-
Guest Post: Talia Jimenez on Cells
Today I share with a guest post by my friend Talia Jimenez. Talia is a musicologist who also blogs on exercise (http://myexercisehabit.blogspot.com). Thanks for your post Talia! * * * After a beautifully focused yoga workout, our instructor has us lie down in sava or dead pose. His narration guides us through each one of our… Continue reading
-
Glenn Gould’s The Idea Of North
In honor of all the cold weather lately, I take the opportunity to revisit one of the only odes of the North (and the cold) that I know of–I’m speaking of course about Glenn Gould’s radio documentary, The Idea of North. Gould is most famous as a pianist who renders the keyboard music of J.S.… Continue reading
-
Heston Blumenthal On Multisensory Experiences
The self-taught English chef Heston Blumenthal, owner of The Fat Duck restaurant and famous for pushing the bounds of cookery, is interested in how sensory context affects our experience of food. In a recorded statement of his philosophy available for listening (as an MP3 file) on his website, Blumenthal notes that even sound can play an important… Continue reading
-
Favela On Blast
The documentary movie Favela On Blast (produced by the American DJ Wesley Pentz, aka Diplo) explores the culture of electronic music making and dance parties situated in the favelas in the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro. The name of this energized and hard-hitting music is variously known as funk carioca, favela funk, and baile funk. Musically,… Continue reading
-
Electronic Music and Gaming Theory
In this week’s New Yorker there is an article by Nick Paumgarten on the Japanese video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto that unpacks the magic behind such Miyamoto game creations such as Super Mario Bros. and Legend Of Zelda. Game designing is a creative endeavor that few people besides Miyamoto have mastered. (Though the American Will Wright, designer of Sims and… Continue reading
-
Interviews with Roger Linn
Instrument designer and musician Roger Linn is perhaps most famous for inventing the first drum machines (in the early 1980s) to use digitally sampled drum sounds, the LM-1 and LinnDrum. In the years since, Linn teamed up with Akai to invent the MPC-series of drum machines/sequencers, and lately Linn has turned his attention to making… Continue reading
-
On Shivkumar Sharma
One of my favorite musicians is North Indian santoor player Shivkumar Sharma.* The santoor is a 72-string box zither of Persian origins. Here is a painting of Iranian women playing the santoor’s predecessor, the santur, circa 1669: Sharma was the first musician to use the instrument in North Indian classical music, giving his first performance in 1955. One plays… Continue reading
-
Music Blogging and Music Piracy
A few weeks ago, a number of prominent hip hop blogs were shut down by the US government (working on behalf of the Recording Industry Of America) for copyright infringement and selling counterfeit goods. What were the blogs doing that is so illegal? They regularly posted and offered for free download new music “leaked” to… Continue reading
-
Michael Chanan on “World Music”
Sometimes the best writing on music is done not by specialists, but rather by people who might be called generalists with a view and taste for the big issues that musical experience so often seems to frame. The English documentary filmmaker, writer, and teacher Michael Chanan is someone I would consider to be such a… Continue reading
-
Just A DJ In The Subway Or . . . ?
Well, this one threw me for a loop, but bear with my description . . . A useful way for a musician to promote his or her music AND a musical event is to bring it directly to the commuting public by performing in the subway. At Union Square this afternoon, a DJ demonstrated his audio finesse. (You can listen… Continue reading
brettworks 
You must be logged in to post a comment.