The big news today is that NPR and 12 NPR Member stations are launching NPR Music, a free, comprehensive multimedia music discovery Web site, that features on-air and online content aggregated from NPR and the participating stations as well as original-to-NPR Music materials such as interviews, reviews, blogs and live performances. The press release goes on to note that specific sections of the site are dedicated to rock/pop/folk, classical, jazz/blues, world and urban music. In each genre, program and subject area, users can explore NPR’s and the stations’ renowned music journalism; intimate interviews and studio sessions with artists and bands;
Read moreFor your Thursday dining and dancing pleasure: [youtube]ARqKIw3vV3E[/youtube]
Read moreToday’s assignment: the perfect ghosts and goblins playlist.
Read moreThe New York Philharmonic is thinking of visiting North Korea next year and that has caused a great deal of tut-tutting from the nuke ’em, don’t serenade ’em crowd. The conservative position was captured rather nicely by Terry Teachout in a piece called Serenading a Tyrant in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday: “Why … is the New York Philharmonic giving serious consideration to playing in Pyongyang, the capital of what may be the world’s most viciously repressive dictatorship?” he wrote. “Attendance at the Philharmonic’s concerts will be carefully controlled. And of course any concert in Pyongyang can’t possibly reach the North Korean people, because only
Read moreHey, I think you and your readers at sequenza21 will like this piece we just published, by Richard Taruskin: It’s a provocative argument that the dire situation in which classical music finds itself is being made even more dire by the sentimentality and unreality of some of the music’s most ardent defenders. Here’s a link. Best, Barron YoungSmith The New Republic
Read moreSeveral good reasons to be glad you weren’t a child prodigy. Oops, forgot. Some of you probably were. Morton Subotnick. Discuss.
Read moreNorman Lebrecht is an entertaining writer who has never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Come to think of it, he may have been the world’s first blogger–he adopted the sloppy research habit before blogs were even invented. For years, he’s been planting verbal IEDs along the classical music highway, wiping out entire convoys of evildoers and occasionally fragging some innocent bystanders in the process. So, it is with some smugness that one is able to report this morning, or the New York Times is able to report, that Stormin’ Norman has had a bit of a comeuppance. The Brtisih publisher of his
Read moreFrom the NYT: After Radiohead announced it would allow fans to download its album for whatever price they chose, about a third of the first million or so downloads paid nothing, according to a British survey. But many paid more than $20. The average price was about $8. That is, people paid for something they could get for free.
Read moreDid you ever wonder why doctors think it’s a good idea for a bunch of sick people to wait together for their exams in a small, overheated, unventilated room? Or why drugstores invariably put the cough medications in the aisle where people are waiting to pick up their prescriptions? No? Well, I do. Think of these things, I mean. But, I digress and I’m late checking in today. Here’s a new rule for those of you with frontpage posting ability. If you don’t see something from me by noon Eastern, feel free to jump in there and mix and stir. If you don’t have frontpage posting rights, let me
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