Lex Ferenda

Radio 4 is getting started with an ambitious history of music, The Making Of Music (hosted by Jim Naughtie). Even on the strength of the first playlist, it’s going to be quite a journey. Spanning ‘1000 years’ up to the present day.

Here in Ireland, the National Symphony Orchestra has released its schedule for 2007/8. I’m probably going to be a subscriber this year (as my current personal schedule means I don’t work Friday nights). In terms of contemporary music highlights, I’m particularly looking forward to the all-20th-century programme on September 21st (Ligeti, Sibelius, Stravinksy), the ‘duelling timpani’ madness of Nielsen’s 4th Symphony (October 12th), more Stravinsky (Rite of Spring) along with Ravel and Falla (May 2nd, 2008) and James MacMillan conducting Ades and Holst (wonder if Pluto is included ). Adams’ The Chairman Dances (one of the few Adams pieces not performed in this year’s celebration of all things Adams) is on the list, as is an unspecified new work by Ronan Guilfoyle in February. All the information is over at the RTÉ website.

Some unusual clips for your attention:

• Current indie favourites The Klaxons doing an unusual version of mid-90s dance track “Not Over Yet” (by ‘Grace’, basically a Paul Oakenfold and friends project): watch them do it live
• The Lancashire Hotpots pay ‘tribute’ to dance music with a medley (in Lancashire style) of Call On Me (Eric Prydz), Drop The Pressure (Mylo), From Paris to Berlin (Infernal), Hey Girl Hey Boy (Chemical Brothers), I See You Baby (Groove Armada), Firestarter (Prodigy), Born Slippy (Underworld) - it’s the Bang Bang Thumpy Dance Megamix! - get the whole thing at the Myspace page or watch a rehearsal version at GooTube.

John Naughton’s always enjoyable Sunday column in the Observer deals with copyright and parody this week. More specifically, he writes about the Flash animation of Tom Lehrer’s Elements Song (go watch it), which he’d blogged about earlier this week. I am a fan of Lehrer - I spent quite a lot of money on the comprehensive “The Remains of Tom Lehrer” boxset some time ago - but I hadn’t seen the animation, and thus seized on it and sent it on to many others..

Anyway, back to today’s story. Naughton’s article, (The very model of a modern creative society? I don’t think so (blog reference) takes the song and animation as the starting point for a quick gallop through the background to the song and finishing up with a discussion on present-day creative culture. See, Lehrer’s song took the tune from I Am The Very Model of A Modern Major-General (Gilbert and Sullivan, Pirates of Penzance). And of course, the clever Flash programmer/designer took the whole thing and added pretty pictures. Copyright lawyers’ ears start to prick up at this point, of course. Naughton (rightly) criticises the extention upon extension of copyright terms, and argues that this ultimately stifles creativity. (Lessig promises a presentation arguing that “Congress should carve a robust exemption to the law for non-commercial remix. Commercial use of such remixes should be regulated by a baseline statutory license.” Looking forward to seeing that).

It’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants if you have to get the giant’s agent’s publisher’s lawyer(s) to sign for it in triplicate first. So this is a timely reminder. And in that spirit…

• Other attempts at adding graphics to the Elements Song: 1, 2, 3, 4, not to mention performances at talent shows (1, 2), a performance in Dutch and a weird, slow anime version.
• A directory of (mostly text) parodies of the Major General
• A great animation of the original (created by a student for a Flash class - an example of what I called the second side of GooTube last week (here)
• “I’ve written a self-referential Major-Gen’ral parody” *yes, it’s a parody of parodies*
• Ill-fated TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (last mentioned here) gave it a go to, with “The Very Model Of A Modern Network TV Show” (lyrics). Amusingly there’s no GooTube version of it other than this, which is the original audio set to a series of clips from (of all things) Battlestar Galactica. Not convinced about the clips but the song is great.

Finally, on reading Naughton’s column over coffee this morning (from Co-op, incidentally, bought the last time I came through Holyhead; why can’t they sell their stuff here instead of Tesco?), I immediately thought of Lobachevsky (studio version | live version), Lehrer’s ditty on plagiarism. (Tagging Eoin so he can come and tell his Lobachevsky story). And Naughton updated his post accordingly. Great minds, etc.

Los Campesinos! are a Welsh band. Cardiff University, to be precise. They’d fit well into a Canadian indie festival. And there are seven of them. Official site, MySpace, BBC profile (all have downloads/videos available).

As one of the members says,

Glockenspiels, melody horns, cow bells, handclaps, Casiotone keyboards, silliness and indie snobbery were then thrown in to complete the mix.

Mmm.

Go listen, and happy Friday afternoon :=)

This is a remarkable story.

CDDB (now Gracenote) is the Internet database of CD information (tracks, authors) etc that most computer-based CD players (right from earlier playback-only applications through Winamp right up to iTunes) use. I have not-so-fond memories of trying to persuade early versions of WinAmp to talk to CDDB via a fairly rigid firewall. But by now it’s quite a huge database - it takes the data manually entered by end users and is, generally speaking, a database containing track listings for virtually all (CD) recorded music.

Controversially, it started out as a free software product, licensed under the GPL; however it is now a highly closed, commercial project, with media players being required to pay a fee to Gracenote and to enter into a contract with Gracenote (which has caused some fuss, especially in relation to exclusivity, display of logos etc).

Anyway, that brings us up to this week’s controversy. Gramaphone magazine writes about Joyce Hatto’s ‘recordings’:

Several days ago, another Gramophone critic decided to listen to a Hatto Liszt CD, of the 12 Transcendental Studies. He put the disc into his computer to listen, and something awfully strange happened. His computer’s player identified the disc as, yes, the Liszts, but not a Hatto recording. Instead, his display suggested that the disc was one on BIS Records, by the pianist Lászlo Simon. Mystified, our critic checked his Hatto disc against the actual Simon recording, and to his amazement they sounded exactly the same.

See, the CDDB (or alternative) system uses track lengths (etc) to create a unique ID (checksum) for each CD. The data is stored on Gracenote servers by unique ID - when you insert a CD, your iTunes (or whatever) calculates the checksum, sends it to Gracenote, they respond with the list of names and artists. But did we ever think it was a detective tool?

So Gramaphone noticed something fishy; and of course, Hatto’s recordings had previously been questioned. She had not performed in 30 years (due to illness, apparently) but had recorded over 100 critically acclaimed discs. On her husband’s record label. So now, the plot thickens.

Pristine Audio and Royal Holloway have carried out significant forensic work, with results like this:

(The top one is the ‘copy’, the bottom one is the ‘original’. Similar exercises have indicated that virtually every Hatto recording is a copy, or a slightly modified version (e.g. pitch), of a well-known recording)

Wikipedia has a good collection of links. What will happen next?

Update: the husband strikes back. (He doesn’t explain how the conductor is an unknown, Rene Kohler, who probably doesn’t exist, or deal with many other problems…)

Dublin audiences have the pleasure of a John Adams festival this weekend. I was in the (small, but enthusiastic) audience for the first event, being the National Symphony Orchestra taking on Lollapolooza, Century Rolls and Harmonielehre (links are to information and audio clips on each piece). Other events over the weekend include jazz concerts, chamber music (including the rare pleasure of Gerald Barry’s Piano Quartet No 1, known to anyone who sat the Leaving Certificate in certain years: study notes (PDF), audio sample (Real)), a film showing and more. Fair dues to RTÉ and Lyric FM for keeping the Living Music festivals on the road (and that’s not just because they gave me a funky Lyric FM t-shirt this evening…)

Anyway, mainly to see if it works, here’s a short clip from Lollapalooza (plays from earbox.com, which is the composer’s official site):

Ah, spam. Where would we be without it? I’ve been thinking about it recently. My current email address is a university one; I used Gmail for a while while I was outside the bubble, but it’s easier (given network restrictions etc) to stick to the ‘official’ one while I’m back inside it. Recently, the on-site Spam Assassin software has been replaced by off-site Microsoft-owned FrontBridge, which doesn’t fill me with much glee.

Anyway, the real purpose of this post is to link to this tongue-in cheek article from the New York Times: “Raining E-Blows On Egos”. Reporter Lisa Foderano gives various examples of puzzled and amused responses to inappropriate (yet appropriate) spam.

And her heart aches for one of her young employees, the only one in the small firm not to have finished college, who seems to be a magnet for spam pushing Johnny-come-lately bachelor’s degree programs. “It’s rubbing him raw day in and day out,” she said. Worsening the psychic toll is the increasingly focused tailoring of spam of all stripes.

When I worked for a student representative organisation, I had the best ones of these up on my wall. It made me laugh for a whole five seconds, but it was something.

The brilliant Canadian independent musician Brad Sucks put together an album entitled Outside The Inbox (free download or $5 CD). It’s a series of songs inspired by subject lines in spam emails. It’s similar (but just as insane) as Spam Radio, which I discovered nearly five years ago, and still tune into from time to time. It takes spam emails and converts them (through text-to-speech) into audio, and sets the result to chillout electronic music. Simple and original.

On a more serious note, note last week’s news that a phishing spammer was convicted under the (US) CAN-SPAM Act; the first full jury trial leading to a conviction since the law came into force. His dirty deeds involved fake AOL emails requesting billing data. You all know the type.

Spam spam spam.

Edit: there’s more…over here!

This weekend sees the release of Stallone’s long-promised Rocky Balboa. And in Dublin on Friday night, around 100 people queued patiently to see Rocky and friends, despite the fact that the place was full, with all 1,200 tickets sold out since the start of the week, and the staff were at pains to point out that few of us would get in.

‘Twas a different Rocky were were after, though. Read the rest of this entry »

Can’t find the ’science’ behind the story, although the researcher is Harry Witchel, who has a good track record in credible-pop-science as well as more serious stuff. Story from the Independent

Open the comments (or click here) for a copy of the various Top 10 lists.

The excellent cyberlaw blogs at Stanford draw my attention (and thus now yours) to this interesting kerfuffle over iPods. Gorge Dubya Bush was doing one of those marvelously fluffy interviews about what he has on his iPod - and said that he had the Beatles.

So, what’s wrong with that? Well, quite famously, Beatles tracks are not available on the iTunes music store. In fact, Apple v Apple (that’s Apple Records and Apple Computers, just for the, um, record) is still in progress in the British courts (trademarks). So, as is being pointed now, that means that Bush (or one of his flunkies):

a) ripped the track off a CD,
b) downloaded it from a file-sharing service of some sort, or
c) purchased it elsewhere and cracked the encryption.

C is a bit fanciful….and B, while it would be hilarious, is also a bit of a stretch. So we’ll presume that it’s A - an act that, in an illustration of the follies of copyright-law-catching-up-with-technology-when?, is (probably) technically illegal - in the US and in Ireland and in other jurisdictions.

I’ve had some fun with this point in the recent past. I had a meeting with IRMA(the trade association for Irish record labels), who were trying to promote some God-awful software for mammies, daddies and schoolteachers to protect their computers from Illegal Files! which could then be made safe (translation: it was a glorified search engine that found all audio files and gave you a big delete button. Riiiight). I tried to get them to admit that this bit of the law was stupid and should be changed, which they declined. Then just a few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to sit next to the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, one Mr. Charles McCreevy (former minister of finance in Ireland) who was full of questions about iPods and how they worked. So I explained, and also pointed out how silly it was that the law was badly written in a way that mode-shifting of legitimately purchased CDs was even legally dubious. If there’s a European directive on this, iPod users, you can send your appreciation in the form of iTMS gift certificates.