TeledyN

Some say the real miracle of Christmas is not that we fail to observe Goodwill Towards Man on all the other days, but in how, as wild animals ourselves, it is miraculous that we can even just somewhat tone down preying upon each other for a few hours each year -- I am sitting here now, downloading Christmas carols in free public domain arrangments, thoughtfully typeset and even transposed for band instruments, and they are good 4-part arrangements. Just imagine ...

No other web site offers all of these features:

• All of it is free! No hidden costs, no teasers, no bait-and-switch.
• Sheet music for every carol, in standard PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. No need to purchase or download special software!
• Sheet music in 4 parts (SATB) for most carols. Just the thing for caroling!
• Lead sheets (melody, chords & lyrics) for most carols.
• Additional guitar lead sheets in easy keys, when the piano lead sheet is in a horrible key for novice guitarists.

• Instrumental parts for C, F, Bb, and Eb instruments. Play in 4 parts with any combination of instruments!
• MIDI files for every carol (so you can hear what they sound like), with both 4-part (SATB) and melody-only versions.
• New! A list of CD's where you can hear each carol, with easy links to buy them from Amazon.com, and (in most cases) a sound clip of a sample of the carol from the CD.
• Background music only when you ask for it, instead of playing automatically whether you want it or not!
• Lyric sheets for every carol. (Okay, so this is no big deal, but this site wouldn't be complete without them.)
• Credits (author, composer, translator, arranger) for every carol.
• No obnoxious animations or pop-up ads.
• And did we mention that all of it is free?

absolutely mindbogglingly amazing - can you imagine? I could call you up, I could post to my site an open call to say, "Grab your instruments and download the following and meet me at the town square and we'll fill the air with music!" and we'd all just meet there and pick our parts and we're ready to go, no lawyers, no rights organizations to notify, just music to be made for everyone.

Truly this is Christmas.

“Sun Ra. Interviews & Essays” (Headpress London, 2010) offers a splendid introduction to a younger generation of Sun Ra fans. Among its essays are memories of the man and his concerts (Amiri Baraka, John Sinclair, David Henderson, Ben Edmonds, Rick Steiger); reflections by musicians and DJ’s (Wayne Kramer, Steve Fly Agaric 23); articles on Ra’s art and film appearances; and annotations to his enormous output on vinyl.

Tune in, tune up, and take to the stars. See you on Saturn; meet you there a Year from Monday.

A gift from John Jacobs:

1

The Other Worlds of Sun Ra on Into the Music

In the history of post-war jazz in the US, perhaps the strangest and most mysterious figure is Sun Ra. An outstanding pianist, composer, arranger and big band leader, he was also a science fiction philosopher, Afro Futurist poet and self-declared citizen of Saturn.

Sun Ra's life project mixed a fascination with outer space with his African roots and wildly expressive music, which continues to delight and inspire audiences almost two decades after he left the planet.

The Other Worlds of Sun Ra features writer and activist Amiri Baraka, who collaborated with Ra in the New York underground of the 1960s. Sun Ra's archivist and one-time drummer, Michael D. Anderson, gives an insider's perspective of playing with Ra and his Arkestra. There are readings from Sun Ra's pamphlets and poems as well as the voice of the man himself. And of course -- plenty of Sun Ra's weird, beautiful and other-worldly music.

More info and full playlist here:
http://abc.net.au/rn/intothemusic/stories/2010/2977933.htm

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Australia

Notes

Producers: Brent Clough and John Jacobs
Narrator: Aku Kadogo
Readers: Calvin Welch and Aku Kadogo

Individual Files

Audio Files	VBR MP3	Ogg Vorbis
The Other Worlds of Sun Ra on Into the Music	119.2 MB	29.3 MB

Information	Format	Size
TheOtherWorldsOfSunRa_files.xml	Metadata	1.1 KB
TheOtherWorldsOfSunRa_meta.xml	Metadata	1.5 KB

Industrial imagery shot and cut by Cameron Hanson, accompanied with soundtrack mash up using Sun Ra's New Day and Moondog's Suite No. 2 3rd Movement

Emily Howell is already a better (sic) composer than 99 percent of the population. Whether she or any other computer can bridge that last 1 percent, making complete works with lasting significance to music, is anyone's guess.

What Chris fails to mention about David Cope's tone bot is that it is creating 'original' works in other people's styles which is, outside of the world of west coast pop music, the mark of a bad composer, at best, it's kitch. It is one thing to emulate Mozart or Bach indistinguishably as a parlour trick or even to sell records to environments hungry for just one more Hershel number, but it is quite another thing to expand the science of the experience of music and to create new music as innovative and enlightening to today's listener as Mozart and Beethoven had been to the audiences of their day, which is to say, there is no danger here of real composers losing their anthropological tribal roles in our evolution. None whatsoever.

And what that tells us is there is more to creativity than simply rehashing history in fresh packaging: creative work is an exploration into the outer space beyond what we previously believed were the outer limits of what we call 'Music'.

This venturing out is in some ways an unpredictable subset space of the greater Universe of sound; there are many 'correct' sounds that no one likes. In other ways, like when we attempt to bottle Music for resale, it seems almost a superset of sound itself, and clearly both of these unknown realms may on occasion be found algorithmically, but very rarely are they recognized algorithmically as valuable additions to our musical knowledge, yet that pruning of the total space of possible sound is essential to the composer -- even John Cage always sought to control what was to be uncontrolled in his aleatoric works, there is always a figure over the background, even in 4'33" our attention is directed to a conducted event. It might be a amusing to provide 'Emily' with the collected piano works of John Cage; while even the average music program grad has little trouble seeing at least potentials of directions to take out into the outer space from there, I really rather doubt the bot would then proceed to find us new conceptual expressions of lessons in Buddhism.

Kevin Pollard is a little more kind to the idea of Emily, who caught him in a mood of transhuman weakness after a close encounter with 'Cynthia', the first synthetic lifeform, but even Kevin has his doubts about Emily's abilities in the Real World:

I’d be interested to do a session with an on-the-fly version of Emily or her successor where phrases are played in a call-and-response manner in real-time…improvised…and see what happens; how I would respond to the musical directions generated by the computer and how it would react to my response. To accomplish that it would need to interpret what I was playing, understand which harmonic direction and tempo it belonged to, and respond by perhaps including some of the elements but not others, deciding the relevant points and maybe adding its own direction whilst adhering to the pulse, dynamics and the unfolding structure of the shared piece, which is essentially what I do when I improvise.

Indeed.  Marcel Duchamp famously punched a hole in the corner of a math textbook, tied a string through it and then hung the book outside his window for a year, "To see how the axioms and corollaries of Euclid would stand up to the harsh realities of Nature."

Even if 'Emily' really is 'the world's most musically creative computer program' -- like they say of the Dancing Bear, the spectacle is not that the Bear dances so well, but that the Bear dances at all. And maybe Emily really is better at the ancient Art of Fugue than 99% of the average Slate reader, but given usual population distributions, I daresay all of the actual composers are in that remaining 1%.  And, on the plus side, if Emily really can digest a style in the traditional forms and churn endless new emulations 7x24 for the cost of the computer time to run the job, hey, maybe it will free up time for Andrew Webber and Philip Glass and the whole hosts of endless cliché TV and cinema composers can now get back to the real work of that thing we call Music!

"Anybody out there looking for music lessons? Or know of anybody who's looking for music lessons?"

Well ... here's the thing: People don't KNOW you offer an enriched learning experience; after now 60 years of being told that music is "just sound" sadly most people in our culture have no direct experience of music at all, and will proudly say,when asked what they play, that they 'play' the radio. They've been sold a lie and even more sadly, we musicians re-inforce that lie every time we hold out a CD as if it was even important. So you can advertise until the cows come home, no one is going to call.

Time was, parents had direct experience of music. These would be the children of the 'tween-war era, those who lived through WWII, every last one of them had heard a real choir, a real organist in their church, they had heard brass bands up close, and their dancehall was a purely acoustic experience of the sonic laser of the Big Band. Most, at least most in the urban areas, had also experienced a full-scale symphony orchestra although in the era since the collapse of Edwardian aristocracy, that experience was, by 1945, rarer and rarer, progressively replaced by the National Radio systems, and by those Infernal Machines, the phonograph. So these parents knew about music, and even the protestants saw value in giving every child possible the opportunity to get in on the musicianship game. It didn't matter if you were poor as churchmice, even the Gershwins and the Blounts could justify the expense; it was a matter of survival.

Today we haven't many parents alive who can remember a world pre-phonograph, precious few remember pre-MTV. Their experience of music is of a commodity that is shrink-wrapped and dazzling, created by mythic heros in the halls of great Olympus, the domain of the gods themselves. Mere mortals do not aspire to challenge the gods of the music industry, they can only pay their tithes and feel priviledged to be allowed to listen in for a fee.

where have all the students gone?

That means no P.A.'s. That means no CDs. That means no electric pianos, no stacks of marshall amps, no 'sound' systems, only the direct brain to body to space to body to brain transmission of musical experience.

And dig: they think it is worthless, so they aren't going to pay a dime for it -- your concerts only preach to the dwindling choir -- if we truly believe music is worth anything, the burden of the proof is ours, it is then left to us to SHOW them what it is worth.

This is why I joined a community band, and this is why I always vote 'YES' when there is even a hint of a potential to play in front of people out where they are, in parks, in parades, on the street, in the shopping malls ...

One concert in the park is worth 10 in the hall. We have to get out there and demonstrate, play not for bucks or sales or awards or acclaim, but play because, very literally, civilization itself depends on our performance. We must rage against the dying of the light, show 'em what we got. If the kids see what you do as the thing they need for their own evolution, you can bet they will line up to learn how its done. But they have to experience it for themselves, they have to feel what it is, they have to SEE the goods,and for that to happen, we have to SHOW the goods.

Or we can sit on our backsides and complain as civilization slides farther and farther into commercialized primitivisms.

Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it! (Vladimir Mayakovsky)

Music is inherent in the human creature, it is fundamental to the way we are, with nothing to do with vibrating strings or ratios of frequencies or cycles of beats, it is all about the animal that we are, and my litmus case for this hypothesis is the observation that children, pre-operational, pre-verbal, pre-educationally-crippled children 'get it' and they get it completely. They breath music, they swim in it, and I could not hope for a more graphic demonstration of this principle than this fellow here taking on what the sensorially-jaded and "highly trained" musical adults call a 'difficult' piece; this boy nails it, in his own parlance, he 'rides' it, and there is nothing difficult or demanding about it, he is charged by it.

A critical perception and ability to mimic diatonic melody is fundamental to human language acquisition; a high-res perception and ability to mimic complex harmonic rhythm is fundamental to our audio recognition and essential to developing motor dexterity. It statnds to reason then that the human creature should have the maximum aptitude for these skills in the early stages when the need to acquire these essential benefits is at a survival premium value.

Mothers who refuse to 'sing' to their babies invariably do, because Baby demands melody, Baby craves it in their struggle to extract information from their environment and Baby requires musical experience to shape and define their identity as a human. Babies know all about animal sounds, they can mimic cats and sea gulls to a remarkable fidelity, but they know what sounds humans make, the real human sounds, and they know that this sound is 'Music'.

You can toss out your slide rules and graph paper: if you want to be a truly creative composer of Music (and not just a mere organizer of sounds) you better get procreative first! Or take up baby-sitting.

If this video demonstration isn't enough to convince you, follow the subtext link beneath the video and Michael Monroe will grace you with further music mastery examples that transcend all notion of mere childlike cuteness.