By Zoë Lang

This post addresses a topic that I’ve hoped to write about for a while: resources for listening to classical music online. I’m planning to stick to resources that are free (no iTunes) and accessible to anyone (no Naxos/Classical Music Library) as well as not potentially infringing on copyright (YouTube). For this post, I will discuss three of my favorites and welcome you to submit others. I’d like to investigate other possibilities for listening online, so please feel free to comment and leave more suggestions.

It is truly humbling to think about the sheer quantity of music that is at our fingertips today. Think about what was available a mere hundred years ago, when one had to rely on either what was playing at their local concert hall (and/or discussed in newspapers), what was in piano arrangements, or what could be studied in scores. Today, we can simply pull up whatever we want from some digital resource and investigate it, making copies onto our hard drives for future hearings. This freedom is unprecedented and astounding.

And yet, how many of us truly take advantage of this potential? It can be equally easy to fall into ruts, simply listening to the same pieces (or composers) as always. Even though I want to expand my knowledge of pieces, it becomes difficult to know where to begin. The same freedom of choice is also constricting in this respect. Attending concerts of an adventuresome orchestra can help redress this problem as well, but many groups are canon perpetuators as well. Also, unless one subscribes to a season, it is easy to fall into the trap of only attending concerts with favorite works, rather than seeking the new.

What I like about the following three resources — apart from the fact that they cost nothing — is the fact that they all encourage the listener to go beyond his/her knowledge of repertoire and explore new works. They do so by making access easy and providing a wide variety of choice. Also, from my experience, all are reliable (they don’t crash often) and have good quality performances. Here are my top three:

1) Klassik auf Klick from SWR 2. I subscribe to this weekly podcast and am alerted to a new recording every Monday from the SWR 2 archives. These recordings are available for free download for that week and can be heard at any time from the SWR 2 website. While these performances can feature canonic composers and works, they also explore lesser known pieces and composers. Either way, it’s a very convenient way of learning new repertoire when it simply appears in my Google Reader once a week. I do my best to keep up with the recordings, even listening to pieces that I (think I) know. For instance, recently Mendelssohn’s Trio in d minor was featured, which has never been one of my favorite works. The first movement is featured in the textbook that I use for teaching my music history survey and it never clicked with me. But the second movement — now that one I liked! Had I not listened to the recording, I wouldn’t have known about it at all, barring accidental attendance at a concert at which it was featured. I will admit that I often find myself loading Beethoven’s Opus 18, no. 5 for the umpteeth time, but I am pleased that this service makes it so easy to also hear works I don’t know.

2) The Schoenberg Center website. Apart from providing digital archives of the Schoenberg Center holdings and creating fun YouTube videos, the Schoenberg Center has also managed to make recordings easily accessible for all of Schoenberg’s works on their website as a ‘Jukebox.’ This is great! I find that it’s one of the easiest ways to get to know new works and explore pieces you might not know otherwise. If you are not familiar with the Schoenberg Center website, and especially the Jukebox, then I highly recommend that you investigate (and if you haven’t already seen that YouTube video, seriously, you really should).

3) Carnegie Hall Commissions. I stumbled upon this website accidentally once when I wanted to learn more about David Lang’s Match Girl Passion. Much to my surprise, not only did I learn more about this piece, but I could also hear the entire work online, for free. The same goes for most of the pieces that have been commissioned for Carnegie Hall since 2006. That is a whole lot of new music by many of the most influential composers working today. For free. There are also biographies of the composers and a wealth of interesting works. I especially liked Evan Ziporyn’s Sulvasutra, but I would encourage you to explore and find your own favorite.

The University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz announced a three-day symposion on Bodily Expression in Electronic Music.

Speakers include Isabel Mundry, Georgina Born, Federico Celestini, Andreas Dorschel, Deniz Peters, Alva Noe, Simon Emmerson, Pauline Oliveros, Gerhard Eckel, and Kendall Walton.

HYDRA @ Harvard

Friday, December 12 and Saturday, December 13
at 8:00pm in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall
Harvard University

The concerts will feature new work by students of Hans Tutschku’s _Electronic Composition_ and
_Electronics: Music and Space_ courses, plus performances of Iannis Xenakis’ Legende d’Eer (Friday), Bernard Parmegiani’s Capture Éphémère (Saturday), and Hans Tutschku’s Zwei Raume (Two Spaces) (Saturday).

There will be a reception following Saturday’s concert.
These concerts are free and open to all. Please join us!

*Hydra is comprised of 32 loudspeakers placed all around the concert hall, distributed both horizontally and vertically, in order to provide a wide range of sound planes and perspectives. Two control interfaces with 32 faders create the possibility to control in real time the individual loudspeakers, or groups of them, which are especially configured for each work performed. The main goal of this practice is to introduce another element of interpretation into the performance of electroacoustic music, allowing for greater expressive communication with audiences.

It is a pleasure to be writing for Zeitschichten!  Ironically, when I was asked to contribute by Matthias, I specifically said, ‘Sure, as long as I can write about something other than Stockhausen!’  Oh, the irony.

One of the disadvantages of teaching music post-World War Two can be difficulties in bringing recordings to class.  If what interests me, as a musicologist, differs from what interests the composition faculty at my institution, there may not be recordings in our library.  Furthermore, online databases, such as Classical Music Library, have significantly fewer 20th-century recordings, probably due to copyright issues (I would assume).

This morning, then, I found myself in a familiar predicament.  I want to play Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge in my class tomorrow as an example of electronic music (and a very interesting piece).  The only copies we have in our library are records from the original issue, and the classroom in which I teach has no record player.  What to do?

Happily, I stumbled upon Medien Kunst Netz, a website in German and English dedicated to media art, a broad category encompassing any interaction between a medium and art.  One of the tenets of this website is that the materials should be available for free to allow anyone to study them.  There is a recording of Gesang der Jünglinge, the score, and a sound profile that one can watch while listening to the piece.  The website also contains several interesting essays about media art, ranging widely from visual art, music, television, perception, and many other topics.

The problem as I see it is a lack of a sufficient search-engine for classical music on their site. How is Real hoping to win over classical music audiences, if those customers will not be able to find the music they are interested in?

Like with other music services, rhapsody’s native interface is geared mainly towards popular music, allowing for searches of artist, keyword, track, album, and composer. While it is thus possible to search for the composer “Johann Sebastian Bach,” the results one gets are absolutely useless, since the composer’s page lists all available albums (255) and tracks (6991) – way too many to browse as you will agree.

In addition, track titles are most often not overly informative. What is a user supposed to understand from a title like “Aria“? This kind of naming is fun when playing music quizzes at late-night musicological geek parties, but I doubt that most of us have subscribed to rhapsody for this very reason.

The lack of even rudimentary meta-data is accompanied by an equally annoying lack of meaningful listening and organizing tools. For instance, why a list of “most popular tracks” when it should be a list of “most popular works (or albums)?” In general what needs to be top priority at rhapsody.com is a list of works associated to each composer. For each work all of the recordings of that particular work should be listed. Combine this functionality with user tagging, commenting, and recommendations and you would have a killer application for classical music geeks.

What real/rhapsody should keep in mind is that as soon as we see easy-to-use networked music players which can be operated intuitively by everyone above 40, the market for online classical music services is going to explode. In general, people interested in this kind of music have a bigger buying power and are more willing to pay high prices for the music they consume. In order to win these customers the music industry (and rhapsody in particular) must develop better music players and online catalogues. As it stands right now the rhapsody.com website can’t even compete with the traditional print catalogue in my local CD store (no website, but yes, they still exist), both in terms of ease of use and comprehensiveness.

For those of you who are interested, I have written about this topic before.

What I find most compelling in their presentation is the idea to develop musical instruments that non-musicians can play. I am convinced that amateur participation will become a major segment of the changing music industry (GuitarHero and RockBand are only the tip of the iceberg) and the real question that I see from a professional point of view is: will this development have an impact on “actual” music making? Will people learn more traditional instruments because they are exposed to these new ways of participating in music? Or will traditional instruments become less and less popular? How is this development changing the ways in which professional musicians work? Will this movement result in a broader and deeper understanding of what music is and what it can do for peoples’ lives?

See for yourself and let me know what you think. Here is the video (and lots more at TED)

Btw: I think TED.com should have really put Adam Boulanger’s name in the title as well.

This is a very handy tool for those who live outside of Germany and have to miss all the interesting shows on WDR due to time differences etc.

Please let me know if there are any other interesting tools like this out there. Thanks!

Here is the link

The concert was part of the Fromm Concert Series at Harvard, which is curated by the German composer and electro-acoustic music specialist Hans Tutschku. The series will continue today with two more concerts. If you are in the area come by; from what I heard in the rehearsals today’s performances should be good, too! Here is the program:

CONCERT I, 8pm:
Jonathan Harvarey: Tombeau de Messiaen
Mario Davidovsky: Synchronisms No. 9
Vladimir Ussachevsky: Wireless Fantasy
Chaya Czernowin: Ina

INTERMISSION

Pierre Boulez: Dialogue de l’ombre double
Ezra Sims: Night Piece

CONCERT II, 11pm

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Oktophonie

All concerts take place in Paine Hall, Harvard University and are free! See you there!

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 Dissonanzen and Marc Ribot, whose Morning Scelsi was combined with several of Scelsi’s own compositions. While I was initially very enthusiastic about this idea, the performance itself turned out to be a let-down. First of all, Ribot’s music is not really ingenious, it’s not even convincing. Second, at times the performance was so loud that it started to be painful for one’s ears. What I liked about the evening, though, was the superb performance of the first two pieces from „Tre pezzi“ for saxophone by Scelsi.

Sauser aus Italien. Eine Urheberei

3) Scelsi/Marthaler/Klangforum Wien: Sauser aus Italien. Eine Urheberei. I saw this excellent production twice and if I had had the chance I would have gone a third time. Marthaler created a theater play around several of Scelsi’s pieces. The fine performance by the Klangforum Wien and the impressive playing by Marthaler’s family (as he calls his actors) was my personal highlight of the festival. Imagine a stage design that incorporates seemingly random items such as buddha statues, tape recorders, candles, oriental table linen, and antiquarian radios (in fact most of these things can also be seen on images taken in Scelsi’s study). This imaginary Scelsi-landscape is inhabited by strange characters who seem to be living in the same apartment block. The whole performance spans over the time of one day, starting with a surreal breakfast scene that features an essentially one-note piano piece by Scelsi and ending with a cocktail party that is accompanied by a Respighi (?) piece for orchestra. In the course of the day the characters listen to several pieces by Scelsi, and what’s really cool to observe for us are their reactions to the music. Sometimes they are delighted, sometimes their are frightened. They dance, dream, wonder, dislike and detest – the whole gamut of human reaction to music is there. Of course – one can ask, why do you have to create a theater play that goes along with contemporary music? The answer is: just for poetry’s sake. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Gidon Kremer

4) Gidon Kremer, Tatjana Grindenko, Mischa Maisky and Valery Afanassiev. It’s always the same problem when chamber music is performed by musicians who rarely play together. Delicate entries are seldomly together, the sound of the ensemble is often out of balance, and since many famous performers apparently have no time to practice, the difficult bits and pieces never quite work. The Brahms sonata No 3 in d minor (with Afanassiev) was completely obnoxious, as were the first two movements of the Bartok sonata for solo violin. The remainder of the evening was much better (second half of Bartok and the Prokofjew sonata for two violins) – at times even breathtakingly beautiful (the Shostakovic trio in e minor). This, by the way, is also typical for great performers: they know exactly which parts to practice and play well – it’s always the last piece of the evening that the audience keeps in mind. In this case, everyone will have the recollection of a wonderful chamber music evening.

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 librarians to help define the program’s scope and functionality. If you have an interest in working with music sources or if you are curating a collection of music manuscripts, you can help the project by sharing your thoughts and ideas about how the software could be of use for you or your institution.

The project makes use of an online collaboration platform on which we exchange our ideas, discuss our contributions, and share our results. The site is set up in such a way that anyone who is registered can edit all the pages and documents. While this open concept invites everyone to edit texts that were written by others, full credit will be given to each individual contribution via a revision control system.

If you are interested in joining the group I suggest that you register on the site. Once your account is set up you can start editing pages. On behalf of the group I look forward to welcoming you in our project!

You will find the project website at http://www.scribeproject.org.

If you have further questions please do not hesitate to contact me at roeder@fas.harvard.edu.

Yours sincerely,
Matthias Röder