3 hour Dutch radio programme about Hennix's music from UbuWeb

"This latest addition to Die Schachtel's sublime Art Series is a largely neglected masterpiece from Swedish-born composer Catherine Christer Hennix, a disciple of LaMonte Young and Pandit Pran Nath during the 1970s. Although her music is largely unknown - even among the experimental music community - those who've been exposed to Hennix's work tend to rank her among the elite of American minimalist composers of the twentieth century.

The Electric Harpsichord (recorded in 1976) is talked about with the highest reverence by the avant-garde's cognoscenti, with Glenn Branca describing it as "a pure perfect piece of music" and "a work of transcendent power". Having embarked on her compositional career in the 1960s studying the techniques of Xenakis and Stockhausen, Hennix's musical bearing was jolted somewhat by the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970, where she first encountered LaMonte Young and Hindustani raga master Sri Faquir Pandit Pran Nath. Over the course of the ensuing decade, Hennix would study with both these men, and to many the piece reproduced on this disc is her magnum opus.

Made using keyboards tuned to just intonation and a tape delay feedback network based on Terry Riley's notion of the "time lag accumulator", the piece is a thing of sparkling psychedelic chaos, achieving that magical dichotomy between apparent narrative-shirking motionlessness and eternal flux. For all its droning stability on a 'macro' level, The Electric Harpsichord's continually recombining layers ensure it remains ceaselessly shifting in 'micro' terms. Significantly, none of this gets out of hand and you can still make out the individual pitches ebbing and flowing within the sound mass. Paying close attention reveals some incredible oceanic movements within the sound waves, and repeat listens reap considerable rewards.

This recording lasts twenty-five minutes, though in the strictest terms it should be considered as only a fragment of what the composition represents; in conceptual terms The Electric Harpsichord would be an endless, perpetual entity.

In support of the music itself, this release comes in a box that opens to reveal a 60-page booklet containing two LaMonte Young pieces written especially for this edition, plus an extensive essay by Henry Flynt (a close friend of Hennix) as well as some illuminating, if highly technical and abstract background text from Hennix herself, who reproduces excerpts from her "notes on the composite sine-wave drone over which The Electric Harpsichord is performed". This utterly absorbing and highly involved passage is just the thing to show drone music naysayers who think it's all just somebody holding a note for a really long time."

I've been after a copy of this for years. Hope some of the dosh goes to Hennix, who is, according to the Wire article, in need of the income. There should be pensions....

Fuzzy copy of the documentary.

Amazing. Kazimierz ‘Kazik’ Piechowski is a lucid and intense man of 90 who pulled off a superb escape from a concentration camp and Katy Carr has enshrined the critical moment in song.

Great news.

Short film about David Toop's work and the laptop orchestra

Nice, well documented, recordings of a 'collected' gamelan in a European museum. The author has provided wavs of each of the individual instruments in each of two contrasting gamelans. Copyright free for sampling provided original samples provided with derivative works.

William Furlong produced the Audio Arts series of tape cassettes for many years. Extracts from the master tapes are available from the tate's web site. Furlong interviewed many artists and sound artists for the cassette magazine. This is a short interview with John Cage.

Alpha software at present, the other end of the scale to Jokosher, looks more like logic pro to me, and supports plugins of many types.

A relatively easy sound recording and mixing program. You can install effects plugins as well. Available in the Ubuntu repository and for windows.

Kristin Hersch is selling a book of photos and lyrics. You obtain the associated music from this Web site, or purchase a download from amazon. You can download 'stems' (the separate vocal, guitar, bass tracks &c in stereo) for each of the songs on the album as 128Kb/s mp3 files.

Converting these to wavs and importing them into a DAW such as Ardour results in you being able to remix and apply effects to the separate tracks and alter the final sound of the track considerably. Nice idea, excellent way to demo open source software with professional material.

New York student radio station WKCR is running a Bach festival from today until New Year's Day. MP3 stream available, clear sound, no glitches!

When you are tired of the music, you could use it for file storage... 256Mb is about right for most assignments...

Lots of Piano as the owner states.

Nice music videos

"Monk said 'There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it'. He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano, because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it. It was like demystifying the sound, because there is a certain veneer to jazz and to any music, after a while it gets traffic rules, and the music takes a backseat to the rules. It's like aerial photography, telling you that this is how we do it."

Nice documentary on Monk and his Southern roots. NPR.

"The Pleyela/pianola master rolls were not recorded using a "recording piano" played by a performer in real time, but were instead true "pianola" rolls, cut mechanically/graphically, free from any constraints imposed by the ability of the player. Musicologist William Malloch observed that on these rolls the final section is at a considerably faster tempo, relative to the rest of the composition, than in the generally used orchestral score."

"Human DNA is made up of just four different chemical compounds, which gave musician Andrew Morley the idea of assigning a note to each of them."

"This work was first performed at a concert given by Bridgetower at the Augarten-Halle in Vienna on 24 May 1803, Beethoven himself playing the piano. The sonata was copied out from Beethoven’s original hurried notation, and was barely finished in time for the première. The piano part of the first movement was only sketched, and Bridgetower was required to read the violin part of the second movement from Beethoven’s manuscript." - Mike Phillips, essay about George Bridgetower

"Rita Dove, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former United States poet laureate, has now breathed life into the story of that virtuoso, George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, in her new book, “Sonata Mulattica” (W. W. Norton" - George Bridgetower's story has been told - in verse.

"Although it is dedicated to Rodolphe Kreutzer, who never performed it, and probably was not even aware of the dedication, this sonata was originally written for George Bridgetower, a mulatto (his father was African) English violinist who was living in Vienna. Beethoven and Bridgetower gave the first performance, but they later had some sort of disagreement and Beethoven changed the dedication to Kreutzer." There is a story here...

Classical music blog by Francisco Arriba of sex pistols cover image fame. Via On An Overgrown Path.

I'm listening to the CD transcription of a 1939 live recording of Bach's St Matthew Passion made using this system. Sounds remarkably clear. Only one microphone!

"...but there's a certain energy that goes into teaching people, it seems to me, and if you don't give them that energy, then you're immoral." -Steve Reich via On An Overgrown Path

via Sandow

A piano where the pitch of each note can be altered using a slider control up or down a whole tone (or there abouts) allowing different tunings to be explored.

I guess digital pianos ought to be able to do this (perhaps using the midi interface and software on a computer) but this one is the first acoustic piano design that can allow change in tuning.

How to get rid of those annoying gaps between tracks when playing opera on your mp3 player (sacrilege, I know, but its a question of time).

The sources of Mahler's text - original Chinese, Bethge's German, Mahler's modifications, English and French translations.

Belafonte and the price of Herring