The New York Times has an account from the post-performance world of music education: at the opening of the Beijing Olympics, a central moment featured a young girl singing (who, it turns out, wasn’t actually singing. A good read, with this great quote:
By Tuesday, the Chinese media had already pounced on the story, instigating a [...]
Archive for the 'Recommended Reading' Category
The Milli-Vanilli of the Olympics?
August 12, 2008Sasha Frere-Jones on Auto-Tune
June 8, 2008A great article that gets at Auto-Tune and some larger issues around recording and the artificial/real world that recording gives us. The closing paragraphs are, as often with Frere-Jones, magnificent:
Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup [...]
Nine Inch Nails
June 8, 2008Yet another story that looks at the possible futures for music in a digital age. Link below this quote:
Mr. Reznor has no global solution for how to sustain a long-term career as a recording musician, much less start one, when listeners take free digital music for granted. “It’s all out there,” he added. “I don’t [...]
Hatto Hobson Hoax Revealed!
April 25, 2008Here’s my favorite quote from the New Yorker piece:
Among the most diligent and dispassionate students of the Hatto hoax is Andrys Basten, the woman who had posted the “Mephisto Waltz” on her Web site. She is a retired computer consultant who lives in Northern California. According to her, the Godowsky and other examples in which [...]
The $42,000 piano
April 16, 2008Technology writer and former Broadway musician David Pogue has a review of a rather extravagant gadget:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/technology/personaltech/17pogue.html?ex=1366084800&en=ae4d2bbe8a2fa005&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
Suzanne Vega on songwriting
April 16, 2008The New York Times has been running a set of blogs on writing/creating music, and here is a wonderful entry by Suzanne Vega. FYEO (For Your Enjoyment Only—no response required)
http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/teen-beat/
Savin’ it!
April 9, 2008A great article regarding the new problem of saving, archiving, and organizing digital data. Incredibly, the amount of digital information in the world is expected to increase 10-fold in the time you’re here as a student. Here’s my favorite quote regarding some of the complexity:
“There might be 100 versions of a report on a company’s [...]
Assignments: Remix and Musique Concrète
April 3, 2008These two assignments must be done before class on April 15 (we will listen to them in class on that day!). You will have some time in class today and some on Tuesday, but most of this assignment should be completed outside of class.
Audacity help and tutorials here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Audacity_Wiki_Home_Page
We will also look at several artists [...]
Nets
April 1, 2008We’ll be talking today about GarageBand, looking at examples and talking a bit about production and (re)mixing.
One way to think about a program is as a technology that makes certain kinds of creativity or expressiveness more or less likely. My mentor, Elliot Eisner, put it well when speaking more generally about education:
The kinds of nets [...]
Billy Bragg on royalties and rights
March 22, 2008Even though we’re not in the business of making professional musicians, many of our students do hope to spend their life, and perhaps make a living, making music.
Musician Billy Bragg has an editorial discussing royalties for artists who appear on sites like MySpace. Anything that gets at the changing shape of the music business in [...]
