EclectEcon

Adrian sent me the link to this YouTube music video by the Arrogant Worms. It is clear and well-done; also pretty funny (though perhaps not for everyone!).



The group has numerous other videos on YouTube as well. I sort of liked "Ontario Sucks" in part because it starts out pointing out things that are wrong with Trono and it ends up praising Alberta. But it is nowhere near as well-done as the one linked above.

Last week, Ron sent me a copy of a mass e-mailing urging people to sign an on-line petition to protest recent changes to CBC Radio 2:

On March 19, 2007, CBC Radio 2 cancelled its excellent evening classical music programming, and the immensely informative Arts Report, and the award-winning Two New Hours. We consider that with these changes the management of our only national public broadcaster has compromised its tradition of providing stimulating and informed programming. We also believe that these changes are not consistent with the CBC mandate and the recent UNESCO treaty on cultural diversity.

The public voices of many dedicated and world-class Canadian writers, hosts, composers, producers and artists are being muted. If the changes are allowed to stand and the trend to continue, the CBC will have entirely squandered its unique capacity to represent the arts, with their inherent qualities of complexity, depth and order.

We, the undersigned, believe the new programming is a retrograde step, one that duplicates material readily available on other stations and compromises the cultural integrity of our public broadcaster. We respectfully insist that the current programming changes to Radio 2 be revisited, and the damage reversed by reinstating the type of intelligent, provocative and informative programming that has long been a hallmark of Radio 2.

My reaction to the changes was a bit different. First, I have always hated the so-called "arts report"; it is usually a collection of special pleadings from the arts community for more gubmnt support.

Second, I have been delighted that CBC Radio 2 has cut waaayyy back on its newscasts. There's no good reason for both CBC1 and CBC2 to run long newscasts, and given the biases of CBC news, the less news the better.

Third, I rarely listen(ed) to CBC2 at night. But I'm certainly willing to give up evening classical music if that means we can also get rid of the arts report.

Further, with web radio and satellite radio, there is far less reason to have the taxpayers of Canada support the performance and broadcast of classical music. CBC2 has traditionally represented a distinctly non-egalitarian redistribution from the taxpayers at large to elitist snobs. But with these technological developments, those of us who want to listen to classical music can easily pay for it and find it ourselves.

While we're at it, why don't we just shut down all of CBC Radio 2 and sell off their broadcast frequencies and equipment?

Related Digression: The television coverage of the World Curling Championships on CBC has been far less than satisfactory.

If you like popular music from 1950 - 1982, you might like this website. Just pick a year, click on it, and listen to most of top hits from that year. [h/t to Ms. Eclectic]

'Hava Nagila' enters race for Christmas No. 1 in Britain


By Sara Miller, Haaretz Correspondent

British singer Lauren Rose has released a modern version of traditional Jewish song "Hava Nagila," and gambling pundits have even given odds on the song to take the top spot in the U.K. Christmas pop charts.

According the British newspaper The Sun, bookmaker William Hill has given 17-year-old Lauren Rose a 16-1 shot at having Britain's best-selling song on December 25.

The Sun also reports that Lauren's father, Mark Goldberg, has quit his job as boss of Bromley Football Club to manage his daughter's music career.

Lauren's version of "Hava Nagila" is not the first by contemporary acts from both the pop and classical worlds. The list of musicians to perform the song includes Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Harry Belafonte, Julie Andrews, Ben Folds and violinist and conductor Andre Rieu.

The song, whose title translates as "Let Us Rejoice," is de rigueur at Jewish celebrations, and is widely attributed to Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who is believed to have penned the song at the close of World War One.



[h/t to Judith, no link available]

Yesterday I conducted the Blyth Festival Orchestra in a joint concert with the Blyth Festival Singers. By ourselves, the orchestra did Vivaldi's L'Estro Armonico, Op3 No4 (RV550), which is one of my favourites, and Purcell's King Arthur Suite. I also conducted the choir and congregation in a couple of Christmas carols, including a knock-'em-dead version of The First Nowell (sic). Sean Kim, the regular conductor of the orchestra, couldn't be there, but he had re-arranged the Vivaldi piece, giving some of the solo sections to the flute and to the clarinet, providing a nice blend and balance.

Sean is leaving at the end of this month to resume his full-time studies (PhD in composition), and I have been asked by several people if I would consider becoming their conductor again (I did it for nearly two years 5-6 years ago). I'd love to. But the damned day job gets in the way.

But that one concert sure was fun! As I said, "What a high!"

Next fantasy: to get The Blyth Festival Orchestra to combine with ThatOtherChoir to do Handel's Messiah at Easter some year. Theologically the piece belongs at Easter, not Christmas, and the blend of the two groups would be ideal.

Watching this gave me shivers.



[h/t to Judith]

It almost brings tears to one's eyes.... the thought that a midwestern mom might be sued by the big, evil recording companies for violating their copyrights by downloading files from the internet. See the story here. Here are some skeletal facts:

A jury has handed a victory to the music recording industry, which had claimed a Minnesota woman infringed song copyrights by using online media to illegally download and distribute music, according to court documents...

The recording companies sued Thomas in April 2006 after 1,702 music files were traced to a computer tied to her, according to court documents. Investigators on February 21, 2005 located an individual with the screen name "tereastarr@KaZaA" using the Kazaa file-sharing software program, according to the documents.

"This individual was downloading copyrighted sounds [sic] recordings from other users of the Kazaa network, and was distributing copyrighted sound recordings stored on her computer to other Kazaa users," the plaintiffs said.

This was a jury verdict. Also the woman had more than 1700 music files available for others to download.

There is considerable evidence that file-sharing caused considerable harm to the firms in the recording industry. Probably the best scholar in the field on this topic is Stan Liebowitz:

The weight of current evidence strongly supports a view that file-sharing diminishes the revenues of the recording industry. There are two forms to the evidence.

The first has to do with general factors: the timing between record sales declines and file-sharing is very close; the current decline is very large compared to previous declines; there are no other explanations for the decline in record sales that hold up upon analysis; economic theory implies that record sales will fall. ... [W]hat appears to be the best estimate of the number of audio files downloaded reports that files downloaded are generally less than one tenth the amounts of previous estimates. File-sharing appears to have hit record retailers less severely than it has hit record clubs, causing possible underestimates of harm by those looking at statistics from retailers. Finally, the claims that DVD sales have been responsible for the decline in CD sales (for those articles that provide any evidence at all) have been based on a statistic that provides a misleading picture of the DVD market. ...

The second form of evidence can be found in econometric studies of the industry. All the econometric studies, except one, find some degree of harm. I have written a recent paper (forthcoming in Management Science) that examines record sales and Internet uses in 99 US cities to measure the impact of file-sharing. ... The methodology avoids many empirical difficulties found in other papers. It concludes that file-sharing is responsible for the entire decline in record sales that has occurred, and that except for file-sharing there would have been an increase in sales since 1999 instead of the strong decline. It also examines which genres had the greatest impact from file-sharing, and they are consistent with intuition (genres appealing to older individuals have the smallest sales decline, and vice-versa).

Liebowitz's piece has numerous links to research that supports his views. It also carefully dissects the article in the JPE which purports to have found no link between file-sharing and CD sales. Liebowitz is a careful scholar. Sadly, as Craig Newmark notes, he has run up against a stone wall in trying to replicate the results of the JPE study. Steve Levitt, editor of the JPE, should be ashamed of himself for not jumping on this; clearly the resistance by the original authors to making their data available violates the journal's policies. But even without access to their database, Liebowitz has a careful, item-by-item critique of their results. See here, for example.

For more on the economics of file sharing, see the April, 2006, issue of the Journal of Law and Economics. Liebowitz has the lead article there.

I have just learned that I will be one of the guest conductors of the Muskegon [Michigan] High School alumni band this Friday, September 28th, at the high school football homecoming game.

They told me not to wear my tails.

Back around 2001 - 02, for nearly two years I was the conductor and music director of the Blyth Festival Orchestra (see here). I resigned that position, extremely reluctantly, because it was taking far too much time from my day job and other activities. However, I have continued at times to play French horn with the orchestra.

The present conductor will be unable to conduct the orchestra for its portion of a joint concert with the Blyth Festival Singers on December 2nd. And I have been asked to fill in for him. So I will be back on the podium. I am absolutely thrilled!

At a small harbour in Ballyvaughan (western Ireland), I saw this boat at the pier/dock.



I'm guessing the owner of the boat liked music and, in particular, Mozart's The Magic Flute, in which Papageno was a major character. Just check out the music and staff on the fin of the little contraption in the upper left hand corner of the above photo:


digression: One of our favourite piano duets when my sister and I were young was "Papageno's Song".

Recently, thanks to a recommendation from Jack, I downloaded Screamer Radio. From the website,

There is little reason to listen to commercial FM radio anymore, it is an old medium that provides little choice of music and is saturated with ads. For the last couple of years there has been an alternative, streaming internet radio. An alternative that has been somewhat complicated to use.

Screamer Radio attempts to remedy this problem by bringing most of the required steps into a single, easy to use, freeware program.

I have used the programme for a few days, now, and I really like it. The presets are thorough, offering lots of easy options for listening to music. Also, the programme seems to cut through all the hocus pocus of each site, making it easy to listen to the various stations.

My sister is planning a bunch of long air trips, bus trips, and rail travel this summer. I have strongly recommended that even if she doesn't want to listen to anything, she should get a reasonably decent pair of noise-canceling headphones:

I really dislike airplane headphones — bad programming, which gets boring on a long flight, and uncomfortable headphones. More seriously, all they do is pump more decibels into our ears, and I can't believe that's good for us.

Noise-canceling headphones are different. They have some built-in magical circuitry (requiring a AAA battery, usually) that "reads" the ambient noise and then creates an exact opposite sound wave, thus canceling that noise perfectly (or pretty near so). They're great for canceling noises from jet engines on planes or computer fans in an office. I have two different sets. The first one I got from Radio Shack, and it wasn't tooooo expensive. I used it last summer on the flights to and from England. Then last fall I bought a Sennheiser set — comparatively more expensive and better, but perhaps not worth the extra money unless you're extra picky.

They both go on, not in, the ear, like regular headphones. So they are bulkier than buds; but they are designed ingeniously so they fold up somehow and take up very little space. Also, it is increasingly the case that you can use your own headphones on airplanes, including noise-canceling headphones, and that makes their programming much better.

To see the effect, you might go to an electronics store to see if they have a demonstration set you can try out. Just putting them on and turning on the circuitry, without music playing through them, gives you a sense of the noise-canceling capabilities, even in a store or mall. It's pretty awesome, especially in a setting with a lot of steady ambient noise. Some people have said they find them a bit disconcerting because they can hear other people's conversations better with all the ambient noise cut out. I figure that at some point I'll have to wear them full time just to hear people speaking more clearly. 8-)

Dyske Suematsu says Americans like songs with lyrics, even [especially] rap music, but are far less interested in music that has no words. Suematsu notes that many foreigners, while liking N. American music, do not listen to the words so much and hence have a better appreciation of music for the sake of the music itself. Suematsu also claims that these foreigners have better understanding of and richer appreciation for instrumental music, including jazz.

And here is why [h/t to RonN]:

... American ears are getting lazier and lazier. It wasn’t so long ago that most people knew how to play a musical instrument or two. Now the vast majority of Americans couldn’t tell the difference between a saxophone and a trumpet. Thanks partially to music videos, music is now a form of visual art. The American culture is so visually dominant that a piece of music without visuals cannot command full attention of the audience. For Americans, music is a background element, a mere side dish to be served with the main course. If they are forced to listen to a piece of instrumental music without any visuals, they don’t know what to do with their eyes, much like the way a nervous speaker standing in front of a large audience struggles to figure out what to do with his hands. Eventually something visual that has nothing to do with the music grabs their attention and the music is push[sic] to the background.

... If we were to reverse this trend, we would need to make a conscious effort in promoting the abstract aspect of music. For instance, play more instrumental music in schools or teach how to play an instrument instead of how to sing. We could go as far as to teach kids in school instrumental music only, because their musical exposure outside of school would be dominated by non-instrumental music anyway. It would be a good way to balance things out.

It is certainly the case that children in the schools in this century have far less exposure to instrumental music than my generation did. But as self-anointed chair of the Philistine Liberation Organization, I have to ask whether it really matters.

The sad, simple fact is that even I, someone who knows a little about music, don't much care for tonnes of improvisational jazz, where I sit and listen to talented musicians try to make things up on the fly. I do really like the older jazz of Brubeck (especially with Paul Desmond) and Miles Davis, to name a few, and when I was quite young I enjoyed myself at some jazz performances. But for the most part I prefer baroque muzak instead.

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Yesterday, out of the blue, I received an e-mail from Alon Eshet, a former student from one of my introductory economics courses, saying,

A number of years ago, outside of Economics 020, we discussed theatre and you mentioned that should a student take part in any production, you'd consider attending. Well, I was reminded of your blog a few days ago when reading http://www.mises.com and thought to invite you to a production of Verdi's Rigoletto we're performing. I realize this is very short notice and I wish I had remembered to send this out earlier, but all the information is here: www.toronto-opera.com (I have a lead role on Saturday's performance)

It looks as if this coming weekend is the last weekend of performances, for those of you who live in/near Trono and who might be interested. I might make it, but I must confess to having some concern about how members of the PLO might react if I do.

From the write-up about the Toronto Opera Repertoire:

Cheap tickets (not much more expensive than a movie). No fussy dress code. Down-to-earth, approachable singers who might just be your friends and neighbours. Toronto Opera Repertoire makes opera accessible — both to the audience, through Supertitles in English, and to the performers.

... Our performances are fully staged, professionally costumed, and cost just $22 (less, if you’re a student or senior). ...

Be sure to read Alon's bio!

I'm sure many of you have heard of and heard the music of Steve Reich, but I had not until I chanced upon a performance of some of his music at the Jazz Festival in Copenhagen last summer. I had no idea what was being performed, but I loved it. The atmosphere was relaxed and, I am reluctant to use this term, "mellow" at the outdoor venue, with people coming and going, drinking beer, eating ice cream, and enjoying themselves. People's heads were bobbing in unison to the rhythm; and then there would be a chaotic interlude to the head-bobbing as the music developed a different cadence.

The music, I have come to learn, was typical Steve Reich: lots of percussion, including xylophones, marimbas, and other mallet instruments. Good examples of his music also appear on the CD, Sextet; Six Marimbas, which I just received from Amazon earlier this week. After the performance, I made my way through the crowd to talk with one of the musicians to ask if they had a CD out. He chuckled a bit and told me that this was the first time they had performed together. I then asked him about the music they had been playing, and he told me it was by Steve Reich.

Reich's music seems very repetitive, but as you listen to it, you begin to notice changes in the nuances, with a slight difference in nearly every bar (or whatever Reich uses for his music). Sometimes there's a slight change in the harmony, sometimes in the melody, but the music slowly progresses or evolves throughout the entire piece or movement.

I don't quite know how to classify Reich's music. Some might call it jazz, but there is little, if any, improvisation in it. Others might call it classical. But maybe "new age" is the best category for it.

Finally, if you have any idea what piece was being performed in Copenhagen, or if you know someone who performed in that group, please let me know.

. .

For more on Steve Reich, see this by Ted Frank. Also, Tyler Cowen recently mentioned the early looped tape music of Steve Reich.

Ms. Eclectic and I went to A&W for breakfast this morning. She had bacon and eggs and pronounced them fine. I had a ham and egg and cheese sandwich, and it was sub-mediocre. Let's face it, nothing lives up to McDonald's Egg McMuffin.

What struck me was that the theme is all 50s, with photos from A&Ws back then, when A&W was in its hey-day. And the music was all hits from the 50s and maybe very early 60s — like that used in American Graffiti. I liked the music, and kept feeling as if I wanted to get up and sing and dance along with it.

Maybe if/when I retire from my present job, instead of becoming a Wal-Mart greeter, I'll get a job at A&W.

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I love watching the NFL on TV. So much so that there are rumours my first marriage ended because I was glued to the TV to watch the NFL more than might have been deemed reasonable by some people.

So what is this? I am actually going to miss tomorrow's first game, the NFC championship between the Bears and Saints (or at least the first half of it)? That's right. Here's why.

I have been asked to play 2nd horn with the Blyth Festival Orchestra in their performances of Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto and Haydn's Symphony 83 (listen for that low B-flat below the staff in the bass clef!).

2:30pm
St. George's Anglican Church
Goderich, Ontario

I don't know how long this site will be up, but there are many lo-res Beatle videos here. I have listened to (and watched) a few. Most are pretty good, but a few look and sound like the worst of theatre copies.

It takes some searching through the site, especially if you don't read German, but this site appears to have the scores for (nearly?) all of Mozart's works. So far I'm loving it.

When I was an undergraduate hornist in the Carleton College orchestra, one of the things the conductor kept telling me was that I needed to listen to the other parts more carefully to hear how my part fit in with everything else. But I never understood what he meant until I began following scores and watching the transitions of different parts through the orchestra. Now, when I play 2nd horn in a performance of Mozart's 23rd piano concerto on January 21st (with the Blyth Festival Orchestra), I can have my own copy of the conductor's score to study and work from.

Also, I really do enjoy the music of Mozart, and I'm looking forward to studying these scores in greater detail. Please note that the scores are protected under copyright and are to be used only under the fair trade exemption.

[h/t to Physics Boy]

I am looking for a portable WMA player that has a good menu system and that takes a full-sized SD card so that I can carry tonnes of music with me and listen to whatever strikes my fancy at the time. So far I have found several different cheapies that take full SD cards, but they are basic "shuffle" type players, making it pretty inconvenient to try to find a particular album or piece on a a 4gig card. Also Sandisk makes several that take micro SD cards, but those cards are expensive and have less capacity.

If you know of something that might fill the bill, please let me know.

Finally, about three years after the fact, I've come across the music video "One Thing" by Finger Eleven. It was voted the best music video of the year in Canada at MuchMusic.

Look carefully for the orchestra conductor, but don't blink.
(Hint: if you don't want to watch the whole thing, fast-forward to about 1:40 and watch about 15 seconds there.

To see an amusing rock video about curling, featuring the Swedish Women's Curling Team, check this out [warning: huge file]

(h/t to Dan York, who provided the link in a comment at Curling)

As I told BenS the other day, I heard a performance of Handel's Messiah last weekend that was by far the most exciting I have ever heard. It wasn't perfect (so how many live performances are?) but the interpretations of tempos and styles were terrific, and the performance was technically among the best I have ever heard. [much quicker tempos for some sections, and much more staccato than many people would expect, but all well-researched by the conductor]

The conductor/harpsichordist is Ron Greidanus. He played a Chopin piano concerto when I was playing French horn in the Blyth Festival Orchestra, and I had the pleasure of conducting that orchestra when Ron performed a Bach piano concerto. He was raised just north of Clinton and despite his late start in music, he developed a terrific reputation for his knowledge and talent. The "orchestra" for this performance of Messiah is 2 violins, a viola, a cello, a bass, a baroque (valveless) trumpet which was played extremely well, and tympani (in addition to Ron on the harpsichord).

Most of the time during the performance, I was smiling and saying (to myself, I hope) "Yes!"

Here's the website for his group's concert schedule in and around Georgetown (Ontario, not DC)

As you can see from that page, they are doing repeat performances of Messiah this coming weekend on both Saturday and Sunday:

The Messiah
Georgetown Bach Chorale and Chamber Orchestra perform the quintessential Christmas work in an intimate Baroque style.

Saturday, November 25, 2006, 8:00 p.m.
Knox Presbyterian Church, Georgetown
and

Sunday, November 26, 2006, 3:00 p.m.
St. James Anglican Church, Caledon East

Tickets: $25.00

Here is their home page.

I highly recommend their performances. At the very least, you will be intrigued, and most likely you will be enthralled. It will be worth the drive for any of you who live anywhere near the Georgetown or Toronto area.

Update: Ron wrote me this morning to say,

It is a different approach, that's for sure — the choruses fast, articulate and sublime; the arias and recits for the most part rather dramatic, if not theatrical. It certainly makes the music come alive — you actually know what is going on.

I love the Baroque approach, and will never change back. If I had to conduct a large choir, I don't know what I would do. The lightness and precision is so much fun to make happen.

During the past month or so, both my nephew and MA have convinced me that I should archive my CD collection by ripping all my CDs to an external hard-drive using lossless wma format. Just trying to understand what that meant took me a week or two.

They pointed out that once my CDs are on a hard drive, then I would have my music with me and could transport it easily; also I would have it backed up or archived. So recently I bought a 400 gb Western Digital My Book, which is waaayyyy more than necessary to hold the CDs I have now.

And now I have slowly begun the process. I am up into the B's in my CD collection.

I must say, it took me awhile to appreciate the features of Windows Media Player, but I'm pretty impressed with it. It is essentially a data-base package on top of a player, so I can sort my music by composer, by performer, by album, etc. There are times, though, when it seems to have a mind of its own concerning what files should be named and which folders should receive the files, and those times leave me pretty confused.

Ripping the CDs has been quite an exercise. The computerized tags provided by the CDs never provide the information I want in the form that I want. Most notably, they list the composers by firstname, lastname, but that's not how I look for my music when I want to listen to it; so I have to retag all the composer listings to the form lastname, firstname. Also, I have to make sure I use the same form of the name each time if I ever want to search through different versions of the same work. But some CDs list Johann Sebastion Bach, others list J.S. Bach, and still others list just Bach. Also, some say it is Ludwig van Beethoven, others say it is Ludwig von Beethoven, and others just say Beethoven. To complicate and amuse matters, the tags for one of the Bach CDs in my collection said that the composer and performer were David Bowie. Another says the label is "Alex", whoever that might be. Still another says that Handel's Water Music belongs in the "rock" genre.

Editing tags in the Windows Media Player is not very easy. MA suggested I use the programme, Tag and Rename, which works better than WMP for editing tags. The major problem with tag editing is finding that tracks after they've been ripped. As I said, WMP places the tracks all in one folder, but where that folder is located is always open to question and frustrating search now that I've ripped quite a few CDs.

Is the process worth the effort? I don't know yet. I do know that having my music with me while I'm working on my computer will be nice. I also know that I will be grateful to have these CDs archived should anything happen to my collection. And, as an added bonus, the process has reaquainted me with some of my CDs that I hadn't listened to for quite some time.

I'm not terribly keen on singing the national anthem(s) before a sporting event. But this year's world series drove me nuts: Must EVERY singer of the national anthem(s) be a country singer?

Not one of them sang all the notes in tune. They all had that country-music tendency to slide into notes and mispronounce words (e.g., the per-oh-liss night; e.g., the rock-its red glare).

I know, I know. Baseball and country music seem to be complementary goods for the bulk of the potential audiences. But there are lots of other baseball fans, too. Why do we never hear a (well-miked) string quartet lead the crowd in the national anthem(s)?

That is a quote from an interview with Meatloaf, whose classic song, "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" is a great example of the "unconscionability under duress" defence for breach of contract.

Me neither.

Pooh sent this link to a video about the taping of a duet between Paul McCartney and Tony Bennett. To be honest,I recommend that you NOT click on it, or at least don't play the video; it is truly painful, as he said when he sent it.

Bennett has a distinctive voice and it used to sound great most of the time, despite being a hair flat often; it sounded great, though, in part because of its uniqueness and timbre. McCartney had a great voice as a young Beatle, but I haven't liked it much since then, and I certainly don't care for any of his recent recordings.

But when the two try to sing together, it is just plain horrible. Certainly it is no better (and possibly worse) than if Pooh and I were to perform a duet, and I say that never having heard Pooh sing.

I expect that when one applies the standard marginal analysis, one can see that indeed it will have been profitable for Bennett and McCartney to have cut this album [Imagine my horror when I saw it featured at the local Starbucks!]. They will sell a bunch, and recording these songs may have been more profitable than any other use of their time (which is pretty revealing about their opportunity costs!).

But life and economics are not just about profits. What about utility? Do these two men get no disutility at all from having to listen to their voices together?

Here is the link, but I don't recommend it:

I realize that most of you who care already have heard and/or seen Nigel Kennedy perform violin works by Vivaldi. I had not seen him or heard him (at least not that I noticed) until about a month ago, when Ms. Eclectic and I came across a performance of his while we were channel surfing.

I was absolutely blown away. He has amazing energy and creativity.

I had taken minor flak, myself, for "creative" interpretations of baroque work when I conducted the Blyth Festival Orchestra, and I was really intrigued by the subtle surprises in Kennedy's renditions of Vivaldi, as well as the up-tempo performances. I immediately ordered two of his CDs:

. . . . .

I am delighted that I have these two albums, but you know what? After listening to them both several times, I am beginning to think that perhaps Kennedy goes over the top a bit. His playing is very rough — he attacks the notes with such vigor that he often loses tone quality. Also, even though I love the up-tempo, he misses too many notes at those tempos. So while I think everyone should hear Vivaldi performed by Nigel Kennedy, it would probably be a mistake not to have other performances in one's library, too.

In this case, diversification is probably a good idea. Try at least one of his CDs to see what you think.

Addendum: Yesterday afternoon, after I had written this posting, I spoke with Jim McKay, conductor of the Hamilton Symphony and the UWO Symphony and world class bassoonist. I asked him, out of the blue, about Nigel Kennedy's interpretations, and he said that Kennedy is VERY knowledgeable about the original scores of the baroque masters. He also added, without my prompting, that he thinks Kennedy sometimes goes "over the top" — exactly the same words I used above.

Update: I was disappointed (but not surprised) to see that no baroque music made the top ten best-selling albums of all time. [h/t to Craig Newmark]. I was even more disappointed to see that none of the all-time Philistine favourites like "Sound of Music" made the top ten either.

Today's Clement editorial cartoon [h/t to Jack; apologies for no link] in the National Post shows angry young men (presumably radical Muslims) carrying signs that say, "Death to Mozart", reacting to the situation described here.

That's pretty funny. But here are some pertinent facts that make it even funnier:

The production — which was also mounted by Deutsche Oper in 2003 — is intended to shock. Mozart never included the severed-heads scene. Indeed, Idomeneo's original libretto never even mentions Islam or Mohammed. But when Idomeneo, the king of Crete, breaks a vow to Poseidon and the sea god sends a monster to the island as punishment, the director of the Berlin production chose to have the title character slay the monster, then stagger on stage carrying the four heads and proclaim, "The gods are dead!"

Such post-modern revisionism of classic texts has become trite. We might well object to this one on artistic grounds. Still the decision whether to mount it or not should be left to tastes of the Deutsche Oper and its audience, rather than the possible rage of a mob. [emphasis added]

The editorial continues in a scathing tone:
he German press agency DPA said Berlin police so far had recorded no direct threat to the opera company, although one patron had passed on an anonymous concern about security. And when the company's directors asked police for a security report, police advised that the possibility of "disturbances" could "not be excluded." All of which makes the company's decision worse: It is crumpling in the face of a potential threat, not even an imminent danger.

When artists, writers, politicians and even ordinary citizens start to self-limit their basic rights to avoid provoking the irrational anger of Muslim street protestors, then rights to such things as free assembly, thought and speech become meaningless. What would Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky and Havel — men who spoke their minds in the face of totalitarian repression — think of such pusillanimity in the face of a tyrannical ideology?

Fortunately even most German politicians are disgusted with the cancellation.

Wolfgang Schaeuble, who as interior minister is Germany's top security official, told a news conference, "This is crazy ... I will not accept that there will be violence because people don't like some pictures [or images on stage]." He said non-Muslims have gone too far in accommodating Muslim sensibilities.

Peter Ramsauer, chairman of the Bavarian Christian Social Union caucus in the German parliament, went further still. He called the cancellation decision "pure cowardice."

Update: Also see Rondi's comments here and here.

Regular readers may recall that I like Christmas music year 'round (see here, here and here)

And now, courtesy of MA, here is a CD worthy of consideration:



He writes,

This Xmas album according to a couple of top jazz critics is the only truly excellent one out there (they've heard them all?).

I have listened to a few tracks from the album; it is beautifully re-mastered, capturing the almost unimaginable clarity and grace of Ella Fitzgerald's voice.

Don't be put off by the 4 - 6 week delivery time at Amazon; just click through to one of their third-party sellers who has it in stock.

Other Christmas albums you might want to consider are

1. The perennial favourite by Bing Crosby, and
2. This instrumental favourite by The Boston Pops.

.

You may recall that a week or so ago, I lamented that there were no internet radio stations playing Christmas carols this time of the year.

I was slightly incorrect.

A friend who deserves to remain anonymous sent a link to a website that plays different renditions of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, continuously.

Just to make sure it was real, I actually listened for a while. The Dolly Parton version was pure Dolly Parton. Ditto the Ringo Starr version.

Let me hasten to add that I don't personally think Rudolph qualifies as a Christmas carol, at least not in the traditional sense; at the very most, it is a Class B carol.

A couple of weeks ago, I felt like listening to some Christmas Carols, and so rather than dig through my CD and tape collections, I decided to check out what might be available on Shoutcast via Winamp.

Nothing. Nada. Not in April.

So I had to sing 'em myself. Next, I'll have to load 'em on my WMA player.

From the BBC, courtesy of Brian Ferguson:

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has been taken to hospital in New Zealand after injuring himself while on holiday in Fiji.

A band spokeswoman said Richards had suffered a "mild concussion" and was taken to hospital as a precaution.

Media reports in Australia and New Zealand said Richards had hurt his head when he fell out of a palm tree.

There are no reports on what he was doing when he fell out of the tree. Speculative comments are more than welcome!

Remember the question, "What ten albums would you want to have with you if you were stranded on an island?"

I faced something like this, five years ago, when I went to Australia for a month. Which ten CDs would I take in my CD case to listen to on my portable CD player during the long flights there and back?

Times have changed. As I prepared for my travels this summer, I decided to load up my Olympus WS-320 with some music. Let me note that the Olympus WS-320, besides being an excellent digital voice recorder that I highly recommend, has the really nice feature that it takes music in WMA format, meaning you can cram a lot of stuff on a one-gig music player.

The question I am posing here is not the hypothetical one, "What music would you want to have with you?" Rather, it is a revealed-preferences type of question: "What music do you have with you?"

I have two major directories of music on my player, "classical" and "jazz and other". Here is the list:

Classical

• Bach, Brandenburg Concerti (all six)
• Bach, Orch Suite #2
• Bach, Violin Concerto (1041)
• Barber, Adagio for Strings
• Beethoven, String Quartets 15 and 16
• Bruch Violin Concerto #1
• Mendelssohn Violin Concerto
• Mozart, Divertimento K136
• Mozart, 4 Horn Concerti
• Mozart, Eine Kleine Nacht Music
• Mozart, Symphony #1
• Shostakovitch, Symphonies 5 and 9
• Vivaldi, Four Seasons
• Vivaldi, Concerto for Two Oboes
• Warlock, Capriol Suite
• Purcell, Corelli, Albinoni selections

Other

• Dave Brubeck, Time Out
• Miles Davis, Sketches from Spain
• Mike Oldfield, QE2
• Sky (Their first album)
• Stan Rogers, Fogarty Cove
• Madonna, American Pie
• Eagles, Hotel California
• my own arrangement of Louie, Louie

Note: Alan Adamson and I both used Olympus WS-320M recorders when we were sportscasters for a curling tournament back in February.

Isn't new technology wonderful?! No CDs, No Discman.
All that music in this little thing (3 5/8 x 1 3/8 x 3/8, inches-- about the size of those little 4-packs of cigarettes that airlines used to provide back in the 50s.), and there is still plenty of room to record my last few lectures this term.

Jason at the Iraqnow blog has a sad tale to tell about how, due to the tonnes of bureaucratic restrictions, one is unlikely to find much amateur music being performed in bars in Italy. Here is his summary, but, really, read his whole list. Unless you've had to deal with Italian bureaucracy before, you may find it hard to believe.

To sum up:

- spontaneous sessions are ILLEGAL.

- if you want to play at a session, you must fork out money and put up with a lot of hassle and paperwork.

The consequence of this state of affairs is that in Italy you hardly ever hear music played in bars, and bands are rare. But since the SIAE rules don't apply in churches, there are lots of amateur choirs around - and they regularly perform in churches.

[h/t to Adrian for the pointer]

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 250 years ago Friday. While musicologists might debate the power and importance of Mozart's music and his contribution to the history, growth, and popularity of music , I just plain like it [see here for some discussion; it was at Tyler Cowen's suggestion there that I decided to post this piece].

Over the past nearly 60 years, I have played French horn off and on. [My motto: I'm not good, but I make up for that by being loud.] Not surprisingly, Mozart's four horn concertos have always been among my favourite pieces of music. The recording by Dennis Brain was by far the best when I first started listening to horn concerti, and it is still regarded by many as the best.

For awhile, many people raved about the recording by Barry Tuckwell, but I always found it just a bit overwhelming — maybe too powerful? — and not as lyrical as others.

Nowadays, I tend to prefer the recording by Canadian Jamie Sommerville:

More on Mozart:
For several years recently, I conducted The Blyth Festival Orchestra, a small community orchestra with some really excellent musicians. The orchestra had mostly strings, along with two of the best flautists in the universe. I think we played something by Mozart in every concert I conducted, including his rarely performed Symphony #1. His music is nice, not outrageously challenging, and pleasing for the audiences, all of which help explain why it has stood the test of time. One of the first pieces I conducted was an arrangement of one of Mozart's Divertimenti [the first three tracks on this CD are a good recording of the piece].

This year is also the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dmitri Shostakovitch, whose music I also absolutely love [I'm frosty over Shosty]. The Blyth Orchestra tried one of his pieces [Opus 110, arranged for string orchestra], but it didn't work out for us.

One of the last pieces I conducted was an arrangement I did of "Louie, Louie" for two flutes and string orchestra [for a pretty bad synthesizer midi version of the arrangement, click here].

For more on my musical tastes and experiences, including a SkyDome performance (!, well....), click here.

Here are some links to the albums mentioned above:

....

Tyler Cowen has several links about Mozart and economics; e.g. here, here, and here. For his favourites, see here.

Tyler Cowen links to a story about restrictions at the Sydney Opera House.

Under a new interpretation of WorkCover rules, players in the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra can't be exposed to sound levels higher than 85 decibels averaged over a day.

This will have implications for orchestral music generally, but its immediate impact is being felt on, of all things, the Australian Ballet's Sleeping Beauty. To avoid any one musician being exposed to excessive sound, the orchestra is working with relay teams of extra musicians: four separate horn sections, four of clarinets, four of flutes, and so on. The orchestra that begins a particular performance isn't necessarily the same one that finishes it.

It's a logistical nightmare and an expensive one, adding $100,000 to the ballet's production costs.

Surely a less costly way of dealing with the situation is to provide the players with partial-sound-deadening earplugs. They are inexpensive and effective.

But as a horn player, I love to see the increase in demand for horn players. If it keeps up, I might even turn semi-pro...

I love traditional Christmas music. In fact, last April, I looked through the WinAmp offerings to see if there was any Christmas music available via internet radio in the spring. Alas, there wasn't.

I have to admit that makes sense. Surely the demand curve lies below the AVC curve for any potential producer. Put another way, the incremental costs of running a Christmas music internet radio station in April outweigh any potential benefits, even if that station could capture the entire demand.

Actually, as recently as a month ago, there was no Christmas music available via internet radio. And two weeks ago, there were only two offerings.

As I write this, there are still only ten internet radio stations devoted to Christmas music. And searching through these ten has confirmed for me that I do not much like junky modern Christmas songs; I will not dignify them by calling them carols.

At the same time, our digital cable service now offers at least two different channels of Christmas carols, one of which is almost exclusively instrumental versions traditional carols. I love this channel. It makes for great background muzak.

In the past, I used to set up my 25-disk CD player about this time of the year to play all my Christmas music CDs. Now we just listen to cable.