Music
Watch Frank Sinatra Record “It Was a Very Good Year” in the Studio in 1965, and You’ll Know Why They Called Him “The Voice”: His technique, professionalism, and sincere emotional response is fascinating to see. Plus, he’s funny.
The Songwriters Behind the Hits of Katy Perry and Taylor Swift: Interesting story about the small handful of Norwegian middle aged men who write a large proportion of current pop hits.
All of Bach: “All of Bach is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society. High-quality recordings of the works by Johann Sebastian Bach are made freely available for everyone.”
Tocatta Settima: Fascinating piece by Michelangelo Rossi. Good performance on harpsichord by Stolz, but in a very reverberant hall.
Dave Brubeck: Today is the 100th birthday of a superb composer and musician who led a fantastic quartet. But Brubeck was also a truly great man.
Dave Brubeck Obituary: Goodbye to a great musician and a great man.
A Composer Condemned Arson. Now No One Will Hire Him.: “I chose to be that guy who didn’t issue the apology,” says Daniel Elder.
Could Thelonious Monk Win The Jazz Competition Named After Him?: The consensus seems to be “no”.
The Outrage is Warranted: Eloquent explanation of why Apple’s recent “crush” advertisement is deeply offensive.
Richard Brody on Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser”: Mr. Brody muses after discovering the new, to him, recording entitled “Straight, No Chaser”: Monk “conveys, by gesture and expression and their exaltedly mysterious musical results, the profoundest sense of thought being embodied, of creation taking flight.”
Musical components important for the Mozart K448 effect in epilepsy: “There is growing evidence for the efficacy of music, specifically Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major (K448), at reducing ictal and interictal epileptiform activity. Nonetheless, little is known about the mechanism underlying this beneficial ‘Mozart K448 effect’ for persons with epilepsy. Here, we measured the influence that K448 had on intracranial interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) in sixteen subjects undergoing intracranial monitoring for refractory focal epilepsy.”
Ancient Greek music: now we finally know what it sounded like: Every educated Westerner at some time or other wonders what ancient Greek music sounded like. I am unable to estimate how speculative this work is, but it is intriguing. Watch the embedded video.
See, Kurt Vonnegut Agrees with Me: He says that Bob Dylan “is the worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.” So there.
The Girl From Ipanema is a far weirder song than you thought: How the second most recorded song in the world is usually performed missing a key element, because people are playing from an arrangement in a popular “fake book” instead of studying earlier recordings. Full of fascinating details about the history of this song.
Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy’s Mysterious Genius: Authors who display a lack of comfort with both mathematics and music may not have been the best choices for an article about this genius mathematician and songwriter. But it is fascinating nonetheless, and contains two lines that made me laugh aloud, both direct quotations from Lehrer.
Who’s the Dick?: Guy uses a photograph without permission to promote his commercial album, which is itself a re-performance of someone else’s music, and the photographer he ripped off gets called a “dick” for not lying down.
gamelan gong kebyar: Exciting gamelan performance.
Great Encounters #1: When Charlie Parker played for Igor Stravinsky: A wonderful story excerpted from this book.
Bob Dylan, Really?: I never really “got” Dylan.
1959: The glorious year of jazz: Interesting snippets of music history with worthy photographs.
Xiph.Org Video Presentation on Digital Signal Processing: Superbly presented and organized information. A great tutorial that effectively banishes the widely held myths about how digital music works.
Good creative tools are virtuosic and open-ended: Good insights in this article by Linus Lee.
The Fraught Dance Between Artist and Interviewer in “Rewind & Play”: An appreciation of the recent documentary “Rewind & Play” by Alain Gomis, which is about a French TV interview with Thelonious Monk from 1969.
Alexander piano- the longest piano in the world: Fascinating project to make a longer piano. This should reduce the linear density of the lower strings, which should reduce their inharmonicity, and make it possible to tune the piano more accurately. Has videos of performances.
Cassette tapes, now?: Trump, Clinton, the silly vinyl revival, and now this? Our society is immersed in masochism.
Unheard ‘Palo Alto’ High School Concert By Thelonious Monk For Release: “The album will represent Monk’s posthumous debut on the revered Impulse! label.”
Thelonius Monk — The Big Smoke: An appreciation, with some examples linked from YouTube.
Update on Baio, Maisel, Gruber, etc.: The internet brushfire burns on.
The Plucked String: Simulates the effect of pluck position on the timbre of plucked string instruments. An interactive webpage using Julia.
Miles Never Said That: A made-up story about what Miles Davis said to Nancy Reagan is infecting the internet.
Composing Music by Composing Functions: Chris Ford’s wonderful demonstration of building up musical ideas through composing clojure functions, culminating in assembling an approximation to a bit of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Includes a fascinating psychoacoustic detour.
Songs of Memphis Slim and “Wee Willie” Dixon: The music on this album is fantastic; it’s well worth the ten bucks. As a bonus, your purchase helps support the Smithsonian.
Iran Bans Zumba, and Its Fans Fume: but “Zumba will not be stopped.”
Mathematics Meets Music: A lively session at the 2016 AAAS meeting in DC.
Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Thelonious Monk: Genuinely valuable ruminations by various musicians and scholars on a handful of Monk tunes. Monk was one of the most important musicians to emerge in the 20th century, and is still underappreciated, so an article such as this always brings some satisfaction. I’m not sure I understand the title, however.
Harmonicity: Very interesting research into the nature of perception of musical intervals.
Pachelbel’s Canon the Way it was Meant to be Played: Much better than the usual soporific rendition.
Need a Drum Teacher in Northern Virginia?: Web Grant is accepting students of all ages.
Have We Been Playing Gershwin Wrong for 70 Years?: The question is about the taxi horn pitches in “An American in Paris.”
Wonky: Explication of the rhythmic complexities of some popular music, brilliantly presented. A superb use of web technologies.
Dave Brubeck: The White Jazz Musician Who Fought Segregation: “Dave Brubeck was one of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1950s, but it was his refusal to play in segregated venues that he should be remembered for.”
Early Music Training has Durable Benefits: Your violin lessons at age four help you when you are an adult, even if you stop music lessons early.
Over 100,000 Vinyl Records Are Being Digitized for Anyone to Listen to Online: The Internet Archive is digitizing LP records from the Boston Library’s sound collection.
Quincy Jones suggests a minister of culture: A remedy for the lack of knowledge about our musical heritage shown by young folks.
Why Compact Discs Sound Great: Ken Rockwell cuts through the nonsense and explains what’s special about compact discs. Also check his link to “interesting CDs”.
Photosynthesis Rap: Performed by the inimitable Oort Kuiper.
