This is the blog archive for December 2007 arranged in ascending date order.
rchrd
Richard Friedman, Oakland, CA, works at
Sun
Microsystems, is a Director of
Other
Minds, wrote his first computer program
in 1962 for the IBM
650. It played dice.
He also takes a lot of photographs, composes music, and does a weekly
radio program on KALW called Music
From Other Minds.
The real-time view
from the left edge of the continent.
I had the opportunity last week to visit the offices of Pandora (pandora.com), the music streaming service.
Seems that finally someone out there on the internet has discovered my New York City pictures and posted them on the NYC-related blog Gothamist.com:
Reading the comments is just making my day.
Somehow this slipped past my radar, but one of the great photojournalists (and my silent hero) Fred McDarrah passed away on Nov 6th, a few hours after his 81st birthday.
McDarrah was the photographer for the Village Voice for decades, and he chronicled Greenwich Village during the beat and hippy periods. His work is iconic, and so many images we have in our minds about that time are branded in our brains in black and white.
Here's an obit in the VVoice by Tom Robbins: link
Some of McDarrah's iconic images are at the Steven Kasher gallery in NYC
The VVoice also has a slide show of his work.
His books can be found here.
Like the rest of that era, it's all slip-sliding away.
The song of holy thanks for recovering good health, in the Lydian mode, from Beethoven's A minor quartet, #15, opus 132 (1825). At the time LvB was completely deaf, and could hear only his own imagination.
Continue reading "For Beethoven's Birthday" »
At Last! A new recording on Harmonia Mundi of Stockhausen's STIMMUNG (1968) just arrived in my mailbox! The last recording, by the British Singcircle appeared in 1983. This new release, with Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices, sounds quite different than that earlier recording in many ways. It's referred to as the "Copenhagen version", because Theatre of Voices has taken residence in Copenhagen.
For one thing, the sound quality is excellent. The pace is much slower, much more meditative. It runs 78 minutes while the Singcircle performance is eight minutes shorter.
And the best thing is the program booklet with Paul Hillier's wonderful notes. Hillier was one of the singers in the Singcircle performances.
The blurb on the cover says: Paris, 1968: with the premiere of Stimmung, Stockhausen redefined the very notion of what vocal music is. This series of sonic sequences, entirely built on the overtones of B flat in multiple combinations, embraces new musical techniques and explores the inner world of speech and song. Paul Hillier, a specialist in contemporary vocal repertoire, proves in his new recording that this milestone of 20th-century music is still as relevant as ever.
I couldn't agree more. This is a significant work from that period, and now in a new and fresh recording and interpretation. I first heard it in Paris in 1971 performed by Collegium Vocale (the "Paris version") and was immediately transfixed. I still am.
Below is a picture I snapped at the October 1971 performance by Collegium Vocale I attended at the Theatre de Ville, Paris.
Paul Dirmeikis gives his account of Stockhausen's funeral last week.
