Lex Ferenda

The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross has just been published in the UK (and received the National Book Critics’ Circle award for criticism this weekend. It’s a lengthy survey of 20th century ‘classical’ music, with a lot of mini-biography and history thrown in. The approach is social history rather than music theory, I suppose, so don’t expect to see crochets and quavers!

I got a copy of the US edition for Christmas and I read it slowly over the course of about a month, and enjoyed it; seeing the reviews this week is therefore very interesting. The Observer says that it is a “vital, engaging, happily polyphonic book” but takes some shots at the US-centric nature of some aspects that resemble a Bush-style ‘messianic imperialism’. On An Overgrowth Path (a must-read music blog) talks about the book and links to BBC Radio 3 coverage. I think it’s a wonderful book; in my view, the last couple of chapters are too rushed (we chug along happily and then around the mid-50s the speed takes off and then we’re done, and a little more about music technology would have been very appropriate. Footnote fanatics note: 100 pages of small-print notes that I’m still getting ideas from, although you’d expect no less from the New Yorker’s music critic!

Anyway, Ross has a long-running blog and has been posting video links, audio clips etc ; you could lose yourself for hours in this site, and then when you’re finished, subscribe to the blog too…

My post previewing the RTÉ Living Music Festival and its programme of works by Arvo Pärt has been getting quite a lot of hits, mainly through Google searches. If you stuck around, this post may interest you.

Indeed, I hope that those of you who passed through here actually managed to get some tickets after all! Every event over the weekend was sold out; Lyric FM’s Bernard Clarke said about Friday night’s concert that it attracted “the most diverse audience you have ever seen at a contemporary music concert”. Due to a combination of other commitments and early sellouts, I attended two concerts, the National Symphony Orchestra/Philharmonic Choir/Joanna McGregor on Friday (Lamentate, Berliner Messe, Credo) and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra on Sunday (Collage uber B-A-C-H, Passacaglia, Tabula Rasa, Wenn Bach Bienen gezuchtet hatte, and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, and a - fascinating, haunting and intriguing - new commission by David Fennessy, This Is How It Feels (Another Bolero). Both concerts were excellent, and in particular I was impressed at how different the works were (I wasn’t familiar with all of them) and how the concentrated period of listening meant that you could really get a sense of the different parts (no pun intended) of the composer’s career to date. (I also came away with a DVD and CD which I thought was pretty restrained under the circumstances). While I think that works like Spiegel im Spiegel (performed at another concert this weekend) are wonderful and compelling (and I could listen to that piece over and over), it’s reassuring that RTÉ did not rely on this ’style’ alone, but explore everything from the familiar Cantus to the recent works like Lamentate and Passacaglia to the early (and often chaotic) Credo, probably one of the most unusual things that the Philharmonic Choir has done in many years.

I can certainly confirm and endorse the common view that there was really some atmosphere at these concerts - and a lot more discussion/chitchat/explanation about the music between strangers in the audience. Pärt was present and was greeted with the appreciation he deserved (lengthy standing ovations all round); he even was kind enough to sign autographs, including for this shy listener!

More from Karlin Lillington, Sinéad Gleeson, Annette Clancy; Shane Hegarty of the Irish Times was at the separate concerts in Co. Louth last week (and also came away with a signed programme).

Most importantly : RTÉ has been improving its website - and you can now ‘listen again’ to concerts broadcast (live or delayed) on Lyric FM for a week after it is broadcast. So that means that you have until this Friday coming to hear last Friday’s concert. Sunday’s concert was broadcast as part of the regular contemporary music show Nova, and can be heard again here. Both require RealPlayer. While it’s not a high-quality stream, it should be a taster and an encouragement and a way to relive memories!

To add to the existing US site (IP and IT conferences at Madisonian), special thanks must go to Jordan Hatcher for the already-invaluable UK (”and beyond”) IPITevents site. Go, subscribe, and buy a drink for Jordan when you see him.

One thing listed (and passed to me via email, too), looks particularly interesting:

Musicians, fans and online copyright
2pm, 19 March, London School of Economics

Is home downloading killing music? Should Internet Service Providers
monitor customers to try and spot copyright infringement, and
disconnect downloaders? Do musicians need new laws to benefit from
the opportunities of the Internet?

Join us at this FREE event to debate these questions and more with
leading copyright thinkers from the music world, government, consumer
groups and universities. Confirmed speakers include John Kennedy (CEO
of IFPI), Paul Sanders (CEO of PlayLouder), Becky Hogge (Open Rights
Group), Lilian Edwards (Southampton University), Rufus Pollock
(Cambridge University) and Michelle Childs (Knowledge Ecology
International).

Unfortunately I can’t make it over to London (I’m off to Glasgow the following week for BILETA), but if you’re around, you should go. Great group of speakers.

Finally, advance notice (or registration reminder) that the Berkman Center’s 10th anniversary conference is taking place on May 15th-16th in Cambridge, MA (of course). This one, all things going well, I will be at, and registration is open, with a generous discount for students, if you are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be one.

Just a quick comment and then a roundup of comments on the Promusicae decision of last week. Read the decision here from the European Court of Justice (alternative link).

In this case, the question was whether the European directives on copyright law and on electronic commerce (and relevant provisions of the new Charter of Fundamental Rights) required a member state to provide for the disclosure (by ISPs, to rights holders) of the identities of Internet users. And the answer, it seems, is that, in the context of other European directives on privacy and data protection and those fundamental rights again, such is not *required*, although it’s not entirely clear whether member states are *permitted* to do so anyway. Such is reserved for another day, with the general warning that the factors are the various directives, fundamental rights, and proportionality. That means, though, that the local court (Spain) has to figure out whether the disclosure is justified in this particular case (it was, in that characteristic feature of European Union law, a preliminary reference to the ECJ). I did comment on Damien’s post back in the summer that the opinion of the Advocate General was just that - an opinion - but it seems that the Court has followed it quite closely.

The Irish caselaw on this point is an ex tempore decision, EMI v Eircom. The position here is thus that details can be handed over with a court order. I wonder if there is any scope for a future case along similar lines being heard in the context of the more detailed criteria set out by the ECJ? Certainly, the situation in that case was not a satisfactory hearing of all the legal issues (including the fundamental rights or proportionality impact) that one would think that the ECJ’s line would now demand. (However, if I understand it correctly, the court’s power to grant such an order is a common law one (albeit in the context of the copyright offences where they exist), not flowing directly from copyright law nor from the EU directives as implemented domestically?)

• Content and Carrier
  
• IP Kitten
• OutLaw
• Technollama
• Ray Corrigan
• Lilian Edwards

So, the new Science Gallery (based on the Trinity College campus where I live and work) is now open. Its first festival/series of events is Lightwave, and the campus is all aglow with various tie-in lights (including the projected signage pictured, right; this one is the wall of the Koralek-designed 1960s Berkeley Library where the law library is located). We’ll pass over the impact of all the generators during Campus Green Week and hope that they run on recycled chip fat or something…

The Gallery itself is small in size, but big in ambition and scope. For example, this week’s festival includes a whole range of talks, walks, events and demos; most are related to light (you’ve just missed some stuff on rock concert visuals, would love to have seen that) but there’s more to come, and other things too in the general science-and-society vibe that is in my view one of the most important areas that the Gallery must work in. In that regard, I’m looking forward to this talk (tickets necessary, €5) on Thursday night, if I can make it :

What are the factors and conditions that contribute to innovation? How are important problems found and solved? How can insights from the arts, science and creative industries be leveraged by business to develop an innovation environment? The Science Gallery presents a unique opportunity to discuss the next generation of idea-environments with David Edwards, founder of Paris’s Le Laboratoire and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University, Colm Long, Director of EMEA Online Sales & Operations at Google and leading Irish American venture capitalist Terry Maguire and facilitated by Irish Times technology columnist, Karlin Lillington. The talk coincides with the launch of David Edwards’ new book ‘ArtScience: Creativity and the post-Google Generation’ (Harvard University Press 2008). The talk will be followed by a book signing. (taken from a bit of the website that I can’t deeplink to, and link to book added by me)

Another outpost of Lightwave is further down the river at Grand Canal Dock (home to the Martha Schwartz-designed square at the original dock*, soon to be home to a theatre designed by Daniel Liebeskind and much more besides). The Schwartz square itself has a strong light theme (including bright red poles sticking up into the sky) and added to the mix for the week is The Hive (KMA), a sound and light installation (using a lot of Philip Glass or something that sounds like him!) that is pictured (cameraphone, with tweaking), left. It involved projection of beams on the ground and a lot of hyperactive children and a sensor…


Anyway, check it all out at sciencegallery.com and around Dublin 2 all this week.

PS First attempt at this post vanished. Anyone else having trouble with Safari of late? Keeps crashing for no particular reason.

PPS Then I couldn’t get into the blog to post the second version. Conspiracy, I tell you.

* which itself was the location for the legendary video for Gloria by U2, one of the first U2 singles videos, when the area looked very different to how it does today. Definitely scope for some sort of music-on-a-barge project to mark it…

The RTÉ Living Music Festival will take place from February 15th through February 17th this year. Last year’s festival covered the music of John Adams (coverage on this blog here, lengthy review in the Journal of Music in Ireland here, lengthy response from the festival director here), and this year’s will turn to the work of Arvo Pärt (website, wiki entry, Naxos page).

The programme has been published (the detailed list is a few pages in) - there’s a lot to choose from. Unfortunately, it seems that the approach in previous years of offering a season ticket has been abandoned - could never afford it in the past and now that I might stretch to it, it’s gone! Oh well. Tickets for the National Concert Hall events are available here (note that it’s unassigned seating, so if you show up early enough you can get a very good seat for the flat price that you paid when you booked!), and the non-NCH events are on sale via the Central Ticket Bureau (thanks to Karlin for spotting that they were on sale here - I couldn’t find it anywhere and presumed they weren’t available yet).

The first proper exposure I had to Pärt’s music was, of all places, an open-air concert in the then-relatively-new Meeting House Square in Temple Bar in Dublin (probably most familiar, if the Flickr search is a good reflection, for its open-air Saturday market) in 1999; I don’t have a programme from it (I used to keep such things quite well, but I had a big clear-out a few years ago) but I remember it included Summa, Tabula Rasa, and Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten (with compere Donal Dineen, then and now of Today FM, playing the bell; hear a sample of this fascinating piece here), and possibly a version of Fratres too. All of these pieces, and much much more, are on the programme for Feburary. I’m particularly looking forward to Berliner Messe and Credo scheduled together on Friday night with the NSO and the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, and Joanna MacGregor joining the Vanbrugh Quartet for a recital of Part, Schnittke and more in the National Gallery.

The artistic director is James MacMillan, one of the most influential ‘living composers’ and a particular favourite of mine - unfortunately, he’s clearly too modest to include his own work in the schedule! However, he’s participating in a seminar, which is something to be glad about.

Something else that used to be in that clippings file was a review of the Irish premiere of MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, performed in the RTÉ “Horizons” stream of free concerts of contemporary music. Thanks to the wonders of archives, though, it’s still out there, and it’s worth recalling a particular sentence by critic Michael Dervan:

At the first of four concerts in the Explorer Series, the enthusiastic cheers which greeted the climactic swell at the end of Scottish composer James MacMillan’s The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (1990) should give RTE the message that there is a genuine appetite for an appreciation of contemporary music in Dublin that it has been failing to address. (Irish Times, 21 January 1999)

The Living Music Festival is a direct response to the failures then (and at other times) highlighted. There’s a nice closing of the loop in seeing MacMillan involved in this year’s much-anticipated festival. I should note, too, that the Horizons series is still alive (although shifted to lunchtime), and starts Tuesday week - information here.

Bonus link - Discovering Music on BBC Radio 3 looked at Adams’ Chamber Symphony, one of the works performed in last year’s festival, today; listen again here.

This post is about some ideas brought together by two podcasts and a newspaper article, from a few days ago…

First of all, there’s this repeat of a classic This American Life show. I try not to blog about TAL constantly (this here was one of my lapses) - I resist the urge after each episode, otherwise this would be Lex Devoted Radio Fan and it might be a bit boring to read. However, this show - rightly beloved by listeners - is worth mentioning, not least for its synchrony with the other material mentioned below.

“Mapping” (go listen to it!) deals with the age-old question of maps and representation of the world, and in the traditional TAL fashion, is divided into five Acts. The innovation, as I saw it (or heard it, or perhaps even sensed it) was to have an act for each of the five senses. So, for example, ‘taste’ was a piece on how a writer, Jonathan Gold, compiled a ‘food map’ of Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The act on ’sound’ was the one that caught my particular attention, and not just as a result of the (perfect) use (at 13.30 and 15.15) of Telephone and Rubber Band (by the Penguin Café Orchestra) as the musical bed for part of the piece. This piece featured a short but compelling discussion (with a guy called Toby Lester) on how each household object has a pitch, and how they interact (e.g. producing minor chords or even the Devil’s Chord (devil’s interval / tritone / augmented fourth) of lore.

These ideas were picked up (in my head, at least) in the first episode of the BBC’s The Sounds of Science show (Radio 4). This was a lot of fun - coming back to the Devil’s Chord but also discussing key/scale/tone, Western v non-Western tradition, dissonance (with lots of spice/food metaphors) and more.

The Observer, too, got in on the game (last Sunday), reporting on a study in the Ecologist of the aspects of the modern environment that people find irritating. Some of these, too, are related to sounds and music. A little curmudgeonly, but prompting interesting reflections and connections with the two radio pieces.

From Slaw comes a mention of a fun database of law-related movie and pop culture references. There are no movies listed about Internet law. You could say that they don’t exist, unless you count Hackers. Which, quite frankly, you shouldn’t.

On the other hand, the general sci-fi genre has a great record on law and technology more generally. Last year’s GikII had two great presentations on this topic: Andrew Adams, From 1984 to V for Vendetta via Minority Report and Andrés Guadamuz, Killer Robots, Evil Scientists and Other Tales of Woe: How Technophobia in Culture Affects the Law.

Damien Mulley’s familiar ‘fluffy links’ includes an embedded KLF video today. Not the first time that Damien has shared the love of Mu Mu with the world - he posted a series of KLF videos before - but all of those links have died. Such is the fate of the dance of GooTube.

Anyway, Damien links to the ‘million pounds’ documentary and the Boing Boing post about it. What’s more, though, recently I noticed a flurry of interesting KLF archive pieces turning up on YouTube and elsewhere. For example, user klfcommunicationsnet (presumably the people behind this) has posted a whole load of things (view the channel here). For now, this includes a rake of the infamous Top of the Pops appearances, such as Justified and Ancient (complete with ice-cream cones playing guitar and Tammy W on a big screen) and Doctorin’ The Tardis (mmmm). Also available through various sources are things like the ‘final’ performance at the Brits (KLF v Extreme Noise Terror), the chaotic comeback (***k The Millennium, and no I’m not being prudish, that’s what it’s called) complete with Liverpool dockers, audio (but not video, that I know of) of the Justified Ancients of M.U. (probably not actual KLF) singing about Cantona and the Acid Brass (no, I’m serious) version of What Time Is Love (which made an appearance in the comeback).

This week sees the release of some new episodes in the infinite Trapped In The Closet musical/dramatic work (don’t make me call it a hip-hopera). Some would say that it’s by R. Kelly, but personally I think it’s all a big trick, steered by the Global Association of Satirists and Parodists (GASP).

TITC has, so far, given us an infamous South Park episode (which used the title as a link into some fun Tom Cruise bashing and managed to get a Scientology theme in there somehow; here’s a link to the R Kelly parody), an 11-minute Weird Al Yankovic song, now with a video (Trapped In The Drive-Thru), a fanatically detailed Sims recreation, not to mention a host of fun, amateur takes like Trapped in the sock drawer and an odd sketch involving Barbie, Batman and friends. A detailed (too detailed) Wiki entry contains information on some broadcast TV ‘tributes’ (such as Mad TV’s Trapped In The Cupboard, all about cereal and other important things).

All hail the interweb.