'Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.'
Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?
Vogue, December 1958
What he said. [via lethebashar via alhasaart]
The music fiends and tech geeks among you no doubt followed Apple’s product announcement yesterday; I watched it on my phone. [Hey look, a major media company unafraid to provide high quality live video on a mobile platform!] Of the new offerings the one that immediately got my attention was Ping, an iTunes-based social music service. I am a longtime Last.fm user and have been frustrated that iTunes has never natively supported the ability to feed data to that service or others like Twitter. So now I’m trying out Ping:
After spending some time today with Apple’s new service I must admit I’m a bit disappointed. Ping has no browser version and apparently no open API or other feed mechanism, meaning profiles are essentially locked inside of iTunes. And I am completely shocked that in the set-up process I was never prompted to import my play history – I simply assumed that track plays would be a central element of the Ping profile. Other weak points as of now include the paltry selection of artists whose iTunes pages allow following and a paucity of options for finding other users.
Apple seems to envision Ping primarily as a platform for iTunes Store purchases. No doubt the record labels it works with appreciate that approach, but if the company continues to emphasize buying over sharing Ping may end up a marginal presence in social music.
Submitted by owms:
Thanks so much for the compliment, Alex. I’ll be doing my best to share something interesting from each of my concerts this coming symphony season so you should have ample opportunity to get to know my work!
Regarding Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard – they are available both on DVD and in book form. The latter is what I’ll be sending out next week to the winner of the Bernstein reblog giveaway.
The late great Frank Zappa – whose cross-genre work with the LA Phil I encountered as a kid – with his parents in that orchestra’s fair city in 1971.
Just one of many fabulous looks at the artist life from this week’s recommended Tumblr, I Hate Music!, a must follow if you are into those strange humans called musicians. Dig composers? F#%! Yeah! Curious about the maestro life? Frank has you covered. Speaking of covers, you might check out his record jacket archive. And don’t even mention Leonard Bernstein, whose 1943 song gave its title to this great blog.
Between score/part preparation deadlines and WCFSO auditions last week I managed to miss the anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth. Never too late to celebrate though, so Lenny is front and center for the first in a series of orchestra21 giveaways – the book version of his Harvard lectures, The Unanswered Question. Simply reblog one of my Bernstein posts by the end of the day this Friday and you’ll be entered into a drawing for the book, pictured below. I will contact the randomly selected winner over the weekend to arrange for delivery.
And if you just can’t wait for the book to arrive, here is a clip from the actual lectures:
Except that Stones Throw Records doesn’t need them so badly that it won’t celebrate the varied but unsanctioned remixing of one of its recent productions, Aloe Blacc’s I Need A Dollar.
Orchestras definitely need dollars – not to mention the kind of diverse audience interest that Stones Throw inspires – and we won’t attract either by locking down our media. Quite the opposite … we’ll know that we are relevant when recordings of our performances are out in the open and taken up for creative reuses of all kinds.
GPOYW Ready to be back at work with the WCFSO! edition
[Photo from a week of 2009 rehearsals by Noah Henscheid]
When I work on creating relevant, insightful and exciting orchestra concerts much of my effort is spent considering how to conceive of repertoire [content] and presentation [container] as one seamless unit. Turns out I’m not the only one preoccupied with this approach …
Robin Sloan, via Frank Chimero, on what it means to be a Media Inventor: It’s somebody primarily interested in content who also experiments with new technol ogy, new processes, and new formats. Fundamentally, I think, a media inventor is someone who isn’t satisfied with the suite of formats that have been handed down to him by his culture (and economy). Novel, novella, short story; album, EP, single; RPG, RTS, FPS—a media inventor doesn’t like those choices. It turns out a media inventor feels compelled to make the content and the container.
Followed up by Frank’s excellent gloss on the subject: The best part of Robin’s definition is the clarity of the first sentence. Media inventors aren’t making format changes for change’s sake. While it may be fun to tinker on a meta level, Media Inventors champion content. [Emphasis is Frank’s, but it could just as well be mine.] It’s the foundation, and every decision that leads to any sort of invention is done in an attempt to tell a better story, sing a better song, or make a more profound or fulfilling experience for an audience.
Typically broad-minded and inspirational thinking about media and the arts from designer Frank Chimero, whose blog I could happily recommend each Tumblr Tuesday.
![GPOYW Ready to be back at work with the WCFSO! edition
[Photo from a week of 2009 rehearsals by Noah Henscheid]](http://blog.jasonweinberger.com/photo/1280/1009234640/1/tumblr_l7prnpxJYc1qaocac)
