April 2012
43 posts
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March 2012
37 posts
“It’s a little misleading to say three fingers. It’s actually two fingers, middle...”
– Banjo player Earl Scruggs talked to Terry Gross about his signature picking method. (via nprfreshair)
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nprmusic:
The Brooklyn Philharmonic invited...
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“At one point, when Theodore Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York, he...”
– The story of the Thomashefskys, stars of the Yiddish stage. (via nprfreshair)
A documentary of the Thomashefskys airs tonight on PBS! We have several Yiddish movies in the Main Library, if you’re interested in seeing some.
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“[Alan Lomax] imagined a tool that would integrate thousands of sound recordings,...”
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Joel Rose reports on how volunteers have realized the folklorist’s Global Jukebox dream. (via nprmusic)
As you know, we really love Alan Lomax and the recordings he made. This 5 minute segment explains the Global Jukebox digitization process (17,400 recordings, all available free online. After...
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The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual...
Today’s book is a collection of essays on opera called The work of opera: genre, nationhood, and sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 1997) edited by Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin. Although this isn’t new, it’s still a good resource.
Dellamora and Fischlin felt strongly moved by the AIDS epidemic being constructed as a “sexual plague” and how...
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Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
Writer and activist Ellen Willis spent years critiquing popular/rock music for the New Yorker (in addition to writing occasionally for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice) during the ’60s and ’70s, and was one of the first music critics to do so on a large scale.
Willis especially loved counterculture musicians, like Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, unsurprising when you consider her...
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Listening through the noise: the aesthetics of...
Oxford University Press came out recently (well, in 2010) with a new book by Joanna Demers called Listening through the noise: the aesthetics of experimental electronic music. Demers looks at electronic music since 1980, examining the huge variety of genres and subgenres in electronic music.
From the back of the book:
The abilities of electronic music to use preexisting sounds and to create...
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Watchnprmusic:
Watch video from Julia Holter’s first-ever public New York City performance, including the dreamy “Moni Mon Amie” rendered in torch song at the baby grand piano. You can also download the entire concert recorded live from Le Poisson Rouge.
Holter has a wonderful voice. A beautiful video
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Watchnprmusic:
The best reason to hate Bach’s Goldberg Variations—aside from the obvious reason that everyone asks you all the time which of the two Glenn Gould recordings you prefer—is that everybody loves them. Not a moment goes by when someone doesn’t release a new recording, accompanied by breathless press. They’re like a trendy bar that (infuriatingly) keeps staying trendy. Yes, I’m suspicious...
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Watchnypl:
Did you miss Meshell Ndegeocello at The Schomburg Center a few weeks ago? Watch this great video that exudes the spirit of the evening. The Schomburg’s Women’s Jazz Festival continues tonight, as some of New York’s best female jazz musicians come together to pay homage to the great jazz and blues greats, while next Monday, a group of performers play from the Bernice Johnson Reagon...
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Africa and the Blues
One of our latest books is a favorite of music faculty Toby King. Written in 1999 by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues comes from academic roots yet is very accessible to non-academics. Kubik talks a look at blues an its origins, with traits coming from Africa and various mutations occurring all over the Americas.
Kubik’s work goes back over fifty...
