Beethoven Remixed

The BBC is doing a Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony remix contest. You have to be a UK resident to enter, but anyone can download the samples and stems. They are pretty interesting! The producers recorded the orchestra’s instrument groups in isolation to create the stems, and they apparently tempo-mapped the whole thing to 108 BPM so …

Salsa in Central Park

Yesterday I went to a free concert by Johnny “Dandy” Rodriguez and his Dream Team by the Harlem Meer in Central Park. I don’t know a lot about salsa, but these guys sound to me like an excellent salsa band.

Teaching whiteness in music class

Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music …

Aurality

Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier (2014) Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press. The nineteenth-century Colombian writing discussed by Ochoa Gautier, like Western convention generally, opposes “art” and “folk” musics. “Art” music is comprised of works created by named authors, transmitted visually via …