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Pandora - Find New Music, Listen to Custom Internet Radio StationsCan you help me discover more music that I’ll like?

Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we [...]

Study: legal music far outweighs P2P on portable music players: Only two years ago we were told that 'stolen' was the most common format on digital music players. A new study suggests that this is far from the truth. (Via Ars Technica.)

Without knowing the methodology of the original study, this is difficult to evaluate, but it agrees qualitatively with what I see in my immediate circle. I wonder to what extent the decay of P2P downloads may be an indirect effect of fear of malware, especially since so many of the P2P programs have been notorious for adware and spyware with security and stability risks. Are malware writers RIAA's best friends?

Rather pointedly titled article, but there is some truth in the matter. Actually, the point seems to be that iPod users are reading existing CDs into AAC or mp3 formatto be used on iPods. There is nothing wrong with this.

I have almost 400 CDs worthof music on my iPod (20 GB version). Of those tracks about one tenth werebought from the iTunes store. The rest I read from CDs. In fact, I hardlylisten to CDs any more. Although I still buy CDs (when they are cheaper the iTunes Storeor not available there), I read them right away to the iPod.

Lst weeked I converted the tracks which were in mp3 format to AAC formatto conserve disk space. About 7 GB worth of music got converted, which resulted insavings of about 2 GB. So now I can fit more music to the iPod, as there is free space for about 50 albums or so.
read more:

Two months ago, Sony released the new Jessica Simpson single in MP3 through Yahoo! Music. This week, Variety (via PaidContent) reports that Disney-owned Hollywood Records will release Jesse McCartney's full album in MP3. It seems that some major record label execs may finally be coming to their senses:

'We're trying to be realistic,' said Ken Bunt, senior VP of marketing at Hollywood Records. 'Jesse's single is already online and we haven't put it out. Piracy happens regardless of what we do. So we're going to see how Jesse's album goes (as an MP3) and then decide on others going forward.'

Kudos to Yahoo! for making progress on this front, even if this is just a baby step in the right direction by the major record labels. DRM won't stop or even meaningfully slow 'Internet piracy.' And after years of pushing for improved compatibility with DRM formats, the record labels have witnessed more, not less, balkanization of music services and devices. If the record labels really care about making sure their customers can play music on the devices of their choice, the only solution that plays-for-sure is an open, unencrypted format like MP3.

(Cross-posted at DeepLinks)

Alan Bush's Concert Piece for Cello and Piano, Op. 17 (1936) is to be featured in next year's Manchester International Cello Festival which will take place from Wednesday 5th to Sunday 9th May 2004, in association with The BBC and in aid of The Pierre Fournier Award.

The work will be included in the Young Artist Recital at 1pm on Saturday 8th May 2004 and will be performed by the Chinese / Australian cellist, Liwei Qin.

Concert Piece for Cello and Piano, performed by Joseph Spooner (cello) and Catherine Summerhayes (piano), is included on the excellent CD by the Summerhayes Piano Trio - Alan Bush: Chamber Music Volume 1 issued on the Meridian label in 2002.

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The Edna Iles Memorial Concert in May 2003 will feature Alan Bush's Nocturne for Piano (Op. 46).

Edna Iles, one of the leading British pianists of the early 20th century who died aged 97 in January 2003, gave the first performance of Nocturne at a MacNaghten Concert in London in March 1958. The first two movements were withdrawn after this first performance and the whole work was later orchestrated by the composer as Variations, Nocturne and Finale on an English Seasong (Op. 60). Nocturne is intended to evoke the nostalgia of a long sea voyage.

The piano version will be performed by Duncan Honeybourne at this concert in memory of Edna Iles, which includes music by Beethoven, Ernst Bloch, Chopin, Medtner and Rachmaninov.

The concert takes place at 7.30pm on Thursday, 8th May 2003 at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Margaret Street, Birmingham, UK.
Tickets are £8 (Concessions £6).

• Microsoft Media Player shreds your rights: 'Think DRM was bad already? Think I was joking when I said the plan was tostart with barely tolerable incursions on your rights, then turn thethumbscrews? Welcome to Windows Media Player 11, and the rights get chippedaway a lot more.'
• Microsoft DRM To Get Even Tighter: 'I think I'm going to wait for Windows Media Player 12 to come out, whichreportedly will include DRM that doesn't let you listen to your music atall. All the major recording labels are on board with this format, so we mayfinally get a realistic alternative to iTunes without the clumsy Mac-likeinterface. Plus, it won't cost much more per track than the average iTunessong now. There will also be more visualizations included to help youimagine what the music you're playing actualy sounds like.'

The Trust are delighted to announce the release of a new CD of four chamber works by Alan Bush, representing the early and late phases of the composer's career. All the works are unpublished and none of them have been recorded previously. Two of the early works on the CD - Phantasy for Violin and Piano and Quartet for Strings and Piano (two movements only) - had their first public performances in December 1924 in Hampstead Town Hall, London, with Bush playing the piano parts. The Sonata for Cello and Pianoforte, written about 60 years after the other works, is along with Bush's Sonata for Organ Op.122 (1987), thought to be his last work.

The music is performed on the CD by the London Piano Quartet, formed in 2000 by Norma Liddell, Elizabeth Turnbull, David Kennedy and Philip Fowke, all distinguished performers in their own fields. The Quartet has quickly made a name for itself through the players' relaxed style and informative presentation. It has premièred and recorded works by other British composers in addition to a concert repertoire of piano quartets by many major composers.

The CD is accompanied by an excellent, very informative sleeve-note by Timothy Bowers, who studied composition with Bush at the Royal Academy of Music and is now himself a well-known composer and professor at the RAM. The Trust owe him another debt of gratitude in that Dr. Bowers prepared the manuscript edition of the Sonata for Cello and Pianoforte, used by the artists on this CD.

On 14th April 2002 English Sinfonia, conducted by Philip Ellis, performed Bush's Homage to William Sterndale Bennett for String Orchestra Op. 27 (1947) in a programme which included music by Haydn, Mozart and Weber.

Formed in the early 1960's, by the conductor Neville Dykes, the orchestra has been based in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, since 1997. It deservedly enjoys a good reputation and an enthusiastic following.

The orchestra, led by Janice Graham (violin), played Bush's lyrical piece very well and all the works were warmly received by the audience.

Bush's work is based on a theme from the Piano Sonata "The Maid of Orleans", composed by Sterndale Bennett who was Principal of the Royal Academy of Music in the mid-19th century.

The work was first performed at the Wigmore Hall on 9th February 1946 by the London String Orchestra, conducted by the composer. The Times Critic wrote at the time: "If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Bush must surely share Schumann's admiration for this rarely played composer...his music has so captured...Bennett's own virginal romanticism as to be almost indistinguishable from it". The Observer described the work as "a most charming and wistful fantasy on motives from this forgotten romantic composer". How ironic that Sterndale Bennett's music is now enjoying a revival, whilst Bush's work is neglected!

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Wednesday 26th November 2003 at 7.30pm Bowdon Rooms, The Firs, Bowdon, Manchester.

Nicholas Ward

The Northern Chamber Orchestra, led by its Artistic Director Nicholas Ward, will perform Alan Bush's English Suite for String Orchestra in Manchester on 26th November, in a programme of music for strings spanning 200 years. Formed in 1967, the NCO has a formidable reputation throughout the North West of England. Playing without a conductor, the ensemble members are all distinguished musicians who play as principals with other orchestras and regularly appear as soloists.

In 1994 the NCO recorded Bush's English Suite - one of his more important works - on a CD for Redcliffe Recordings, Music by Alan Bush. You can listen to the Passacaglia movement on the Listen section of the website.

The Alan Bush Music Trust are delighted to announce the Trust's latest project and to ask for your help in raising funds for the issue of a CD, to be released in the Summer of 2004, of Alan Bush's Symphony No. 1 in C (Op. 21) (1940) and Symphony No.2 ("The Nottingham Symphony") (Op. 33) (1949), performed by the Royal Northern College of Music Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra will be conducted by Douglas Bostock. The recording will take place in February 2004.

Douglas Bostock

The Royal Northern College of Music Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Douglas Bostock who is internationally renowned, will also perform Bush's Nottingham Symphony at a concert at the Royal Northern College in Manchester on Friday 6th February 2004. We hope that as many lovers of Bush's music as possible will attend this concert!

The CD will be issued on the Danish Classico label as part of their long-running "British Symphonic Collection". The recording company under the guidance of Douglas Bostock and their repertoire consultant, Lewis Foreman, have taken a particular interest in recording British music of the 20th century.

This will be a wonderful opportunity to further public awareness of Bush's symphonic works, following on from the great critical success enjoyed by the CDs of his music issued during 2002 - with more CDs to come this year and in 2004.

Those who send a donation of at least £15 will automatically receive a copy of the CD upon its release in 2004.

Early this week, in an email to a coworker, I mentioned that I made music and pointed her to my site. On Thursday she wrote back and said “cool, you’re even on iTunes!” This surprised me; my two albums were submitted about 3 and 8 weeks ago and hadn’t shown up on iTunes as of Monday or so. But I looked, and indeed, there they both are on iTunes. For those of you who’ve heard the music, I’d appreciate a customer review. For those of you who haven’t, what are you waiting for? :-) Of course there are also old-fashioned shiny discs in plastic cases. Thanks!

Last modified: 24 June 2006, 19:18

WSJ: Free, Legal and Ignored. The subhead says it all: Colleges Offer Music Downloads, But Their Students Just Say No; Too Many Strings Attached. The article is about the unsurprising-to-anyone-except-Napster miserable failure of subscription based music services to take hold in universities. Compared to the complicated barrage of restrictions on the music offered by Napster, the students come across as models of common sense:

• While Cornell's online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. "After I read that, I decided I didn't want to even try it," says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall...
• Purdue University officials say that lower-than-expected demand among its students stems in part from all the frustrating restrictions that accompany legal downloading. Students at the West Lafayette, Ind., school can play songs free on their laptops but have to pay to burn songs onto CDs or load them onto a digital music device.
• "People still want to have a music collection. Music listeners like owning their music, not renting," says Bill Goodwin, 21, who graduated in May from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. USC decided last year that it was finished with Napster after fewer than 500 students signed up...

There’s also a telling quotation from the director of the Campus Computing Project, who says, “The RIAA’s push to buy into these services strikes me as protection money. Buy in and we’ll protect you from our lawsuits,” which is one of the kinder descriptions of the unfriendliness of the industry that I’ve read lately.

I’m still waiting for someone in the industry to wake up and understand that their path to profitability lies in supporting good music and making their rich back catalogs available, not in fighting the fans of music tooth and nail. Today, three years after the birth of the iTunes Music Store, there are still many albums and tracks that can’t be found anywhere online—some by major artists (just try tracking down any non-album Sting tracks from before the late 90s), some by minor artists on major labels (Annabouboula, anyone?), and some by great cultural figures (I’d gladly pay through the nose for access to e.e. cummings’s Six Nonlectures as digital files, or even on CD). Instead we get American Idol and Rock Star. What, no one ever told these guys that a steady diet of candy can kill you?

BTW, for a good counterexample, check out Verve’s deep catalog—including a bunch of rare Impulse! recordings—though they don’t quite get it right; they support both iTunes and Windows Media, but no DRM-free offerings. But at least they’re opening up their catalog.

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The music critic Ivan March has selected the new Alan Bush Claudio CD as his Critic's choice of the year in Gramophone Magazine, December 2002.In the November 2002 issue he reviews both the Claudio CD, which features the Violin Concerto and Dialectic, and Chamber Music Volume 1 by the Summerhayes Trio.He says of both discs "I cannot recommend them too highly".

MusicWeb also has two other reviews of the Claudio CD, both very favourable.
Rob Barnett's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Sept02
Peter Grahame Woolf's review can be seen at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Oct02

There is also a review in the orchestral section of International Record Review, December 2002.

  Listen to tracks from the Claudio CD
The Violin Concerto CD can be purchased from Claudio Records

Also on MusicWeb, Chamber Music Vol. 1 was featured as recording of the month for November 2002.
See the review by Rob Barnett at:
www.musicweb.uk.net/classrev/2002/Dec02

There are other reviews of the CD in International Record Review (December 2002) by Piers Burton-Page and BBC Music Magazine (December 2002) by Michael Oliver.

Piers Burton-Page writes "...a superb CD...these new recordings of his chamber music, convincingly played, excellently engineered and attractively presented...should be on everyone's shopping list".

Michael Oliver says "There is very little British Chamber Music of the Thirties that approaches the intensity, passionate eloquence and intellectual rigour of his Concert Piece, very little from the Forties that can be compared with his Three Concert Studies for exciting economical power and an expressiveness all the more profound for its restraint".

  Listen to tracks from Chamber Music Volume 1
Chamber Music Volume 1 can be purchased from Crotchet Records