Rhapsody.com still not useful for classical music listeners

As some of you may already know, rhapsody.com has added a mp3-store to its portfolio recently. While I welcome this move, especially since the mp3s are DRM-free, the main drawback with the service, namely its poor user interface, still remains an issue.
The problem as I see it is a lack of a sufficient search-engine for [...]

The Future of Music Making

Surfing the web today, I came across a very interesting talk by our music colleagues from the MIT Media Lab. In this video talk Tod Machover, Adam Boulanger, and Dan Ellsey give a quick overview on their work on new musical instruments and the impact that their research has on society.
What I find most compelling [...]

German Radio

For all you radio junkies out there check out the WDR RadioRecorder. This neat tool lets you record the streams of the WDR radio station to your computer. The big plus of this software is that you can select specific programs you wish to record via a clean interface. The program will then save the [...]

Mantra at Harvard

Yesterday we heard Stockhausen’s Mantra at Harvard. Frank Gutschmidt and Benjamin Kobler captivated their audience in a late-night performance that was colorful, precise, groovy, and overwhelmingly lucid. What I liked most about their interpretation was the sense of unity that they created; at times one had the feeling that all the music came from one [...]

Salzburg Wrap-up

Salzburger Festspiele

Ok, this year’s festival was a short one for me. I saw only a couple of performances but some of these were really excellent!
1) Grisey: Les Espaces Acoustiques. I’ve already written about that one on this blog.

Marc Ribot

2) Then there was this other concert from the Kontinent Scelsi series. An evening with the Ensemble [...]

The SCRIBE Project is online

Dear colleagues:
It is my pleasure to invite you to SCRIBE, an interdisciplinary and open research group that develops a software system for searches of music manuscripts by handwriting similarity.
The group is designed as an open collaboration between individuals, which means that anyone is welcome to join.
At the moment the project is seeking music scholars and [...]

Musimathics

This might be the book I’ve been waiting for: http://www.musimathics.com/

Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music

From May 18 - 20, the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung will host the inaugural conference of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music (SMCM). The conference will feature a diverse set of promising papers on topics such as Metalanguage and Representation, Computational Models in Music Psychology, Mathematical Approaches to Composition, Mathematical Approaches to Musical [...]

Free Mozart Edition Online

The Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (ISM) has launched the free online version of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA). The website contains scans of the complete works of Mozart as well as the accompanying critical commentaries. Check out the site at http://dme.mozarteum.at/.
In a next step the ISM will work on a new Digital Mozart Edition that will [...]

What Rhapsody is lacking

Real Rhapsody is a music subscription service that I have been using for quite a while now. It features millions of pop songs, jazz tunes, and classical works. The catalogue is pretty amazing, rarely do they not have what I am looking for. All it takes to listen to days of music is a broadband [...]

A Music Search Engine

UMI is a good thing. If you ask them nicely they will send you information about and links to all the newly uploaded doctoral dissertations in North America. Today I came across an interesting thesis from McGill University by Ian Knopke (reference below). Ian worked on a music search engine that, unlike the standard search [...]