There are other ancestral ghosts hidden in the Western canon. When Bach set lines from the Song of Songs in his cantata Wachet auf, he drew on a tradition that goes back at least as far as the Sumerian hymns written by the world’s first known composer, Enheduanna, in the third millennium BC. Likewise, the 6/8 time of the final movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is African in origin, brought into Europe through popular dances in the 15th century.
Tag: music
White boys trying K-Pop
the philosophical questions in the video are very interesting. in a global culture, things will get blurry.
Do You Love Me?
Ambient japanese music
Old, ambient Japanese music became a smash hit. obscure chillout tunes are becoming popular again due to being featured in situational playlists.
Japan phone rests
You placed the receiver atop the cradle, and the weight of the receiver pressed the large button in the center. That activated a wind-up music box. This was a super low-tech way to put a caller on “hold” and treat them to a little ditty while you hustled off to find Matsumoto-san or whomever they were calling for.
Bardcore
With time to burn during ye olde pandemic, practitioners of a musical genre called bardcore have been taking pop songs and medieval-izing their lyrics and tunes.
Jukebox
We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.
Hagia Sophia Music
The marble interior of Hagia Sophia was 70 meters long, while in height it reached 56 meters at the apex of the great dome. The vast chamber and its reflective surfaces of marble and gold resulted in unprecedented acoustics of over 10 seconds reverberation time.
Musical Surgery
A patient at a British hospital played Mahler and Gershwin on the violin while a tumour was removed from her brain so that surgeons could preserve her ability to play music and honor her 40-year passion for the instrument. This takes “I’m fully awake during my surgery” to a new level.
Senior songs
You're so engaging, but we're both aging
At age 99 Alan Tripp wrote a poem called “Best Old Friends” to celebrate the many new friends he made at Beaumont at Bryn Mawr, the Pennsylvania retirement community where he lives. As a gift for Alan’s 100th birthday, his younger friend and neighbor, 88 year-old Marvin Weisbord, set the poem to music. That was the spark that launched Senior Song Book with this dynamic songwriting duo, and inspired a whole community to sing, dance and perform along with them
Gregor J. Rothfuss 