually to the U.S. The mash–up garnered some mainstream press with the first release by Belgian brothers 2 Many DJs. This was not only a thrilling and imaginative mix–CD but also came with a story: the brothers had attempted to clear every song used on the CD in order to release it commercially, but were unable to do so, forcing it to remain underground.

The essential point is that this style of recombinant music has a past and was already on the verge of breaking through from the underground. It took an especially iconoclastic and instantly recognizable mash–up to grab mainstream attention, and Danger Mouse found the combination — the pop royalty that is the Beatles and the most famous hiphop artist of his day, Jay–Z. This might not have been enough on its own, but the heat was turned up by EMI’s legal reaction, which in turn was seized upon by Downhill Battle.

There are other factors that must be acknowledged in this history. One of the most obvious is technology. The explosion in mash–ups occurred in large part because cheap computers and easy–to–use software, such as Acid and Pro–Tools, have proliferated far beyond the sound–proofed walls of the professional recording studio. As well as simplified production, the Internet — and P2P in particular — was also necessary for the distribution and dissemination of mash–up tracks around the scene and around the world. Of course, quality and talent still play a large role: the Grey Album worked because it is good, not simply because it was a clever idea. It is also relevant that remixing and sampling are the currency of today’s popular culture. Cultural appropriation takes place on our televisions and cinema screens, in the advertising that surrounds us and in the music that is piped to us on radio — which is why the illegality of a project like the Grey Album strikes so many people as counter–intuitive. There is a political element to this point that I will return to in the conclusion.

23 October
This morning the DSL was hors de combat, so I wrote a bit of what was in my mind. Includes a pointer to Audacity, which may function as basic software...

24 October
This just in:

Spitzer's iron wrist shits to music industry
www.chinaview.cn 2004-10-24 16:06:47

BEIJING, Oct. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office now shits their attention to the music industry, particularly its practices for influencing what songs are heard on the public airwaves.

Spitzer has recently taken on a procession of corporate powers from Wall Street analysts to mutual funds to insurance brokers. He began this investigation whether the United States' largest record companies are skirting payola laws by hiring middlemen to influence which songs are heard on the public airwaves.

Investigators in Mr. Spitzer's office have served subpoenas on the four major record corporations - the Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the EMI Group and the Warner Music Group - seeking copies of contracts, billing records and other information detailing their ties to independent middlemen who pitch new songs to radio programmers in New York State.

According to people involved, the inquiry encompasses all the major radio formats and is not aiming at any individual record promoter. Enditem

(http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-10/24/content_2132597.htm)

Department of Sweaty Palms: podcasting appears right on the horizon...

From Lessig's blog: William Fisher (author of Promises to Keep – Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment, on Entertainment Industry Crisis

Here’s the argument in a nutshell: In combination, three technological developments – digital recording and storage systems, compression/decompression systems, and the Internet – have created dramatically new ways of making, keeping, sharing, and enjoying audio and video recordings. Full exploitation of those new techniques would have many social and economic benefits: large costs savings (enabling consumers to get more entertainment for less or artists to be paid more); greater convenience and precision in the ways that recordings are delivered to consumers; a sharp increase in the number of musicians and filmmakers who can reach global audiences and make decent livings; enhancement of the diversity of materials available to the public; and a dramatic increase in the number of persons who participate in the making of culture (a trend for which I use the term [not of my own invention] “semiotic democracy”). The same developments, however, pose three serious dangers: corrosion of the systems by which artists and intermediaries have traditionally made money from their recordings; threats to artists’ “moral rights”; and destabilization of the cultural icons in reference to which we partially define ourselves.

29 October
Onfolio collections: links from my office machine, roughly sorted --and the same from the home machine

Songs in a vanishing tongue, about Sami recording

1 November
Cross-Cultural Studies in Music blog established

Annie CD holdings in 'world music' realms

29 November
John Philip Souza:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy... in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing... Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. (Congressional testimony, 1906)
cited by Ed Felten http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/rip/

(around 19 minutes in, an excellent A-to-D explanation; and at 33, rip-mix-burn "not just copying" audio collages viz: negativland --check out downloading)

2 December
songfight.org and Independent Content Networks podcasts

An extract from a video clip on Microsoft's blogging software release: "people are the music that they listen to".

OnFolio links from home, November (unsorted) and office links (also unsorted)

3 December
Trying ListGarden: I used ListGarden to make an RSS feed (/musics/rss.xml), this time on my desktop and then ftp'd to /musics
I found it via bloglines and subscribed
it almost works (if I click on it, it doesn't point to the proper page URL, but that's a technicality --albeit one I don't know how to solve yet)
So I can MAKE an rss.xml, though it's not fully formed. What I haven't figured out is how to automate the process...

4 December
From Studio360 (via pri.org), Stanley Crouch on jazz and Moby-Dick: a nice example of lateral linking to an unexpected something else, a particular sort of 'contextualization': audio ... and Mobydude too (no musical connection, but a gem...)

5 December
Xeni Jardin on NPR, Aug 2004, on mp3 Weblogs

...and I keep finding troves. This time it's NPR's All Songs Considered

So the problem is how to choose amongst this richness of possibilities, where anything is a starting point, and I have thousands of anythings. I need to be clear about what I want students to do, and I think the outlines of that are straightforward: build podcasts that succeed in contextualizing a selection of personally meaningful/interesting music, and including 'liner notes'; go beyond where you begin, in terms of musical adventure (explore genres you don't already know about); WRITE about music

My own reminiscence is worth thinking about again...

funky butt text recovered via Wayback machine

The thought of doing a section on 'Gypsy music' has occurred several times, the advantage being the tremendous variety, and Latcho Drom is such a remarkable film anyway... There's plenty of ambit, with Django et al.

See Laura Shannon's Selected Resources ...and seeher wonderful reminiscence of a 1995 Gypsy music Festival in Switzerland. And see also Michal Shapiro explores the music of the Roma

FUCC the INS and an interview with the band

many recordings listed (swipnet.se)

Hungarian Gypsy Music: Whose Heritage? (Bálint Sárosi)

Rootsworld summary

CDRoots listing

6 December
TouchGraph Audioscrobbler Browser (the magic really starts to happen when one double-clicks a link). See sourceforge on audioscrobbler, and JeffHarrington ...and a beepsnort blogposting ...and Jeff's recent listens... see Baaba Maal and Jukka Henrik for a couple of other facets... and 3 Mustaphas 3 for another...

8 December
from http://www.thewire.co.uk/archive/charts.php The Wire (30 left out of "100 Records That Set the World On Fire" extra Published in The Wire Issue 175 September) You ain't nothing but a hound dog. The record came together more or less accidentally at a recording session in Los Angeles in August 1952. Precocious songwriter Jerry Leiber (20 years old) came up with a few phrases for Willie Mae to spit out with gleeful venom, The Johnny Otis Band hit a funky mambo groove, and Pete Lewis was goaded into playing one of the best guitar figures ever, especially in the solo where Willie Mae exhorts him to growl and moan like a dog without a bone. Three years later, Elvis truly did shake the world with his reworking of the song, and Leiber & Stoller had to take Johnny Otis to court to establish that, young as they were, they really had written the song without his help. Later, when everybody thought that the only credible performers were those who wrote their own material, Willie Mae said she wrote it. But I look into Jerry's eyes (one brown, one blue) and I believe he thought up those words - "You can wag your tail but I ain't gonna feed you no more". CG

10 December
There's just so much going on, which has to somehow be knit into what I'm planning to attempt. A blog posting by Seb Paquet pointed me to (Alf's amazing mp3-link-scraping bookmarklet, which routes mp3 files to a WinAmp playlist. Just another of the affordances ... Here's Seb's Picks ...and the whole Webjay list seems pretty bottomless.

I had a waking-up image of covering the boards in 114 with a sort of map of interconnected content/subject matter, and then grabbing the image of the result with a digital camera... and going on from there. So many boxes to fill/unpack: how the ear works ... mp3s as lossy compression ... podcasting ... Webjay ... Audacity and other software ... organology ... and then on to the musics themselves ... the question will be: how to keep track of everything? What are the chances of getting the whole thing blogged, via classroom wireless?

Of course I'm trying to do too many things, to include far too much in the "course", but I'm more inclined to keep trying to expand and interconnect than to limit it to fewer things.

mashing for beginners

11 December
An open-ended set of stances toward music, not intended to be mutually exclusive, but worth exploring for the behaviors and attitudes associated with each:

summary of laptop audio setup

Don Byron's 'Ivey-Divey' Revisits Lester Young

I thought of starting with Tango... upon hearing an NPR bit on Pablo Ziegler, Astor Piazzolla's piano player (gotta get the URL tomorrow)

Also occurred to me to use the Elvis Presley Blues comparison, using Gillian Welch's original [just 1:22 of it here] and Peter Mulvey's version

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
Just a country boy that combed his hair
And put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air
And he shook it like a chorus girl
And he shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby
Like you never seen

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
How he took it all out of black and white
Grabbed his wand in the other hand and he held on tight
And he shook it like a hurricane
He shook it like to make it break
And he shook it like a holy roller, baby
With his soul at stake

(or:
Now he took hold of Black and White,
Grabbed it in one, then the other hand,
and he held on tight.)

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
He was all alone in a long decline
Thinking how happy John Henry was that he fell down and died
When he shook it and he rang like silver
He shook it and he shine like gold
He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby
Well bless my soul
He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby
Well bless my soul, what's wrong with me?

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
Just a country boy that combed his hair
Put on a shirt his mother made and he went on the air
And he shook it like a chorus girl
He shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby
Like he never seen

Cf this sentiment:
"...I was shocked by NPR music critic Ken Tucker’s lambasting of their song "Elvis Presley Blues," calling it "the worst song about Elvis ever written." It’s a brilliant and truly original song, a country blues gem fashioned after John Hurt’s "Spikedriver Blues." When one considers all the idolatrous, imitative, and sycophantic material that is King-derived, it’s actually pretty funny. In fact, when I saw the duo at a sushi bar one night and asked them if they’d seen the review, they intimated that they pay no particular attention to such things. When I shared his judgement with them, they both laughed and got a kick out of it, said that they thought it was all good, whatever people say..."
Sean Spada cover of Elvis Presley Blues... there's also a Joan Baez cover.

Eminem Is Right By Mary Eberstadt (Hoover Institute Fellow)

12 December
Steve Worona: "For those watching Congress working on copyright legislation over the last few weeks, it's been like the end of the fireworks show on the 4th of July..." (EDUCAUSE blog)

Red Hot Jazz Archive (2000+ RealAudio examples of pre-1930 jazz...)

exploration of the term "Mouldy Fig", in preliminary form

'International' stations (Telugu, Tamil, Zouk, Soukous, Bollywood, Thai... and earlyMusic.net Radio (home page)

Some passages from John McDaid's brilliant story "Keyboard Practice, Consisting of an Aria with Diverse Variations for the Harpsichord with Two Manuals" [Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan 2005]

13 December
Peter Mulvey's version of Elvis Presley Blues is pretty impressive. On the walk in, I wrote the following while listening to it and Don Byron on Ivey Divey:

We've all had the experience of epiphany. Conveying to somebody else in any medium is the greatest challenge of communication. You have to induct that somebody else into the context of the epiphany. It's a matter of getting to the place where you can see, hear, read, say --appreciate-- the subtleties, nuances, the message of a packett of Information...
There are other takes on that piece: Joan Baez, Sean Spada, and Ken Tucker ...each contributes something to a wider understanding. I'm thinking about how to explore that more systematically.

14 December
Funky Butt/Buddy Bolden: http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/5135/BoldenTunes.html has a link to Morton Band's version of the song and there's more at http://www.turoks.net/Bordello/FunkyButt.htm --and don't forget Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Greil Marcus is such a wonderful writer:

...best remembered for "The Train that Carried the Girl from Town," Hutchinson died in 1945, in Dayton, Ohio, disappointed and out of place. he had angel's fingers, and the voice of a man who's seen it all and loves more than anything to think back, facedown in a memory, in Roseann Cash's phrase, as if some overlooked opportunity for revenge or solace might be found. (Invisible Republic pg 54)
(Roseann Cash lyric)

18 December
Music is far too important to be confined to a single academic discipline, or to be relegated to "the Humanities" as if it had no vital connections to the Social Sciences and the Natural Sciences. In fact, more than any other "thing" that I can think of, music can be studied from the perspectives of every discipline, and there's still plenty left over that fits nowhere in the conventional structures of academia. I'm tempted to say (if only to be provocative) that music is really THE most important "thing" in human experience. It's certainly one of the great mysteries, and its archaeological traces are surely as old as Homo sapiens... Perhaps the "technology" that embraces tool making and practical knowledge is more important, or maybe it's language as a medium of communication, but surely music is right up there. How can something so apparently frivolous and non-mission-critical as making structured sound be so universal, and hence so important? And yet it's completely obvious that it is vitally important.

So we want to explore the how and the why, and our adventure will take us to many unanticipated corners of the world, and human knowledge. It won't be orderly, and it won't be"finished" in April. In fact, my dearest wish is that continuing exploration will be seeded in each of the participants in the adventure, that you'll listen differently, and think differently about significance and implication and cross-connection... and that you'll pass on to others the virus of widened interest in soundscapes.

I've been looking at bittorrent and subscription music services, neither of which I've really pursued before. Downloading "Chinese Music of the Han and Uighur" via bi-torrent.com, and I've signed up for a trial with emusic.com (choosing them for starters because they seem not to constrain what one can do with the downloaded/purchased units).

The Shanachie/Yazoo catalog is one of the emusic offerings...

26 December
American Pie (Don McLean) analyzed (and cached here --see lyrics, FAQ, Official Don McLean page, and Miss American Pie - An Interpretation) A version: concert in Dartford UK and video explaining connection to Buddy Holly This is a good place to start thinking about how to present/analyze a song. What constructive criticism might one make of this?

30 December
December home unsorted

Grey Album Rules, OK: Entertainment Weekly sez "Album of the Year"

The Grey Album Danger Mouse Jay-Z, meet the Beatles: Only in the age of accelerating technology could someone have thought to pinch rhymes from the rapper's Black Album and synch them up to random riffs, refrains, and snippets from the White Album. The someone in question is DJ Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, and the result could have been a novelty worth one listen at most — the sound of an iPod with seriously crossed internal wires. Yet far from being a wack job, The Grey Album — a free download before the Beatles' reps not surprisingly put a halt to it — is the ultimate artistic validation of technology and the mash-up. Even such praise, though, doesn't hint at its ingenious merging of two generations: the hypnotic blend of ''Long, Long, Long'' and ''Public Service Announcement,'' the ''Hova!'' shout-outs in ''Encore'' newly buttressed by the guitar snarls of ''Glass Onion,'' the childhood recollections of ''December 4th'' merged with ''Mother Nature's Son.'' (The album would have been the perfect capper to Jay-Z's retirement, had he actually retired.) Rock and rap have tangled with each other for over a decade, but rarely this seamlessly. The astonishing thing about The Grey Album is that despite its mad-scientist origins, it feels more organic than so much other music released this year. It's an experiment even a Luddite — never mind a rap or Beatle hater — could love.
(http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/0,6115,1009259_4_0_,00.html)

Selling Music for a Song: Online music stores make at most a dime per track—where does the money go? By Steven Cherry in IEEE Spectrum

Even as they complain about digital "piracy," the record labels seem to be using the new technologies to propel their profit margins toward the stratosphere. After all, they're getting about the same revenue, with much lower costs... A new service, eMusicLive, will make a recording at a live concert and then sell it on a CD or USB key drive to departing patrons, minutes after the last encore—a far more enjoyable take-away than the traditional band-tour T-shirt. For more and more musicians, the fruits of new technologies may get the rent paid better than traditional recording contracts.

31 December
from Mathemagenic: learning and KM insights - Friday, October 18, 2002: "But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that 'knowledge workers' use the physical space of the desktop to hold 'ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.' The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to 'recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay' when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains." (http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/10/18.html#a286)

Acouple of disclaimers:

from http://vinyljourney.blogspot.com/2004/12/gray-matter-food-for-thought-lp-rb.html : Fine Print: Songs are all from the Food for Thought LP (although its kind of a mini-LP), recorded from vinyl and digitized accordingly. These songs are not out of print and retain all the original copyright bullshit intact. They are made available for a short period of time (~two weeks) to faccilitate discussion and research and Fair Use ... but if the artists or one of the copyright holders objects, they will be removed promptly.

From http://mangosandmandolins.blogspot.com/2004/12/all-blue.html : MP3s are deleted from the server after 10 days. They're up for the purpose of spreading the word about my favorite music, with the idea that other folks might agree and decide to support these artists. Most of these musicians rely on word of mouth for business. If you are an artist or label and want a song removed, e-mail me.

http://mangosandmandolins.blogspot.com/2004/12/tom-z-discovering-floor-sander.html

Sweet Lullaby for World Music (Steven Feld)

Deep Forest - 1992 - This debut album was released in Australia, Japan, Canada and throughout Europe. Mixing traditional chants from Cameroon, Senegal, Burundi, and The Solomon Islands with western beats and melodies created an energetic yet uplifting sound, which became popular all over the world. Deep Forest's most recognizable song, Sweet Lullaby, is on this album. NOTE: Early US and UK releases contained 10 tracks. Later versions contained the bonus song, 'Forest Hymn' as the 11th track.
(from http://www.deepforestmusic.com/faq02.htm)

From an interview with Willam Gibson, in the wake of his Pattern Recognition: Apophenia: "spontaneous perception of connections and the meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena... perception of patterns that aren't there" ..."making connections where none previously existed" (danah boyd --from a recent posting: "Music is a social tool. Most people get their music through their friends and social networks say more about music than anything else. Of course, many of my older friends are still listening to what they loved when they were in college because they no longer have access the diverse networks that introduce them to new music. And we're not even going to begin discussing the weaknesses of radio. When Napster collapsed, my music explorations collapsed. The only thing that fixed that was a server my friends have that allows you to stream music. Folks in our crew upload music and we can all stream it. That is a fantastic way of connecting to interesting music that my friends have found."[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ for 29 Dec])

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958... In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. (http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html)

Some of the Basic Questions, extracted from the above:

Who has, and who should have, what rights to what bits of sound?
Advancing technologies enable and afford (Viz: Wireless Music's New Social Sound [David Pescovitz]...and the 24 Oct entry from Lessig's blog, and 29 Nov Souza quote )
Versions... Laswell/Myles Davis Panthalassa, Elvis Presley Blues, the Garbarek/Solomons thing...
I don't wanna go all Andy Rooney on your ass, but you know what I hate? I hate when people call covers or remixes of an artist's music "sacrilege." Y'know, just get over it. How much more of an imbecile can you really become when you start calling things sacrilege? What an uptight, bone-headed, pompous thing to say. But you just can't help some people out-- they're too far gone.
Now that we've established that, let's move on to something else I hate. I hate when people say that an artist has sold out just because they're not making the exact same kind of music they used to. Yeah, an artist decides to move in a new direction and explore new musical territory, thereby transforming themselves into pure evil. Now, it's true that Miles Davis readily admitted to trying to appeal to a larger audience with his 1970s electric music. But arguably, Davis produced some of his best music during that phase. When you're a musical genius, maybe playing the same style of music for four decades gets a little tedious.
Contrary to popular belief, Bill Laswell's reconstruction and remixing of some of Miles Davis' 1970s-period electric jazz isn't sacrilege. It's Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis (1969-1974), and it makes an excellent listen. If you're a fan of Davis' 70s material, this is gonna sound pretty good to you. Laswell's softened up some of the more abrasive horn solos and given the music a more chilled-out vibe.
Panthalassa consists of four tracks, each seamlessly mixing together classics like "In a Silent Way", "It's About That Time", "Black Satin", and "Billy Preston". It's great background music, it's great foreground music. It's especially nice for long, nighttime cruises around the metropolis of your choice, or long, nighttime drives during cross-country road trips. In fact, you could listen to Panthalassa at just about any time other than grandma's funeral and it'd fit right into place. Just don't let anyone call it sacrilege.
-Ryan Schreiber, April, 1998

New possibilities, like songfight.org

Feld's "Rorogwela" example continued:

The original is available on Lullabies & Children's Songs Listening To The World (Audio CD (August 10, 1996) Label: Unesco Catalog: #8102 ASIN: B000003I3J)

Frank Van Bogaert (Belgian keyboardist) has a version at http://www.groove.nl/cd/g/gr-112.html

Extreme Music from Africa ( http://www.susanlawly.freeuk.com/africa/africa.html ) lists Rorogwela as #1 --but it may be the name of a group

====
The Dunya Yunis case:
from http://www.silent-watcher.net/billlaswell/ REVIEWS:
Does This Global Village Have Two-Way Traffic?
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - David Byrne and Brian Eno
Marshall McLuhan would have loved the concept: sample the global media blitz, edit, add polyethnic rhythm tracks, name the results after a novel by Nigerian author Amos Tutuola and recycle them into the blitz. Talking Heads' David Byrne and audio eclectic Brian Eno have made vocal tracks from snippets of radio broadcasts and Middle Eastern music (the way Robert Fripp turned his neighbors fighting into "NY3"), then set them in and against percussive, repetitive mind-funk designed more for listening than dancing. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is an undeniably awesome feat of tape editing and rhythmic ingenuity. But, like most "found" art, it raises stubborn questions about context, manipulation and cultural imperialism.

What's the difference between using evangelists' rhetoric as lyrics (for "Once in a Lifetime" on Talking Heads Remain in Light) and using the voice of New Orleans preacher Reverend Paul Morton in "Help Me Somebody"? Plenty. "Once in a Lifetime" is obviously Byrne's creation, complete on its own terms. "Help Me Somebody" is a falsified ritual, with its development truncated and its rhythm deformed. A pseudodocument, it teases us by being "real." Even more annoying is "The Jezebel Spirit," which utilizes a recorded exorcism. Byrne and Eno latch onto the rhythm of the exorcists dry laugh for the backup, but the fade out before we find out what happened to the possessed woman - which would have been a lot more interesting than the chattery band track. Blasphemy is beside the point: Byrne and Eno have trivialized the event.

Still, electronic music does have an honorable tradition of messing with speech sounds. "America Is Waiting," "Mea Culpa" and "Come with Us" - rhythmic nuggets from an editorial, a talk show and yet another evangelist - are smart, funny-creepy transformations, justifiable because they don't promise a narrative payoff. But messing with music is a more dubious proposition. You'd think if Algerian Muslims had wanted accompaniment while they chanted the Koran ("Quran"), they'd have invented some. Or if Lebanese singer Dunya Yusin [sic!] craved a backbeat, she could have found one (Byrne and Eno's "Regiment" sounds like something from the Midnight Express soundtrack).

When they don't succumb to exoticism or cuteness - luckily, that's most of the album - the Byrne-Eno backups are fascinating, complementing the sources without absorbing them. David Byrne and Brian Eno pile up riffs and cross-rhythms to build drama, yet they keep the cuts uncluttered and mysterious. As sheer sound (ignoring content and context) many of the selections are heady and memorable. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts does make me wonder, though, how Byrne and Eno would react if Dunya Yusin spliced together a little of "Animals" and a bit of "The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch," then added her idea of a suitable backup. Does this global village have two-way traffic?

(A review by Jon Pareles, from Rolling Stone, 8/2/81)

another set of short reviews: http://www.enotalone.com/music/B000002MM1.html

1 January 2005
browse Blues at www.archive.org, and 'Music' categories at the Archive

magnatune.com

assign Jon Udell's Open Source Audio (21 minutes)

Geeshie Wiley

discography

Nugrape sound files examples

World Music from Magnatune

Maciej's Manifesto

2 January
Kiddie RecordsWeekly Classics from the Golden Age

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones Date: December 11th, 2004 Venue: Finney Chapel Location: Oberlin, OH (Internet Archive)

On Mashups (Dale Lawrence)

raiding the 20th century (a history of the cutup) ...and see Wikipedia on Bastard pop (" a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the acapella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.")

Google 'Raiding the 20th century' (cached here)

Strictly Kev's "Raiding the 20th Century" (warning: 54MB download; site is often down) is an amazing mash-up, or rather meta-mash-up. That is to say, this almost-40-minute-long mixtape doesn't only sample multiple sonic sources at once; but the sources it samples are themselves mash-ups, composed of multiple samples at once (e.g., it doesn't sample James Brown, but Double Dee and Steinski's James Brown mix; it doesn't sample Eminem, but the Freelance Hairdresser's mix of Eminem with a ragtime piano). It's sonically dense, in a way that repays multiple listenings: I've been playing it over and over for the last couple of weeks, and I still discover fresh things each time, that I hadn't noticed before. "Raiding the 20th Century" works in a variety of ways: 1)by moment-to-moment juxtapositions, in a sort of manic free association; 2)by recurring motifs, as sonic landmarks old and new (from the Beatles to Beyonce) keep on returning in varying combinations; 3)by suggesting a sort of narrative, with suggestions of chronology from the invention of mixing in the mid-20th century through the digital developments at that century's end (though the chronology is not strict and is often violated, there's enough of it there to reinforce the suggestion that some sort of story is being told: we start with the brute fact of the tape recorder, mixing sounds promiscuously; then at about 14 minutes into the set, we are invited back to the origins of taping, and from there we progress forward to the present; 4)by the insertion of various voices discussing the art of the mixtape (William Burroughs discoursing on the cut-up method with tape recorders; John Lennon being interviewed on how he put together "Revolution 9"; fragments of McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Massage" recording, etc.). "Raiding the 20th Century" is emotionally gripping as well as intellectually challenging: it is exhilarating like I imagine a ride in a space ship would be. Beyond the game of identifying fragments (that's Jimi Hendrix! that's Kelis! that's ... it is so familiar but I can't quite put my finger on it), it powerfully suggests a continuum through time (if not quite space: it is nearly all Ango-American, with little or no "world music"), a Celestial Jukebox in which patterns of musical invention jostle one another without being bogged down by ownership, copyright, and other barriers to (even if they are supposed to be rewards of) creativity. (from http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/archives/000264.html)

Raiding the 20th Century is like a 21st Century ragamuffin rewrite of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, penned with sound-editing software on a laptop somewhere in the global dystopia of the suburban or inner-city sprawl. (from http://www.ashleyb.org/archives/000229.html)

Friday, January 23, 2004 One to catch quickly: "raiding the 20th century - (a history of the cut-up)" by DJ strictly kev. This 53mb download is the bootleg mash-up to end all mash-ups, a virtuoso 39 minute journey through pop, past, present and future. There are literally hundreds of artists sampled, layered, spliced, time-stretched, edited and compiled. It's quite amazing, although whether you'd want to listen to it on a regular basis is quite another matter. All human life is here: S-Club, Jimi Hendrix, the Strokes, Missy Elliot, U2, Pointer Sisters, Madonna, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Pink, the JAMMS, etc. etc. etc. (full track-listing - you have to admire this guy's record collection if nothing else). The relentless switching between the tracks doesn't half inspire you to check out the originals again. (from http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/003852.php)

William Burroughs on cutups and John Lennon on Number 9 extracted

The by-now-familiar digression: this time it was an almost-accidental discovery of a page with lyrics to one of the really peculiar gems of the 20th century, I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape (found at The Devil's Music, a LARGE collection --see the main page ...n.b. also videos). The sound file for I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape is at archive.org. Amazon has more sound samples for Nugrape Twins.

3 January
3 Mustaphas 3 'official' page ..see also interview ...and another. Anapse To Tsigaro [Live] (previously unreleased). Also WNYC Imaginary world music show (Works by Radio Tarifa, Penguin Café Orchestra, 3 Mustaphas 3, Zap Mama, Another Fine Day, and more... the link doesn't work, alas)

Michael Lehman's Podcasting from SoftwareLand --Jan 1 The Podcasting Song (lyrics here)(cf Leon Rosselson "We Sell Everything")

Reminded of Miéville's King Rat and the Drum'n bass quote that I transcribed last March...

4 January
The early morning harvest:

Underground USA, a BBC Documentary "on horrorcore rap, reggaeton and other “underground” musical movements in the US" (via warrenellis.com

250 covers of House of the Rising Sun: Dolly Parton... Jimi Hendrix... Texas Alexander (see more --the guitar is Lonnie Johnson)

The ScreamBody lets you vent silently and even records...

...and an extract from Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes

A bunch of might-use for today's class:
I saw a hippie girl on 8th Avenue (Jeffrey Lewis)

I Just Don't Get It (Peter Mulvey)

NPR on Miss Ohio

Papa was a Rolling Stone (from Adam Curry)

The Podcasting Song

University of Ghana Post Office

Rip 'n Mix ...and see Negativland

I'm continuously amazed at what I've missed... I'd never heard of 'reggaeton' until I heard the BBC bit linked above, but I see that Google knows about it to the tune of 290,000 hits... Wikipedia is on the case

hiphop holiday (stoner rap mix) from http://ccmixter.org/file/shortfacedbear/3 --see ccmixter.org

How to Podcast RIAA Music Under License (from Brett Fausett) ...the MP3: iProRadio-Podcasts-n-copyrights.mp3a

5 January
Danah Boyd has an interesting posting on Music-Driven Networking, including this:

Music is one of the best focis out there. We naturally turn to our friends for music recommendations. People access music through their friends and people (most notably subcultural youth) find friends through music. Particularly among younger groups, i would posit that much about social network can be understood through music distribution and tastes. [Anyone have good research on this?]

Music is a cultural foci, one that i think has a lot of salience for these tools. It is present in most of the sociable articulated social networks and the most important factor for MySpace (built on indie rock bands) and Tribe.net (built on Burning Man culture which is fundamentally a music/art festival). Yet, it is last.FM that takes it to the next level and lets you connect for and because of the music, directly appreciating others' music tastes.

This is not to say that there aren't oddities involved. Your behavioral musical profile says so much about you that articulated versions of your tastes do not. I have already found myself temporarily banning certain artists because their dominance in my profile gives the wrong impression of my tastes. In other words, the visibility of my behavior has resulted in a behavioral change. That is indeed a very interesting end result of publicly visible behavior-driven social data.

I won't even try... [update: I did... see 6 Jan entry for two wonderful [?] extracts] Torture Music

You probably know that the US Government uses loud, annoying music to humanely torture their captives.
Well, what if you really took the time to find the worst of the worst: music so bad that it defies description. I’m sure you could come up with something much worse than the government can find.

musicplasma.com

from Corante (Clay Shirky) --the relevant bit for music issues is in the second paragraph:

And of course, sometimes Wikipedia is better, since, as with the Indian Ocean tsunami example, Britannica simply has no offering. So, at the margin, a casual user who wants free access to a Web site that offers a communally-compiled and non-authoritative overview of a recent event will prefer the Wikipedia to nothing, which is what Britannica offers. In this case, Wikipedia comes out on top, and walking along several of those axes like cost, availability, topicality, and breadth of coverage, Wikipedia has the advantage, and in many cases, that advantage is increasing with time.
Now Britannica doesn't want this to be true (god, do they not want this to be true) and so they try to create litmus tests around authoritativeness -- "WARNING: Do not read anything that does not come from an institutional source!" But this is as silly as audiophiles dismissing the MP3 format because it wasn't an improvement in audio quality, missing entirely that the package of "moderate quality+improved cost and distribution" was what made the format great. Considering MP3 as nothing more than a lossy compression scheme missed the bundle of services that it enabled.

Written by the prescient Dave Winer in 2000:

I believe we're at the brink of a new form of listening to music, one which intimately involves fans in the music experience, and creates an environment that could unleash the kind of creative community that only happens when new technology explodes. With that will come new music, and new ways to play it, new ways to explore the emotions it brings up, and new kinds of community, deep ones, far deeper than those we've been able to create on the silent Web. This is one of the most exciting things going on, technologically and artistically, at the turn of the century.
So we've got musical artists, fans and technology, all that's in the way is the music industry. Even if they shut down Napster, so what? They still have to deal with the customers, the music and the technology. The Napster lawsuit is a distraction. A new artform awaits. New ways to use music. We'll pay money for it. But please, it's not about money.
The music industry is inflexible. We've learned about the kinds of deals they cut with the musicians, and as a paying user I'm sad to see that little if any of my money finds its way to the musicians. (If this isn't true, a thoughtful and public rebuttal is called-for from the music industry.)
Further, let's not defend people's supposed right to pirate, but come on music industry, get over it, you can't protect the bits, you depend on the honesty of your users, as the rest of us who create digital software do.
(http://davenet.scripting.com/2000/07/04/imAMusicFan)

A practicality: How to record better acoustic guitar ("Are you ready? Here it comes. The secret: Don't point the microphone at the soundhole.")

A posting on Creative Commons and podcasting

Podcasting being an audio medium is well suited to the process and distribution of music composition. The making of music is an evolving, fragmented and largely collaborative process that can take place over long periods of time. Songs written many years ago are still being sampled re-mixed and performed today as they will in the future because good music is essentially timeless. Grassroots music production is an extremely fluid process with contributions coming from many sources. Compositions evolve over time and therefore copyright ownership may change depending on things like personnel, sampling and editing during the production process. The need for clear, flexible and fair legal protection is what Creative Commons is about. The fact that podcasts let the user access content outside of mass media broadcast time is the key use. People regard music in terms of archived collections and recorded performances that they choose to listen to as necessary or when they feel in the mood. Podcasting presents another way of storing and sharing this type of data not dissimilar to CDs and radio.

The death of audiotape

the last audio tape factory in the US has closed up shop and the company, Quantegy/Ampex has filed for bankrupcy.

This one will be there for only a few days, but it inspired ME to order the CD: The other white album: João Gilberto

Calabash Music offers World Music downloads (" Fair Trade Music from Around the World") at $.99 each

6 January
The Torture Tape Experiment By Henry H. Owings & Brian Teasley

"Also Sprach Kazoostra" Temple City Kazoostra (n.b.: 2001: A Space Odyssey theme --see other sound bits here)

"I Feel Fine" The Beatle Barkers

More on Creative Commies: Soviet-style poster

inspired by xeni jardin’s flag on boingboing (illustrating matt bradleys copyleft idea) i whipped up this bit of soviet constructivist goodness this morning (click the thumbnail for full artwork). for those of you who missed it, bill gates, of ludicrously rich fame, decided recently it would be a good idea to equate free culture advocates with communists, or to be more specific “new modern-day sort of communists.” how generous of the sort of modern-day robber baron. anyhow, the image is a rework of an old soviet poster which you can see here. Greg DeKoenigsberg (lead web engineer for Red Hat Network) expressed interest in a t-shirt. i’m reluctant to do a cafepress style tee, but if anyone else has interest leave a comment and we’ll go from there. forward the cause comrades!
(from http://thenonist.com/index.php?/weblog/permalink/creative_commies1/)

JVC Video Anthology of World Music and Dance, 41 VHS tapes...

It might be said that there are only so many Stories, or at least that themes repeat. One example of the moment is inspired by a Hungarian Gypsy song (La Ratyake Sheja) and some American folklore ?parallels?

Some Roma links:

They Call Themselves Roma (Michal Shapiro)

Gypsy Music Festival Part One and Part Two by Laura Shannon

Hungarian Gypsy Music: Whose Heritage? Bálint Sárosi

Roma Music at cdRoots (with lots of sound samples)

Society: Ethnicity: Romani: Arts: Music from dmoz.org

The Patrin Web Journal: Romani Culture and History

Çengi music and Turkish Gypsy Music with samples

Django page with a drawing of his hand

LIBRA Radio, "unique gypsy style webcast from Slovenia" " our programme is basicly formed by all-styles of Gypsy music, Klezmer, Balkan, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, Arabic, Indian...and so on"

Lara St. John (a bit hard to take the photo seriously, but the text is pretty interesting --se a review that puts it into ...ummm... perspective)

Music: Pushing Gypsiness, Roma or Otherwise By MICHAEL BECKERMAN

Some consider the word "Gypsy" tantamount to an ethnic slur: in effect, the G- word. So here is an awkward twist: to bring in the crowds, the musicians allow themselves to be advertised as something many would rather not be....

The styles we call flamenco or Hungarian Gypsy music or, for that matter, Jewish music result from an almost infinite number of interactions among groups. The law of the planet is the law of taint.

"A Little Bit Special" - Censorship and the Gypsy Musicians of Romania Garth Cartwright (37-page pdf) --from Freemuse, a Danish "Freedom of Musical Expression" site

Romania: Gypsy Musicians

Chasms of Perdition: How Ferenc Liszt tried to tame the divine essence of the Romani soul Dan Damon

Gypsies are here to stay: An introduction to the Gypsy influence on Polish popular music by Barbara J. Kwiatkowska

Guitar virtuoso Paco Pena discusses the past and future of Flamenco

7 January
WGBH Forum --lectures, including Jazz Appreciation

vinylpodcast.com "fair use of forgotten music"

Many podcasters are actively seeking out and playing new music that’s being released under Creative Commons or is otherwise RIAA-free. I’ve chosen instead to play music that’s fallen through the cracks. All the recordings you’ll hear on the Vinyl Podcast are out of print, meaning you couldn’t buy a new copy if you wanted to. One of the RIAA’s stated objections to digital distribution of music is that, unlike putting a song on a cassette tape for a friend, when you encode that song digitally, you’re making a perfect copy that is indistinguishable from the source version. If you listen to any of my podcasts, you’ll hear that the songs I’m playing are far from perfect. They’re full of dust and scratches and pops, all the little nuances that make vinyl records so much more charming than your average cd or mp3.

8 January
Truth and Bill Gates from Dan Gillmor

9 January
More Flamenco Stuff

The Flamenco Forms by "Flamenco Chuck" Keyser (see also Rhythmic Foundation and Accompaniment

Flamenco Dictionary

Resources for Beginners A page for beginning students by Steven Bridenbaugh

Bollywood for the Skeptical from Webjay

oddiokatya's playlists on Webjay

capoeira for example, and Pretty Polly versions, and Bay of Bengal collection (many Javanese, some N. Thai), and Japan and Okinawa

I have been looking for the ORIGINAL Rorogwela, and finally found a bit of it on a French site, and snagged it... ...and here's the Bogaert version. Other pieces of the tale: Turmeric, pygmies and piracy from "Ethan Zuckerman's ramblings on Africa, technology and media" retells the details of Feld's article. I now have both the Deep Forest and Jan Garbarek CDs.

10 January
A Google search for "gosport tragedy" was inspired by oddiokatya's Pretty Polly playlist, and turned up a number of springboards:

Glimpses into the 19th Century Broadside Ballad Trade

The Cruel Ship's Carpenter from folkinfo.org (links to variant texts) ...and Byrds version

"pretty polly" at CDDB (277 versions --indicates iTunes availability)

A complete accident: I was exploring MP3 Digger and held down the Control key while I clicked on an MP3... it started to play. Held down the same key and clicked on another... and it did too (probably a Firefox tab thing). Not a very impressive pairing, but the surprise was that I was able to grab the stream with Audacity: mp3blogs.org --what's the status of this stuff?

The Blow

"The Blow is one unassuming Khaela Maricich whose catalog of come-ons is sultry, clever, and disarming enough to lure even the most reluctant players to bed. When I say players, I don't mean Fabolous or Jermaine Dupri. I mean the mysterious outsiders, the John Cusacks of the world..."

More flamenco:

Flamenco World article on Camarón de la Isla --discography has some sound clips
(I happened on his name in an article in Diane Tong's Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader: "The music of Camarón de la Isla is particularly noteworthy for its redolent gitanismo..." [184))
...and the Flamenco World site is worth a look! See classification of palos, for example bulerías

Lebrijano example with sound clips --very North-African sounding...

Zambra discussed in Spanish

CHUCK E. WEISS: MENSCH, MONKEY, AND LIAR by Rip Rense (happening to run into mention of The Pygmy Fund... weiss: "There is such a thing as the Pygmy Fund," he said. "There's an organization you can contribute to in order to, I guess, keep Pygmies from becoming an extinct civilization. I overheard some people talking about it, and decided to write a song about it. I just thought it was a real cool thing to do---give your money to the Pygmy Fund.") See also African Pygmy chants go Europop in 'Deep Forest' ...

Fast 'n' Bulbous Music Webzine

Két Szál Pünkösdrózsa (Two Red Peonies): Kettö, Robert Mandel, and Preludium és Kánon (Béla Bartók, Duo 37 for Two Violins)

11 January
today's spam... I had to delete the comments, one by one, and then inform MT that I want to BAN the IP addresses from which the spam originated.

Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band - "Van Dieman's Land" (see Said the Gramophone for some more details --and a Google search for "van dieman's land" [n.b. covered/versioned by U2), with more lyrics [and a MIDI file]. Reinhard Zierke's astonishing English Folk Music Website has a discussion of the Shirley Collins/Albion Country Band version. And a bit of the Steeleye Span version is available.

Conway's Band "Ragging the Scale" (1915) from archive.org

Seeger quotes Steve Feld, memorably:

Musical appropriation sings a double line with one voice. It is a melody of admiration, even homage and respect; a fundamental source of connectedness, creativity, and innovation. This we locate in a discourse of "roots," of reproducing and expanding "the tradition." Yet this voice is harmonized by a counter-melody of power, even control and domination; a fundamental source of maintaining asymmetries in ownership and commodification of musical works. This we locate in a discourse of rip-offs," of reproducing "the hegemonic." Appropriation means that the issue of "whose music is submerged, supplanted, and subverted by the assertion of "our music."
(Feld 1988:31, in Seeger 1992 354-355)

On Paul Simon's Graceland

Like Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon has received harsh criticism for the use and abuse of foreign musicians on his Graceland album and 1987 tour. The album jump-started Simon’s languishing career by winning the 1986 Grammy for Album of the Year. In this light the cover art to the album is quite ironic as it depicts a white conquistador figure spear in hand riding a white stallion. The heavily outlined eyes and high forehead of the figure seem to represent Simon in his glasses. (Note that the #23 single "You Can Call Me Al" became the official theme song for the 1996 Vice Presidential candidate Al Gore.) Yet the issues of positionality and hegemony here are not completely clear. Although the cover of the album says simply "Paul Simon GRACELAND," the interior notes acknowledge the names of each musician participating on the album. The South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo which sings on this track became an international sensation in part because of the high visibility offered them through their collaboration with Simon, especially on TV spots such as Saturday Night Live. (The vocal group has an entry in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia!) Their lead vocalist, Joseph Shabalala is even given co-composer credit for this work’s opening. LBM is a Zulu mbube choir who sing a rhythmic a capella music alternately called mbaqanga, Isicanthamiya, or "township jive." During the height of the war against Apartheid, LBM’s international prominence helped generate sympathy and awareness of the plight of South African blacks. Using the money from their albums, Joseph Shabalala hopes to construct an academy of music at Colenso in South Africa to teach traditional South African culture.
(http://www-personal.umich.edu/~claguem/courses/MHM408508/listguide_7a.htm)
from a North Carolina review of a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert in Durham:
In 1986, after not having been heard from for several years, Paul Simon released an album called Graceland . Although the title track did allude to the Memphis estate of Elvis Presley, the real significance of this recording, which swept the Grammy awards that year, was the inclusion of Ladysmith. This opened up the ears of the world to the musical riches of South Africa and, many believe, gave rise to the whole "world music" genre. The enormous success of Graceland was not without subsequent virulent attacks on Simon. He was accused of raping the musical culture of an impoverished society that knew little of the complexities of recording contracts, royalties, and copyright. Since this type of behavior by record companies had certainly occurred before, for a while this line of attack soured the musical masterpiece that this was. Fortunately, everyone involved prospered and more importantly, Ladysmith became known beyond the borders of South Africa. Eventually Paul Simon became such a beloved figure in that country that he became known as "the Vulindella" ("he who opened the gate").
(http://www.cvnc.org/reviews/2004/march/Ladysmith.html)

Rock 'N' Roll 'Swindle' - The day the royalties die By: Adam Sherwin - Nov 2, 2004 Source: Times OnLine (from ElvisAustralia)

IT IS the greatest pension fund raid of all time. The stars who created rock’n’roll are about to lose the rights over the classic hits that made them famous.

From January 1, 2005, anyone will be able to release landmark rock’n’roll recordings such as Elvis Presley’s That’s All Right without paying a penny in royalties to the performer or their estates...

The Elvis Presley industry, which was worth £21.8 million from Graceland admissions alone last year, will be the first to suffer. That’s All Right and Blue Moon, his revolutionary 1954 recordings, are the first to enter the public domain, with Love Me Tender and Heartbreak Hotel to follow soon. Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock and Shake, Rattle and Roll, are also available from January.

Those who believe that music should be “free” argue that the 50-year rule allows public access to songs that record companies and artists have enjoyed ample opportunity to exploit. But the BPI said that new bands will miss out as record companies lose control over their back catalogue. A spokesman said: “Labels rely on income from past hits to invest in new talent”.

Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative by John Oswald From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990

MUSICAL BORROWING: An Annotated Bibliography Edited by J. Peter Burkholder, Andreas Giger, and David C. Birchler

MP3 blogs to playlists to streaming to podcasts to your newsreader (Prentiss Riddle: Toys aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada) --and a pointer to One Million Free & Legal Music Tracks, which leads me to Erik Brown's mp3 links, which reminded me about Epitonic.com (Stefano Scodanibbio bass)... and on it goes... next: Snubbing the RIAA from Kuro5hin.org and magnatune... a lot to absorb!

14 January
What are we to make of THIS? You probably need to see this one first...

Belf's Music: a wonderful set of mp3s, which I've put into a Webjay Playlist ...and which I found out about thanks to klezmershack.com ...and see NewMusicBox.org for its current issue: Is Experimentation Kosher? ("where klezmer and new music meet..."). See Rockin' the Shtetl By Seth Rogovoy.

13 January
Creative misuse and abuse of musical tools

This project stems from my own interest in new electronic music, in particular that which has lately been termed "Glitch Electronica." More broadly, though, I am interested in the "wrong" use of musical technology in the production of music, and the semiotics of "wrong" sounds. This project is meant to serve as a documentation of such sound production over time, and as a means to make available music that may have been written about more than it has been heard.

BBC Quick Guide to Experimental Music

A term coined by Canadian John Oswald to describe his method of sampling and generally mucking around with other people's music (varispeeding Dolly Parton, cutting up Metallica etc). Often the subjects of lawsuits from record companies, Oswald and fellow media terrorists Negativland prefigured much of today's sampling activity, though the first was James Tenney's Elvis cutup piece Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) in 1961.

...so I went looking for Collage, and found it at ILLEGAL ART ("illegal art began in 1998 when we sampled beck. he loved it, but his lawyers tried to sue us. we continue to release challenging experimental electronic music as a digital sampling band.")

Also led to Satie Homepage by a reference to his "Parade" (produced with Jean Cocteau and first performed in Paris in 1917), a satire/provocation. What else was going on in Paris in 1917, you may ask...

It is true that we were brought closer to Satie by the scandal around Parade, the ballet by Jean Cocteau with settings and costumes by Pablo Picasso, composed in 1916, created by the ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev in 1917. This score marked the final break with Debussyan impressionism and the return to a melodic and harmonic frankness of great purity. In Parade, Satie, still the original thinker, initiated various innovations. Was he not the first to introduce extra-musical elements into the orchestra (sound splashes, lottery wheels, sirens, typewriters, pistol shots, etc.)?

Barong Remix A Nu Text from archive.org

January 11th, 2004
A piece written using Reason that uses samples of Balinese gamelan and samples of Drum & Bass and synthesizes them along with some words by a DJ Spooky interview into an interesting drum & bass mashup...

This was a piece originally written as a project for a class I took that surveyed the influence of "Oriental" music on Western European composers. I decided to take gamelan music and re-inscribe it into a drum and bass context because 1) They are both dance musics and 2) They are both largely comprised of oppositions of pulse (slower bass lines against fast breakbeats and large deep gongs against the small metallophones of the gamelan). While we tend to think of sampling as a relatively new phenomenon, it is only the technology that we can claim as an innovation germane to the 20th century for the notion of borrowing is quite old indeed. Nevertheless, this piece exemplifies this new method of appropriation. Feel free to email me for gamelan samples, the DnB sample source, or the DJ Spooky interview.

A Curiosity: Queen in Japanese

some little men...

Is there a DC mashup scene?

14 January
A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Conlon Nancarrow 30-minute PRI program from archive.org

Harry Partch's Instruments !!!!

William Washabaugh's Flamenco pages

...see his 'Popular Articles' on Carmen, and Flamenco Music and Documentary (Ethnomusicology, 1997), and Forms of cante and toque

from http://www.afana.org/flamenco.htm

THE MOOD OF CANTE JONDO

The essential mood of the 'cante', like many American Blues songs, is one of despair and tortured emotions. This "pena negra", or black sorrow, can be expressed profoundly merely by the mournful repetition of the word "Ay! The Siguiriya has been described as singing of "pains without possible consolation, wounds that will never close, crimes without human redemption... the lament of the earth that will never be the sky, the sea that knows no limits, the good-bye eternal, forever". It is the exposure of one's soul stripped bare:

Detrás del carrito no Iloraba aguita
que Iloraba sangre

Behind the funeral cart
sobbed my mother
she didn't weep tears
she wept blood

Recurrent themes of Cante Jondo are the terror of death and the pain of love... there seems to be no middle ground. Federico García Lorca has noted a similarity between the Cante and Arabic verse in the praise of wine, obsession with women’s hair, and crying: "the Siguiriya is like a hot iron that burns the heart, throat and lips of those who pronounce it".

The singer who portrays "pena negra" must above all have "duende", a word which cannot be adequately translated into English but is essential in conveying the great and terrible art of the Cante, Through "duende", sorrow and tortured emotion accompany the singer coming from, as Lorca says: "distant races, crossing the cemetery of the years".

...and compare with Cante... the song (see biographies of famous singers at the bottom of that page)

Flamenco forms from esflamenco.com (good short descriptions of 20+ named forms, with dance, guitar, and singing characterized)

beyondjazz.blogspot.com

The whole issue of "[insert ethnonym here] Music" and labelling...

15 January
Chris Corrigan's rolling list of world music ("My own ever-changing top 40 of eclectic world music by salishsea")

18 January
some descriptions of flamenco forms to go along with the examples played in class from Saura's Flamenco

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and Alexander Street Press today announced an agreement to publish the entirety of Smithsonian Global Sound® as a streaming music service to libraries around the world. The collaboration will deliver content from archives of traditional music in South Africa and India as well as the audio collection of the U.S. national museum.

www.mperia.com uses BitPass micropayments ($.25/track and up)

Benn loxo du tàccu African MP3 blog

emusic.com: Before the Blues vol 2 and Jazz the World Forgot vol 1 and I Can't Be Satisfied vol 1 and I Can't Be Satisfied vol 2

19 January
Google search: books about delta blues has 3 from Google Print (Ears of Another Hippopotamus)

A search for 'books about charley patton' produces a pointer to Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson. And see Charley Patton by R. Crumb

Ma Rainey page from lambda.net ...and Prove it on me lyrics

my examples page for Blues, horribly Under Construction...

21 January
The Ragtime Ephemeralist " Still Devoted to the Preservation and Dissemination of Articles and Items Relating to Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Popular Music"

Raiding the 20th Century ("dj food’s unforgettable musical history lesson (a history of the cut up) in samples, bootlegs, cutup and free speech got expanded to be even greater, louder, longer. more music, more samples … listen and learn!") updated and expanded (a 60MB download)

Alvin Lucier "I am sitting in a room..." [1969] and Wikipedia entry, and more information

22 January
Thousands are sailing (The Pogues, with lyrics)

Nothing but the same old story (Paul Brady, lyrics --see Paul Brady's comments on the record, and book with the same title)

The Foxy Devil (Joe Dolan, as sung by Christy Moore)

Delirium Tremens (Christy Moore)

The King of Ballyhooley (as sung by Andy Irvine, Patrick Street)

Tommy Johnson

HOW STALIN INVENTED WORLD MUSIC Or Le Mystere de Voix Sovietique - by Joe Boyd (cached)

Hank Sapoznik and the Youngers of Zion

rebetiko.org ("Radical Movement for Rebetiko Dechiotification and Bouzouki Detetrachordization") --see clip from Nuit sans Lune, and the excellent Archive of Rebetika Research Materials ...and Introduction to greek smyrnaiika and rebetika music from musiq.com

One I'm looking for: KINESI SDCD007 LOUISIANA RED BLUES+REMBETIKA (Trikont may have it)

23 January

Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson (turntable speed... listen to this, two versions of the same phrase, the last of "Me and the Devil")

The Nightingale's Code: a poetic study of Bob Dylan (includes some text) --see more at Touched Press site

Reading Griel Marcus' Dead Elvis: a chronicle of a cultural obsession (1991). He quotes Michael Ventura's Shadow Dancing in the USA (1986):

Elvis's singing was so extraordinary because you could hear the moves, infer the moves, in his singing. No white man and few blacks had ever sung so completely with the whole body

Elvis, before the Army, before 1959, was something truly extraordinary: a white man who seemed, to the rest of us, to appear out of nowhere with moves that most white people had never imagined, let alone seen. His legs weren't solidly planted then, as they would be years later. They were always in motion. Often he'd rise on his toes, seem on the verge of some impossible groin-propelled leap, then twist, shimmy, dip, and shake in some direction you wouldn't have expected. You never expected it. Every inflection was matched, accented, harmonized by an inflection of muscle. As though the voice couldn't sing unless the body moved...

Nobody had ever seen a white boy move like that. He was a flesh-and-blood rent in white reality. A gash in the nature of Western things. Through him, or through his image, a whole culture started to pass from its most strictured, fearful years to our unpredictably fermentive age-- a jangled, discordant feeling, at once ultra-modern and primitive... (121-122)

Lil Hardin "First Lady of Jazz"

Greek FM with mp3s of programs: www.gaepis.org (programs on Vamvakaris, Café Aman America, Diamanda Galas, Ross Daly...)

24 January
Robert Johnson

The Robert Johnson Notebooks from UVa --lyrics and much more
Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta (ML420.J735 W35 2004) is essential...
Robert Johnson & the devil's pact: Did celebrated 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson sell his soul to the Devil for fame and guitar expertise?
Robert Johnson's Legacy
Robert Johnson, His Life, His Music, His Legacy by Alan White (the picture is a rendering of a portrait of Charlie Patton...)
Robert Johnson and the Crossroads Curse
Eric Clapton's "Me and Mr. Johnson" (2004) --see the reviews...
Directory of Mississippi Musicians and Music by Jim Brewer

Jimi Hendrix video clips "Killing Floor" is 'just' 12-bar blues

25 January
Subterranean Homesick Blues dealt with by What They Sang to Me

Update of my 'blues examples' page and W&L-only mp3 files of many songs

Music files from the very early 1920s - most acoustically recorded, in .ogg format

26 January
A new version/update of Raiding the 20th Century, from which I've winkled out some extracts (about 19 minutes sliced from the hour, mostly the narrative bits and not the mashups/musics so much)

The whole thing is [may be...] available for a SLOOOOW download via http://www.djfood.org/rt20c/info.html (I grabbed it, and so can give you the whole thing on a CD if you want it)

...see musicalbear, Seattle Weekly, Pinocchio Theory, and this summary:

this really is an amazing document. there is a real intellegence and passion behind this work. it manages to achieve its aim of cataloguing all elements of cut-up music - from alvin lucier, through steinski to the present day franzie boys et al. this ultra-condensed mix has far more impact than any dry pages of text or radio broadcasts on the importance of sampling in music can. he plays with the notions of pop music, time, ideas, recycling/sampling - everything we take for granted about sound is questioned. kev does all this without descending into avant garde chin wankery. instead, he has produced the definitive mix of sample culture. the inclusion of morley, whatever your opinions on him may be, adds authority to this piece as a comment on pop music as an organic whole.

more 20s jazz, in .ogg format. I did figure out how to play .ogg files in Parmly 302 and wrote some instructions

syncop[e/ation]

Ubuweb Ethnopoetics ...see mp3s, e.g., Jaap Blonk ...and The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin (William S. Burroughs)

Brent Hayes Edwards, Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat, in Critical Inquiry Volume 28, Number 3, Spring 2002 [32 pages] --and I need to dig out "Heebie Jeebies"!

Tactus de Sonus "Net jamz & Xperimental electracousticambianoisysomething"

27 January
ccmixter.org on "Sampling, Mashing, Sharing"

The Flikr Song from CogDogBlog (partial answer to: songs about computers/the present?)

mix'n'mash with DJ Riko

Just lose the accordion DJ NoNo mashes Lawrence Welk and ummm... perhaps not for grownups

weirdomusic.com "your portal for weird and wonderful music"

28 January
Origins of the Blues ("The Blues? Ain't no first blues! The blues always been.")

eb.com

African influences are apparent in the blues tonality; the call and response pattern of the repeated refrain structure of the blues stanza; the falsetto break in the vocal style; and the imitation of vocal idioms by instruments, especially the guitar and harmonica.

Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues are essentially vocal. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; the singer expresses his feelings rather than tells a story. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems in love. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as melisma and syncopation and instrumental techniques such as "choking" or bending guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide or bottleneck to the guitar strings to create a whining, voice-like sound.

honkytonks.org with audio clips

The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the l920’s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry. “Blues” became a code word for a record designed to sell to black listeners. Blues also came to be associated with migration and wandering. It’s no accident that WC Handy’s tale of “discovering” the blues takes place in a train station.

The birth of the blues UNESCO Courier, March, 1991 by Etienne Bours, Alberto Nogueira

The Origins of the Mississippi Delta Blues

A bunch of relevant books:
AUTHOR Kubik, Gerhard, 1933-
TITLE Africa and the blues / Gerhard Kubik.
IMPRINT Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, c1999.
CALL NO. ML3521 .K83 1999.

TITLE Yonder come the blues : the evolution of a genre
IMPRINT Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, c2001.
CALL NO. ML3521 .Y66 2001.

AUTHOR Van der Merwe, Peter.
TITLE Origins of the popular style : the antecedents of twentieth- century popular music
IMPRINT Oxford [Oxfordshire] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1989.
CALL NO. ML3470 .V36 1989.

AUTHOR Davis, Francis.
TITLE The history of the blues / by Francis Davis.
IMPRINT New York : Hyperion, c1995.
CALL NO. ML3521 .D36 1995.

TITLE Write me a few of your lines : a blues reader / edited by Steven C. Tracy.
IMPRINT Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, c1999.
CALL NO. ML3521 .W75 1999. by James Miller

trove of Brazilian mp3s!!!

31 January
A site with lots from the Icelandic band Sigur-Rós

kingblind.com offers "Music News, Album & Concerts Reviews, MP3's, Music Videos, Art / Entertainment and much more!", with lots of audio AND video mashups... for me, a lot of the musical territory is unfamiliar (a matter of age and choice), so I can't separate the components of some of the mashups.

Afropop Worldwide has lots of relevant stuff. At the moment there's a link to a transcription of an absolutely WONDERFUL interview with Elijah Wald, author of the excellent Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues ...ought to be Required Reading!

Afropop Worldwide also sells music. Christie would probably be interested in Gangbe Brass Band, forinstance... and the Hugh Tracey series is represented. The emphasis is "pop", which could be interpreted many ways.

A piece on Audacity from transom.org

Still fiddling with Audacity: Call-and-response example (Glen Faulkner, one-string)

from Richard Allen Waterman's essay "Africa and the blues" in Write Me a Few of Your Lines: a blues reader (Waterman was Son House's agent/producer/friend --see his photography):

The outstanding feature of African music which sets it most apart from that of Europe is the rhythm, a focal value which is implemented in a great number of ways. As Herskovits has written, "for the African, the important thing about rhythm is to have it, regardless of how it is produced." African rhythms have been spoken of as "incredible and incomprehensible to us." ...it is undoubtedly true that the appreciation of African rhythms requires the development of a musical sense that, in the individual conditioned only to the norms of European music, usually lies somewhat dormant.

This may be spoken of as the metronome sense. Until it is developed, much of the aspect of African music most important to the African may well remain incomprehensible to the most careful investigator. From the point of view of the listener, it entails habits of conceiving any music as structured along a theoretical framework of beats regularly spaced in time and of co-operating in terms of overt or inhibited motor behavior with the pulses of this metric pattern whether or not the beats are expressed in actual melodic or percussion tones. Essentially, this simply means that African music, with few exceptions, is to be regarded as music for the dance, although the "dance" involved may be entirely a mental one. Since this metronomic sense is of such basic importance, it is obvious that the music is conceived and executed in terms of it; it is assumed without question or consideration to be part of the perceptual equipment of both musicians and listeners and is, in the most complete way, taken for granted. When the beat is actually sounded, it serves as a confirmation of this subjective beat. And because it amounts to an unverbalized point of view concerning all music, this traditional value which differentiates African from "pure" European systems of musical appreciation is a typical example of the variety of subliminal culture pattern most immune to the pressures of an acculturative situation. (pp 20-21)

Generally: an anhemitonic pentatonic with "variable intonation of the third and seventh of the scale" (Waterman 23)

1 February
Tangled Up in The Blues

2 February
Into Africa

3 February
List of musical modes Created by Manuel Op de Coul (and far beyond what I'd constructed, years ago...) as part of Scala

a powerful software tool for experimentation with musical tunings, such as just intonation scales, equal and historical temperaments, microtonal and macrotonal scales, and non-Western scales. It supports scale creation, editing, comparison, analysis, storage, tuning of electronic instruments, and MIDI file generation and tuning conversion
see also Scales 3.11

Scalculator online from ushimitsudoki.com

Display Scale utility from usd.edu

alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.world-music

SLIM GAILLARD: WITH A FLOY-FLOY ...and on Ethnopoetics

4 February
You'll love it, probably (see source)

I'm scheming a quick dash to Caribbean musics for next Tuesday. Along the way, I ran across groovesite.com and asked for 'reggae' (there's also an African playlist, among others)

5 February
The Kleptones have another mashup, "Bonus Winter Collection". I've got it, if anybody wants it...

6 February
Inuit music listing from amazon.fr

Webjay Dub playlist

Scratch Radio (" The format ranges from early-1960s ska (with the likes of The Skatalites, Laurel Aitken and Theophilus Beckford), through rocksteady, reggae and on to modern-day dub and is mostly Jamaican in content. There is a small amount of mento in the playlist (preceding ska and uniquely Jamaican, mento is a fusion of African, European, Caribbean and American Jazz)."

The evolution of portable audio By Matthew McKinnon (CBC, and cached here)

How to sort out the 'successors' to reggae? Somehow Dub, Jungle, Trip-Hop, Drum'n'Bass and probably some other genres I don't comprehend are all related. This Dutch site has some other labels new to me... and here's a Brief History of Dub and THE SECRET HISTORY OF DUB: Reggae historians delve into the echo chamber by ERIN HAWKINS. And Stone Grooves: A Trip-Hop Primer ("Its detractors say it's hip-hop blanche: a white, bohemianized take on a black urban form, a revolution without the rage. Is trip-hop just Muzak for wannabe mack daddies? Or is it the logical soundtrack for a generation trying to unwind from millennial tension?" by James Rotondi.

And Evolution of a Sound by Scott Woods [1996?]

Stylistically, trip-hop is hip-hop, slowed down to a snail's pace, with random outbursts of echo and delay, and everything up to and including the kitchen sink tossed in for good measure: spy movie music, screaming guitars, theremins, trees falling in empty forests, etc. More importantly, trip-hop evokes a certain mood-- or rather, several variations on a mood--which I can only describe as dreamy, spacey, stoned, soulful, ominous, desperate, and confused, sometimes (but not always) all in the same breath.
Review of People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee "Scratch" Perry (David Katz)

Mad Professor teaches a course in dub at Catalyst and Agenda By Nicky Baxter

Musical styles come and go, but dub persists. Sure, gangs of youthful clublanders haven been taken in by techno, while others are tumbling for trip-hop, but both forms derive at least some portion of their style, if not substance, from dub, a method of manipulating prerecorded reggae material to create skeletal beats enveloped in echo or reverb.

"Forelocks, not dreadlocks for Hasidic hip-hopper," by Ted S. Stratton, Cleveland Jewish News, Jan. 28, 2005

7 February
Today's mail brought Paul Morley's Words and Music. Consider this (and cf High Fidelity):

It’s a story full of lists. Some day music will only be air. There will be no objects to hold or fetishise and people will simply collect lists. No disc, nothing spooled or grooved, no heads to clean, no dust to wipe, no compulsive alphabetising. Nothing to put away in shoeboxes or spare cupboards and be embarrassed about. A chip inside us and inside the chip a route to all the music that there ever was, which we can compile and organise and reorganise and merge with and feel into and in whatever way possible find the time to listen to, and we’ll need the time, all the time there is, all the time that music finds to press itself into.
(http://www.rocklist.net/steveparker/paulmorley.htm)
another take:
As far as I can understand--and I'm not sure even the author could make things any clearer--it's a book based on a) a huge number of lists, and b) such matters as the implicit link between avant-garde music and modern pop, the death of rock, and Morley's own progress as a writer. If that makes the book sound like an easy read, it should be remembered that much of it is based around a fictional journey to a city formed from music and text, in a sports car driven by an android Kylie Minogue. Kylie talks to Morley about the possibility of him ghosting her autobiography, while taking calls on her mobile from Sigmund Freud and occasionally being replaced in the driving seat by Madonna. Mercifully, there are no giant mice (although there is at least one reference to "robot rabbits").
(http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4649_132/ai_106861338)
and another:
Those on the lookout for a succinct tour around pop should avoid Words And Music like the plague, the reason being it’s probably the loopiest pop history you can imagine. Morley’s writing is in a league of its own and this could very well drive you to distraction. He opens the book with his two favourite records - Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room (60s experimentalism with spoken word loops)...
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A2895799)
...which puts me in mind of the need to say more about Alvin Lucier, whose opus I mentioned one day in class.
Hear the whole thing, and
a succinct extract, four slices from the loaf (beginning, thirds, end)

Famous People are Weird from Dr. Demento

8 February
Music from Mathematics mp3 from http://radiofreepolygon.blogspot.com/2005/02/music-from-mathematics.html

9 February
Yma Sumac on the Web

mp3tunes.com non-DRM music at $.88/unit

10 February
These demos require the Microsoft Explorer browser, alas...

Basic Audacity 1: recording voice

Basic Audacity 2: adding an mp3 file

Basic Audacity 3: recording from an mp3 player

Basic Audacity 3a: a better demo of mp3 player

Basic Audacity 4: cleanup and export to mp3

the exported sound file (which almost works...)

So: you can capture an audio stream by setting Audacity to "Wave Out Mix"

cdroots.com brings temptation(s) my way...

Eluard Burt on New Orleans music (5 minutes+)

11 February
Back when I was scheming the course, I included some comments about writing about music, and now I'm interested in continuing that thread, and considering the challenge of verbalizing an essentially subjective and internal experience. I want to get beyond the starting point of basic tools: labels (for genres, mostly) and lists (with a nod/wink to Nick Hornby [and John Cusack] for High Fidelity ["the best movie ever made about list-making", sez Amazonite David Horiuchi; "The book was a best seller which appealled to men (who all thought it was about them) and women (who thought it explained what men really think about - it does", sez Clayton Everett in Unreel])

In Thursday's class I handed out a couple of pages from Paul Morley's Words and Music, commenting that the task of the music writer was to verbalize the experience of listening --and suggesting that music writers often did remarkable things with language in order to produce the words.

One of the people I was thinking of is Lester Bangs, a now-expired "rock journalist" (see A Final Chat With Lester Bangs [Jim DeRogatis --author of Let it Blurt : The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic, and of Milk It!: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the '90s] and Lester Bangs Tribute [Kurt Hernon]). Bangs died in 1982 (before most of you were born, again...)

Once upon a time there was a music called rock n' roll. You've probably heard of it. Rock n' roll had the magical power to make people happy. You could go to the store and, for the price of a black plastic disk, buy happiness. At least sometimes. Then a group of people known as rock critics appeared and claimed they could identify which records that were magic or at least "good." They generally couldn't but were often amusing anyway. Many of the more iconoclastic members of this brotherhood were published in a magazine called CREEM including one who was magic himself. He's generally given credit for naming "Heavy Metal" music and defining the ethos of punk before there was punk. He could nail the way we felt about music and life, crystallize it into such prose that it touched our hearts. He could also make us fall down laughing by ridiculing our rock idols. He thrilled us and infuriated rock stars. His name was Lester Bangs. He welded his wit not like a saber but like a pin and used it to burst bubbles of arrogance and pretension. No rock star's ego was safe with him in the world. We need him today, but alas, he died in 1982, died alone, died of the flu and darvon when none of his "friends" cared enough for his genius to keep him alive. You might have seen Bangs depicted in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous...
(from http://www.newsgarden.org/chatters/homepages/alllie/bangs.shtml)
Two collections of his writing: Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste : A Lester Bangs Reader (he published in Creem, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and London's NME).

Here's one to include:
The Penguin book of rock & roll writing / edited by Clinton Heylin
London : New York : Penguin Group, 1992
Leyburn-Level 3 ML3916 .P46 1992

Others from Annie, a selection:

AUTHOR Hamelman, Steven L., 1952-
TITLE But is it garbage? : on rock and trash / Steven L. Hamelman.
IMPRINT Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2004.
CALL NO. MT146 .H36 2004.

AUTHOR Zak, Albin.
TITLE The poetics of rock : cutting tracks, making records / Albin J. Zak III.
IMPRINT Berkeley : University of California Press, c2001.
CALL NO. ML3534 .Z35 2001.

TITLE Reading rock and roll : authenticity, appropriation, aesthetics / edited by Kevin J.H. Dettmar and William Richey
IMPRINT New York : Columbia University Press, c1999.
CALL NO. ML3534 .R3844 1999.

TITLE Rock over the edge : transformations in popular music culture / edited by Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders.
IMPRINT Durham : Duke University Press, c2002.
CALL NO. ML3534 .R6336 2002.

These are dominated by rock writing/criticism, which may have its own rules, habits, publics, etc. Perhaps a worthy subject for exploration...

And, like the music itself, it just has to keep coming. It's not like there's a closed canon --it's absolutely open, and overflowing with innovation and with imitation (and worse), with posing and poseurs, with statements, with the angry and the pathetic and the self-indulgent and the living-dangerously... not to mention the manifold temptations of drugs, alcohol, sex, money, power, fame, glamor... Any performer has a half-life in the public eye, and in retrospect it's easy to see that so-and-so burned so hot that they couldn't last, etc.

Jenny forwarded me this one:

Atzilut: Concerts for Peace will be performing in the Lenfest Center for the Performing Arts on March 1st at 8 p.m. Preceding the concert the musical director of Atzilut, Jack Kessler, will be leading a hands on percussion workshop utilizing the instruments that will be featured in the evening performance. The workshop will begin at 5 p.m. in the Commons Living Room. ..for more information on the group and their music please visit www.atzilutmusic.com

16 February
Bollywood for the Skeptical and Ska for the Skeptical

17 February
mp34u seems to be a redistributor of links to mp3s, presumably 'legal'

19 February
Plotting a Celtic detour...

Moving Hearts ...Irish Ways & Irish Laws Lyrics

The Story and Legacy of The Bothy Band (1974-79)

On Musical Obsession from Koranteng's Toli

20 February
Klezmer mp3s (short samples fro a German site)

Baltimore Tummelers Klezmer Band

Klezmerica (frozenchosen.com, from Minnesota...)

Klezmer summary from jewish-online.de

Klingon Klezmer

On (and Beyond) the Pale

Beyond the Pale: the history of Jews in Russia ...and Beyond the Pale a Toronto Klezmer band --see some video

Quinion on The Pale

NINE CENTURIES OF DOMINATION AND RESISTANCE and other Irish reflecftions

Plain Tales from the Hills: Beyond the Pale Rudyard Kipling ("Kingsley Amis (Rudyard Kipling p.48) describes this as 'one of the most terrible stories in the language', and J M S Tompkins (The Art of Rudyard Kipling p. 233) places it in 'this region of grotesque and tragic illusion and grotesque and tragic reality' which also includes the later story "Mary Postgate". Tompkins notes that the horror of "Beyond the Pale" is enhanced by the matter-of-fact narration... [http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_beyondpale1.htm])

Procol Harum: Beyond the Pale

Beyond the Pale: An Overview of Recent Scholarship Pertaining to the Colonial Backcountry By Daniel P. Barr

Pink pigs beyond the pale Barbecue eatery's mural draws squeals from Snohomish

21 February
I happened upon A guide for the perplexed [sound recording] : Jewish alternative movement.
New York : Knitting Factory Records, 1998.
CALL NO. CDS 1271.
and a Google search led me to:

Jewish Politics, Jewish Culture
Jewish Alternative Movement (JAM)
Klezmer Review
JAM BANDS AT THE FREEMAN CENTER
Rhythm & Jews: Post-klezmer music hitches a ride to everywhere By Alexandra J. Wall

wixonomy for music

22 February
What to do with palm cuts?

Returning swiftly with another batch of bhaji madness, I present to you 'palm cuts (volume 2)'. Written entirely on a Sony Clié Palm OS handheld device using the phenomenal bhajis loops software. This time we journey through styles like the epic electro ballad 'super jumping dal', borderline silly funk of 'vanilla micro blobby', orchestral idm ambience of 'coco flying mole', twisted dancefloor rhythms of 'chipopo deadly carrot', and the whacked out trippy-hop of 'magic burning dal'. Again, this record was mostly constructed on my breaks at work, and the titles (as will be the tradition) are bhaji generated. Enjoy.

Celtic stuff:

An Irish Sampler (W&L only)

Ceolas, "the largest online collection of information on Celtic music"
celticmusic.com (mandolin-centric)
U Wisc Madison online course: Celtic music: regional cultures and modern success
The Encyclopedia of Traditional Celtic Music
Liam O'Flynn on uillean pipes and interviews

Musics of the Middle East for 1 March, under construction

24 February
Gypsy Guitar

26 February
The Future of Music from Berklee Press

27 Feb
How Apple Saved the Music Biz (John Naughton) --a 5-minute podcast reading of his mid-February column, published in The Observer. Original at blogs.guardian.co.uk

etree.org "etree.org is the award-winning leader in lossless digital audio distribution on the Internet! We are a community committed to providing the highest quality live concert recordings in a losslessly-compressed, downloadable format. All of the music on etree.org is free, and 100% legal to download, trade, and burn."

Astonishing: Transpacific Sound Paradise Saturday, February 12, 2005 Guest DJ Corinna Snyder of Yasna Voices: Bulgarian vocal music and more (seems to be 3 hours...) ...from Special Archives on WFMU ...OMG....

1 March
History of Mashups vol 6: Krautrock Idol --the mp3 is here, and the main site looks quite interesting.

For today: Musics of the Middle East

4 March
Bollywood via National Geographic

from pieceoplastic.com, a word about copyleft:

all music and audio is borrowed with the utmost respect for its creators. however, i do consider this to be fair use. this material is created purely for fun, to share with my online friends. there is no commercial transaction involved. as a long-time dj i own 5?000+ albums in vinyl and quite a few cd’s. all the music i use for these mixes, i either own a copy of or it was released under a CC-license to begin with. i release all my work under a creative commons license, hence i treat this material as if it was under CC license. i attribute it and i do not use it for commercial gain. don’t try to sue me, i am broke anyway.

Asian Dub Foundation

Asian Dub Foundation are 21st century MIDI warriors. Their distinctive sound is a combination of hard ragga-jungle rhythms, indo-dub basslines, searing sitar- inspired guitars and 'traditional' sounds gleaned from their parents' record collections, shot through with fast-chat conscious lyrics.

Rough Guides for world music --but just the teasers and you have to register for magazines to see more. Ugh.

CircumPolar Musics ...another off-the-wall project

DAMN! (OpenAir programmes, alas not accessible...)

6 March
The Fine Art of Sampling Contests: winners (see contest announcement)

Constantinople

The Dr. Demento Show ...mp3s of the shows...

Tim Barsky downloads ...and Flute Beatbox FAQ ...creator of Bright River, "...part fairy tale, part stand-up comedy, part poetry slam, part musical layer cake." (http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/entertainment/10579014.htm)

Pincus the Peddler (Benny Bell, 1945)

Mingus' Haitian Fight Song explained

7 March
Types of Throat-Singing with Tips ...and see INEDIT's Epics and Overtone Singing: Central Asia & Siberia for short samples ...and Evie and Sarah (Inuit throat singing video)

When the men are away on a hunting trip, the women left at home entertain themselves with games, which may involve throat singing. Two women face each other usually in a standing position. One singer leads by setting a short rhythmic pattern, which she repeats leaving brief silent intervals between each repetition. The other singer fills in the gap with another rhythmic pattern. Usually thecompetition lasts up to three minutes until one of the singers starts to laugh or is left breathless. At one time the lips of the two women almost touched, so that one singer used the mouth cavity of the other as a resonator, but this isn't so common today. Often the singing is accompanied by a shuffling in rhythm from one foot to the other. The sounds may be actual words or nonsense syllables or created during exhalation.

New World Terms: The name for throat singing in Canada varies with the geography:

The Indians in Alaska have lost the art and those in Greenland evidently never developed it.
(http://www.khoomei.com/types.htm)
khoomei.com main page

8 March
Music 2004: the 10 best from Entertainment Weekly. #1 is The Grey Album.

Wiki Becomes a Way of Life (more on Wikipedia, from Wired News)

Ask math Ph.D. Matthews why he's so active on Wikipedia, and he's ready with a sound bite: "Wikipedia is a boot camp for polymaths," he said. "You may think you're a broad kind of person, but go to the newly created pages and you can stand under a waterfall of knowledge needing to be pulled into shape."

10 March
Greek Musics... a bottomless Sea of Possiblities!

11 March
Thinking forward, in the mode of Salt Water/Thalassa... perhaps a quick trip to the Baltic, OR perhaps it's straight to the Indian Ocean, and the Malayo-Polynesian diaspora.

Not all of us could or would deal productively with this site: BULGARIAN ACADEMIC MUSIC PORTAL from Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Art Studies

A Czech Roma Internet radio site

12 March
Maya Arulpragasam (MIA) ...astonishing video that soaks up a LOT of bandwidth...

bunnyrabbits (just click, don't ask why... cached here)

13 March
Is it worthwhile to consider 'Asian Music'?

Asian Music Journal of the Society for Asian Music (no full text --just TOC ...but vols 1-31 [1968-2000] can be found in JSTOR!)

asianmusicsource.com

Asian / Asian American Music Reviews Covers (mainly) contemporary music by Asian Americans (and Canadians) or influenced by Asia. Contains reviews, interviews, calendar of events, and projects.

BBC Asian Network Music

Southeast Asian Traditional Music

Asia of Rootsworld

Asian Music History Find resources detailing the development and practice of music in Asian countries.

15 March
Asian hip-hop thrives, crossover still a long shot

an eclectic compilation of South Asian Hip Hop, raga-jazz, urban funk, and spoken word, the Awaz of ArtWallah festival soundtrack CD brings together a generation of progressive artists from Toronto, New York, and California. These voices represent the forefront of a new South Asian artistic movement.

live365.com

malkoha Internet radio (Asian, Hip-Hop, International)

philradio.com

Our goal is to reach as many "wired" Filipinos worldwide as we can through the language of music. Through PhilRadio, we have succeeded in bridging cultural barriers which have enabled us to have listeners from all over the world. Since Filipino music is so eclectic, we decided that PhilRadio International should feature all types of Filipino music from rock to pop to classics and alternative which allows us to be a showcase of Philippine music and artists. And due to the cultural influences in the Philippines, we also play a lot of Spanish and American songs that are quite popular with Filipinos. Mostly, our 24/7 broadcast is comprised of an "all-you-can-eat" fare of Filipino music. But we do have special shows we produce which allow us to focus on a specific genre like Pinoy Rock (Filipino Rock), Pinoy Jazz (Filipino Jazz), Pinoy Folk (Filipino Folk), Mga Kanta ng Lolo Ko (Filipino classics) and Mga Himig ng Pag-ibig (Filipino Love Songs).

ethno techno .com (Asian, Indian, Electronica/Dance) --I guessed one was Bjork...

Hardcore J JPOP

ANIME HARDCORE RADIO

The Anime Radio Nook

Sounds of Manila

Pop Goes Asia

Indonesia NetRadio

Khmer Media

Challenging Sushi "THE place to listen to alternative Japanese rock, punk, reggae, ska, electronica, folk rock, and some things that just can't be classified"

Thai Radio

Asian Vibrations

Hong Kong Vintage Pop

16 March
A quote from Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, volume on Southeast Asia:

...in Burmese music, nobody plays a coherent, intact version of any melody. Following a fixed structure that exists only in players' minds, even the lead musicians sound their instruments in an idiom comprising octave displacements, beat displacements, and other melodic "rearrangements." Perhaps a visual comparison to the formal displacements of European cubist art will help the listener discern what has happened to the composition. A good way to understand this process is to ask a Burmese musician to play a familiar Western tune, as pianist U Ko Ko does on a recent compact disc, when he plays "When the Saints Come Marching In". Perhaps two valid analogies to the process of displacement would be Schönberg's concept of Klangfarbenmelodie, in which the listener must connect disjointed bits of melody into a continuous whole, and Seurat's technique of pointillism, in which the viewer must connect discrete dots of color into a coherent image. (pp 18-19)

17 March
More on M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam):

M.I.A. is, well, MIA due to visa troubles while entering US (see interview from pitchfork media) and M.I.A. for intergalactic overlord and Rolling Stone review of Arular and amazon.com record (with clips) and Sri Lankan hip-hop mix: torrent ...and cached here for a while for W&L right-click downloads
and MarioMix... ...and video cached temporarily for W&L use

Index of Dr. Auratheft, whence came that mix... Sumtin' happnin'...

This from the world of Mac, but it's the phenomenon thaht's of interest as much as the specific app: Goombah ("your free, no-hassle connection to like-minded listeners from all over the world. Goombah browses your iTunes collection and theirs to compare what you like and make recommendations. If you and your peers share a love for one song, chances are you’ll appreciate others your Goombah Neighbors listen to...")

The Engadget Interview: Chris Gorog, CEO of Napster on the Future of Music

Gorog: The point is simply that people are going to value instantaneous access to anything they can think of anywhere anytime. That’s what they’ll place value in rather than ownership — I own this CD, I own this track I downloaded. Because in the digital world, everything is available.

So it’s really a paradigm shift for people to recognize that the music collections they’ve carried around with them on their back, all of this stuff doesn’t matter anymore. Because for a monthly fee they can have access not only to everything they’ve collected in the past, but everything they don’t even know about yet that they can still discover. It’s a very different model and extremely attractive, once you get used to it. ...

Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software

I'm thinking quite differently about 'Asian Music' than I was a day or two ago, thanks to several bits of inspiration, read-thought-seen-heard in the last 24 hours. Among the pieces:

Processing all that, I'm inclined to think that the question is: what are the interesting questions? ...and that's what I want to elicit blog postings about, to provide some direction for the next few classes. I'm thinking that today should involve some exposure coupled with opportunity to respond, and to experiment a bit with sound.

Examples (W&L only):

Thailand
  • Thai lam sing

    Burma

  • Burmese kyo harp
  • When the Saints by a Burmese pianist

    Vietnam:

  • Vietnamese guitar
  • Ghost Riders on one-string dan bau ...and another version
  • cung dan dat nuoc on dan bau
  • Bonanza
  • Lucky Luke ...memorable voices...
  • VC Blues (blind street singer, electric vietnamese guitar)
  • death song by a brass band (think New Orleans...)
  • death blues ...another unprecedented voice...
  • vo chong lam bieng

    Indonesia

  • Diya excerpt Javanese experimental music
  • Galura excerpt another experimental piece
  • Batak funeral tune (Sumatra ...but think New Orleans again)
  • Brother Pilgrim (Sundanese gamelan piece --trombone imitates the big gong)
  • Each of the nations of Asia has at least one (and in some cases many) classical traditions, with lots of accumulated scholarship and (often) vanishingly small audiences (there are exceptions --looks to me like Persian classical music has a big market). Each also has a burgeoning popular musical landscape, in some cases with substantial diaspora participation. The CD world offers a lot of, e.g., Indian classical material, but a lot of the really "popular" stuff is pretty much entirely in cassette form, and never makes it onto international markets. The emergence of Internet radio will, I predict, do remarkable things for available musical variety.

    One from the blogosphere, from James Lileks, one of my Cultural Heroes (see his Bleatophany for some music... and moooooore and Gallery of Regrettable Food):

    I’ve got records like you wouldn’t believe. Guys playing vaccuum cleaner, people who invented not only their own instruments but their own musical scales, music that will drive the vermin screaming from your house.

    But James Lileks is at the Diner, and pulls out a song, a calypso, about transsexual Christine Jorgensen.

    Sung by…Louis Farrakhan.

    18 March
    Morning Becomes Eclectic from KCRW, a Southern California Public Radio station with a really broad range of musics one might otherwise not encounter

    Here's a good summary of Lessig's talk yesterday, about the really big issues:

    Remixing culture is nothing new. Throughout history people have been doing it in "ordinary ways," mainly with text. This is how cultures are made, Lessig said.

    19 March
    futuredrumz.net is worth a look for more on "somethin' happnin..." in the way of emergent genres (followup on the handout from the latest New Yorker). I snagged a pretty remarkable 'Dubplate mix (grime)' this morning from http://forum.proteinos.com/viewtopic.php?p=4677#4677 and it's on the server for your amusement (followup to Kate's comment on the Sri Lankan stuff as study background): cached for W&L

    BLACKDOWN - URBAN JOURNALS

    Blackdown, aka Martin Clark, is one the UK's better known urban music journalists. With an obvious passion for his chosen subject, he has seen the (d)evolution of garage into hybrids like "dubstep" and "grime".

    With the growing popularity of the post-garage movement and the confusion toward the interchangable terms that seem to go with it, an email conversation between the Blackdown Sound Boy and myself took place over the last couple of months to try and get to the bottom of these beats.

    Classic Underground Garage tracks by North American producers

    20 March
    Web demo launches hip-hop in China --see Shanghai Rap site, e.g. Made in Shanghai

    Among last week's arrivals: Bob Dylan's Love and Theft, and lyrics and here too

    Overtone flutes: The Stick, Slovakian fujara --and sound samples and MD gathering, sälje flöjt listing from Northside, Sandro Friedrich-Northrop plays several

    La Llorona


    The Spirit of La Llorona
    A Hispanic Legend
    Weeping Woman of the Southwest
    The Legend of La Llorona and the Bloody Box of El Paso, Texas
    Mexican-moon-mother? (Wendy Devlin)
    American folklore: La Llorona
    Belize variant
    a ghost legend

    Lila Downs: "La Llorona Extraordinaria" By Lorenza Muñoz

    21 March
    Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Music and Wikipedia:WikiProject World music and List of cultural and regional genres of music and List of cities that have been the birthplace of a genre of music

    22 March
    I took a swerve into Mexican music over the last few days, propelled by one of the extras with the DVD of Frida, an interview with Lila Downs about her participation in the film. It was La Llorona (see above) that got me there:

    La Llorona
    some lyrics and Google translation
    another version of La Llorona
    ...but there are some Border considerations raised by a couple of other songs on Lila Downs' CDs:
    Sale Sobrando and lyrics
    El Bracero Fracasado and lyrics

    Barrioism (Funky Aztecs, a now-defunct Chicano rap unit)

    On Corridos and Narcocorridos

    Las Monjitas (The Little Nuns --Grupo Exterminador)

    Written by Francisco Quintero/Maximum Aguirre Music Publishing, Co.

    One troka left in the morning from Durango to two or the three.
    Two very insolent girls also took to pure cocaine and marijuana
    but they disguised themselves of nuns paí to be able to take it to Tijuana

    The detents of the highway to the nuns did not review them
    perhaps it was respect to the Convent but never they imagined it
    that they were two great smugglers who in their beards the drug happened;

    The agent who was of turn in that inspection of Walnuts
    by the sight he was not very believing and immediately he began to ask to them
    that from where came ñ ídis that traivanî said the head of the federals

    Very calm the nuns answer, we go course of orfanatorio
    and the boxes that you in troka see are dust tecitos and milk
    destined paí the huerfanitos, and if you do not create nor way then.

    Ívoy said to the head of the federals ñ to make the control of routine
    I request excuse to them hermanitas but I want to remove the thorn
    I have a feeling that dust milk already became to them cocaínaî.

    With a ridicule gesture the agent I bring closer myself and he said to them to the monjitas
    - íyo I feel it by the huerfanitos, no longer are going to take its lechita
    now díganme as they are called, if hermanitasî is not much annoyance -

    One said I am called Sister Juana the other said, I am called Sister Surprise
    and they raised the habit at the same time and they removed metralletas
    and they killed the federals and they went in its light truck.

    In Durango two nuns look for who no longer have returned to the Convent
    and a thing yes I assure to them, that they arrived with the shipment,
    that way they say that they are very heavy, and that lives back in Sacrament.

    lyrics for Elijah Wald's "Corridos y Narcocorridos" CD in Spanish, and in Google translation ...and more detail on the book --see especially Corrido Watch, which has translations of topical songs

    Putumayo takes me back to a year ago, when I was wondering if I'd ever have the opportunity to explore some musical territories again... and now that I've had/taken the opportunity, I'm wondering about it, with just a couple of weeks to go. What was and wasn't accomplished?

    Der Führer's Face (Spike Jones)

    Overtone flutes:

    Russian kaljuka with udu (Strannie Ludi, Russia)
    Fulinghalling (Hedningarna, Sweden)
    Fanitullen (Ale Möller, Sweden)
    Hallingar från Dalsland (Ale Möller, Sweden, with Aly Bain, Shetland)
    Hebyhalling (Bäsk, Sweden)
    Knut Heddis stevtone (Ale Möller, Sweden)
    Fanitullen (Ale Möller, Sweden)
    Gammal och Ung halling (Ale Möller, Sweden)

    Some curious instrumental combinations, from recent CDs:

    Gnossienne #1 (Appelation Controlée: Eric Satiefor two hurdygurdies and accordion)
    Orff and Bernstein (Appelation Controlée: two hurdygurdies and accordion again)

    23 March
    Prince Nico Mbarga, a long-time favorite of mine. From this I learned that he died in 1997... His most famous: Sweet Mother. Brilliant.

    24 March
    Yahoo CC search for 'ethnomusicology' ...consider what this means! (one thing I found: Uncyclopedia on Starbucks)

    For today: we take on East Asia, a major exercise in hubris... so we'll just dip our toes in:

    ...see live365.com links above [15 March entry] for a choice of streams
    Two DVDs from the Leyburn collection:
    Number 17 cotton mill Shanghai blues [videorecording] : music in China / produced and directed by Jeremy Marre
    Shanachie Home Video, c2003.
    ML3746 .N6 2003.

    Sukiyaki and chips [videorecording] : the Japanese sounds of music / produced and directed by Jeremy Marre
    Shanachie Home Video, c2003.
    CALL NO. ML340 .S94 2003.

    These DVDs have the drawback (if that's what it is) of being 20+ years old, but there are some startlingly wonderful perfomances and a lot to think about.
    Chinese musical instruments, and Japanese Musical Instruments via amazon.com
    ...and the phenomenon of Cui Jian, now 10 and more years ago --see links via Putumayo, down toward the bottom
    ...and the 20 March entry above, for Shanghai Rap and the more or less contemporary

    This may have little to do with anything, but then again may have a lot: amaztype.tha.jp

    after class: the other Big New Thing I was trying to remember: ourmedia.org

    25 March
    On the flickr/socialsoftware account, take a look at this posting and especially at the link to the pictures on Flikr. I got onto this via one of the blogs I follow: Maciej's Idle Words... and while we're at it with non-musical content, take a look at this posting pointing to Invasive Species Weblog. And here's another resource you NEED to have/know about: The Dialectizer Try it yourself: go to http://rinkworks.com/dialect/, paste in a URL, choose the 'dialect' you wish to see, then click Dialectize! button.

    And how about Spell with flickr!

    Stackolee extravaganza, about 50 versions: "These MP3s are only up for a limited time only."

    26 March
    Worth revisiting: World Music in Contemporary Life from SDSU Knowledge Webs

    and (based at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London) OpenAir music programmes, in streaming audio form --hour-long explorations with knowledgeable commentary and well-chosen examples (I've snagged the one on Rembetika to put onto acadproj: hinkley.mp3). These are so wonderful that I really wonder if it wouldn't have been better to make THEM the content of a "course"... but then that's the whole thing I was alluding to in my on some teaching issues rumination. I'm now listening to a program on "A musical journey through Central Asia - Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kashgar - which explored the musical initiatives sponsored by Aga Khan, including previously unheard field recordings." Astonishing. See also Links to like-minded organizations.

    For my last class, on Tuesday: in the queue are Brazil and Madagascar and... whatever just has to be not forgotten. With both Brazil and Madagascar, a theme that occurs to me is "instruments that have traveled", with berimbau and valiha as examples

    27 March
    We'll never get to it, but you might want to explore dangdut on your own.

    28 March
    How to finish up? Two places I really want to be sure to get to:

    and

    What do they have in common? *both have significant populations from somewhere else (African slave descendants in Brazil, migrants from Southeast Asia and mainland Africans in Madagascar).

    berimbau (Nana Vasconcelos)
    Saudaçao aos Mestres
    berimbau (capoeira setting)
    berimbau pictures
    rhythmweb.com on berimbau
    THE BERIMBAU: Heart of Capoeira
    several examples of rhythms from different locales
    Berimbau By Richard P. Graham and N. Scott Robinson (longer article)
    Promessas do Sol (Uakti)

    And a quick dive south to Argentina: Tanguedia III (Astor Piazzolla)


    valiha (Rakotozafy)

    box valiha

    sheet-iron zither

    Afindrafindrao (6 valihas, 1930s)
    "Folly leads to regrets"
    lokanga voatavo duet

    Afara koa tsy atao
    Bobo-drano (D'Gary)
    Rakoto Frah Two-Step
    I fought the law (and the law won)

    THE VALIHA TORITENANY
    Valiha High
    Lark in the Morning

    Malagasy Guitarists from Afropop Woldwide, and Gitara Gasy from fRoots and ditto from rootsworld.com with a different layout and ?more/different pictures?

    29 March
    Radio David Byrne

    A friend who relocated to California from NY said she missed hearing all the odd variety of music that was played around the office here. “I miss hearing what you all are listening to,” she wrote. This “radio” is my response. It will stream for a few hours and then it will recycle. Maybe it will run longer in the future. The artists played here are respectful of one another and gunplay is forbidden. Click on the player button below — a popup window will appear and the stream will begin. As songs play they will be identified, along with the artist — so if you like something you can see what and who it is. The song list will be updated periodically (how long is that really, in Earth time? Well, it depends on my listening habits.) As it reflects what I’m listening to, some songs will hang around longer while others will get dumped and replaced quickly.

    Like many people, I listen to a wide variety of music, and some of it is, ahem, more appropriate at certain times of day than others. We here are not responsible for adverse affects from playing the wrong music at the wrong time. Hope some of this is enjoyable.

    from Strange Music in Small Doses, a feed worth following ("a three cut collision to the avant extremes of sound")

    30 March
    Istanbul not Constantinople as predicate logic

    In the "what's it all about?" realm, consider this tangent:

    The problem is that it takes more than one class/quarter/semester to start becoming a proficient denizen of the socially networked community. One-off uses are not enough—just when students are starting to make the connections themselves, and just when they are starting to have their own personal “AHA!” moments, the plug gets pulled and they may not encounter such an educational environment again for another term or two (or ever). What we need to do is rethink our curriculum in terms of interaction, create a consistent, generic toolset that supports the needs of the students and instructors, and instill community practices from end-to-end in the curriculum. I have in mind something like the idea of the portfolio, which spans semesters and houses explicity artifacts, within which would be integrated discussion, blogging, and wikis tied to that student’s identity throughout their academic career. Top-down LMS like Blackboard are exactly the wrong answer because the social tools (I’m being generous with the plural here) are pathetic, locked down, and not created to go beyond the instance of a single semester or course. Blackboard provides some very useful tools, and these should remain (the gradebook, a house for static content), but they are really two tiny pieces in a much larger and more complex puzzle in which the authentic success of our students is at stake.
    (from http://homepage.mac.com/john_kruper/iblog/B905739295/C1776019690/E1154978752/index.html)

    For those with Brazilian and Japanese tastes: Smokey Hormel with Miho Hatori - Blue Glasses (mp3)

    The /limit/ folder holds 1.6GB of music files. The /musics/ folder stands at 140MB, and about 60 of the .html files were created for this course. The largest .html file is the Log file, at 171KB. I suppose that's a measure of something.

    31 March
    Scotty's Cigar Box Guitars

    and

    some improv, with my friend Daniel Heïkalo:

    Freakout at the Souvlaki Hangout
    Clytemnestra's Wobble
    Recorder Boogie
    Pas Devant les Enfants
    Appalachia
    no name yet
    and The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld – Lyrics and Sound Clips

    ...and the flow continues:

    Petit Jazz from a 1996 compilation of Zaïrean/Congolese music ( http://mattgy.net/music/archives/2005/03/31/revue-noire/ )

    ...and off the subject of music, exploring Wiki