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BBC Offers Beethoven Symphonies for Download
Simon80 writes "BBC Radio 3 is making performances by the BBC Philharmonic of Beethoven's 6th to 9th symphonies available for free download for the next few days only, as the second part of a trial to 'test listeners appetite for downloads'. During the first part, the first 5 symphonies were offered, and over 650,000 people downloaded them."
So, where can I get the earlier performances? I assume someone might have them available for download somewhere. Thanks. :)
Free classical music downloads. Sure, the recording of the performance is still copyrighted, but aren't there any "free classical performers" out there?
Does anyone have links to the first 5 (if it is even still legal to download them from anywhere)?
Anyway, this sort of thing is very cool. I have not listened to much Beethoven (aside from bits and peices in movies and such), so something like this is an excellent opportunity. If anyone knows any places to legally download performances of other classics, please post them.
I love getting free, good music from the internet. The Internet Achive's Audio section is my very good friend, as is LegalTorrents. Granted, that is completely different music from this, but still it is awesome to be able to enjoy music being made by people who love making music more than making money.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
TEST #1: Appetite for free downloads
- status: complete
result: people like free downloads.
TEST #2: Ongoing Appetite for free downloads
- status: incomplete
result: pending...
I just cant wait to see what the results are!!
air and light and time and space
The best musicians are usually too busy trying to scrape a living to play in a recording for free. Even if some musicians are willing to play for nothing, there are many other costs involved. You have to hire the music, which includes a fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases. You have to hire a recording venue with a nice acoustic. And you have to pay someone who knows what they're doing to record it. I'm sure there are lots of classical recordings that don't recoup even these costs...
One good turn - gets all the covers.
The mp3s are CBR 128kbps. Ugh. When will people learn to use ABR instead of CBR? You wind up with fractionally larger files that sound MUCH better!
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Goddamn communist atheists at the BBC, sharing stuff. Don't they realise that if any of us stop grasping what is ours, society will collapse. You didn't see Jesus Christ preaching about sharing, did you.
Love,
The Republican Party
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
aren't there any "free classical performers" out there?
Yes. The problem is, they're not very good. Unlike popular music, where someone can start to learn guitar and become a world-famous "musician" a few years later (in some cases, this order is reversed), a good quality symphony orchestra contains 50 or more musicians, rarely with less than fifteen years of experience.
As a general rule, if you're a professional classical musician, you can't afford to give away your work for free -- not to mention the costs of renting a recording studio which can fit an entire symphony orchestra. If you're an amateur classical musician (defined as "has a full time job which isn't music"), then unless you're really exceptional, you're not good enough to make recordings which people will want to listen to.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I've always thought that Beethoven's 9th symphony (and Beethoven generally) was incredibly overrated, just because everyone has heard of Ode to Joy. I'm no aficianado, but it seems generally all over the place and 'ding-dongy' - mindless triumphalism for the flag-waving plebs.
Listen to the whole thing. The Ninth is a heck of a lot more than just the Ode to Joy.
I agree that if you only listen to the Ode to Joy, and take it out of the context of the greater work, then it is mindless triumphalism.
For this reason I really, really hate those "best of the classics"-type mix albums with the most-well-known fragments of classical music.
They're the musical equivalent to sports videos with "Greatest goals" etc. Watching an amazing goal is fun. But it is nowhere near the same experience as watching a full game at the edge of your seat, and experienceing an amazing last-minute goal in its context.
Test users' appetite for downloads?? Why don't they just ask Apple or an Apple shareholder? Better yet, put the old Hitchhikers Guide or Dr. Who episodes online and they'll find out right quick about appetites for downloads!
I always thought that most countries should those days invest a non-negligeable part of their cultur budget to set up huge on-line databases. I am amazed to see the cost to maintain dusty municipal libraries while I have still no way to get all those music and novels which are in the public domain.
It is still the same tune: when will people in charge realize the power of digital information. One book in a library can be read by one person at one time. It gets wear out, it can be stolen. A book in a library can be read by what ? at most 50 person a year ? How much does it cost to be stored handled, fixed ? That's ridiculous. And municipal libraries should be the place to find computer to access those database if you do not own one.
Also, for that BBC initiative, I read:
Download disclaimer:
The BBC grants you a 7-day, non-exclusive licence to download this Beethoven Experience audio.
You may not copy, reproduce, edit, adapt, alter, republish, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use this audio in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use.
So I can't give that piece of culture to my grand'ma and my little nephew ? That sucks.
--Go Debian!
Bah! Everyone loves a Pops concert!
Maybe I'm just bleary this Sunday morning, but I didn't see a discussion of bitrates or sound quality in any of the Radio 3 FAQs or "Jargon Buster". Tis an issue with any of the online stores offering classical music, too.
Actually, the Jargon Buster is v amusing. Maybe I'm just waaaay out of touch, but I've never come across the terms "iPod Sunday" and "iPodectomy". Yeech. Those wacky Beeb webbies - or have they been cribbing from a PR "Fact sheet"? Hmmmm ...
Sorry, up late watching Live8 - on a side note, was surprised at the tracks from last night's concert in Hyde Park on sale via iTunes, gosh!
So kudos to Radio 3 for making all this available, but maybe they could spare a little more bandwidth for higher bitrates (or even charge a nominal fee for a FLAC or AppleLossless bit of Beethoven)
Well it may be triumphal, but it isn't mindless triumphalism in that sort of jingoistic way you imply. Rather is is a deep expression of joy and solidarity among your fellow human beings. With out a little work you will probably miss the point of any music which falls outside the musical vernacular within which you were raised. I would suggest spending a little time with the middle piano sonatas and concertos and move on from there. Beethoven did write some mind-blowingly profound music such as the late string quartets, but you need to be able to listen from a different point of view than you generally get by default in this culture.
Here is the text of the Schiller poem used in the last movement--I think flag waving is a stretch:
Joy!
Joy, beautiful spark of God,
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, fire-drunk,
Heavenly, your shrine.
Your magic reunites
That which custom has strongly split;
All humans will become brothers
[Schiller's original:
What custom's sword has parted;
Beggars become princes' brothers]
Where your soft wing whiles.
Whoever has succeeded in the great attempt
To be a friend of a friend;
Whoever has achieved a lovely wife
Mix in your joy!
Yes, also whoever only one soul
Calls his own around the world!
And whoever has never known of this,
Steal away crying out of this group!
All beings drink joy
At the breasts of nature;
All the good, all the bad
Follow her trail of roses.
She gave us kisses and vines,
A friend, proven in death;
Great pleasure was given to the worm,
And the cherub stands before God.
Glad, like his sun flies
Through heaven's splendid plan,
Run, brothers, your race,
Joyful, like a hero to the victory.
Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to all the world!
Brothers, over the starry firmament
Must live a loving father.
Do you bow down, millions?
Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him beyond the starry firmament!
He must dwell beyond the stars.
my new scene.org ID: berianir
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Listen to the whole thing. The Ninth is a heck of a lot more than just the Ode to Joy.
I reckon the 9th Symphony 67 minutes. Ode to Joy is but a tiny fraction of it.
Incidentally all of Beethoven's symphonies are very long. The symphonies range from around 25 minutes and the 9th is 67 minutes. It should be a crime to listen to only part of it.
I've never come across the terms "iPod Sunday" and "iPodectomy"
In fact, the only google hit for "iPod Sunday" is BBC's own Jargon Buster. A few more for "iPodectomy", but only enough to almost fill one google hit page, and one of those are of course the Jargon Buster. One has to wonder if there isn't enough jargon already, since they have to make stuff up?
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Is Moonlight Sonata, one of my favorite classical tunes, part of symphonies or is that separate?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Many classical forms have become pompous, whiny and annoying to modern ears. I, for example, can't stand any Vivaldi, Haendel, Beethoven. I've enjoyed them all, mind you, when I was younger, but I've grown out of it. These days, I enjoy Mahler, Rachmaninoff, or Franck much more, and I'm getting to be really fond of Ligeti, Xenakis and all the really modern composers.
I believe music is like wine: when you start drinking some, you prefer the sweet, easy-going ones. Then as your tastebuds develop, you start getting more and more into wines that you once thought were bitter and undrinkable, and you start "understanding" them more. What I mean is, music, like wine, is an acquired taste.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
as they are breaking Beethoven's copyright.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Yeah -- that's the best part!
That's the way I like to watch the news too -- just fast forward to the explosions. Everything else is just an appetizer.
See for example Magnatune, which has tons of good classical recordings including some from world renowned performers, all under Creative Commons licenses. Granted they are mostly solo and small chamber performances, rather than full scale orchestral works. However, there are certainly professional classical performers willing and able to release stuff under CC. Note also that the BBC downloads are just a 7-day license and you're not allowed to share the files after downloading. It's not much better than a one-time radio broadcast that you can tape off the air.
Sure, the recording of the performance is still copyrighted, but aren't there any "free classical performers" out there?
Is this true? I thought copyright was only awarded to ORIGINAL work not performances of such works?
This article at wikipedia states that for one to claim Copyright over a work three basic criteria have to be satifisied: skill, originality and work.
While skill and work criteria are certainly satifisied, originality is not. I'm no legal expert but I expect that one can't claim copyright claim on these works.
People are willing to pay for such performances because they're otherwise hard to come by not because copying these pieces is illegal (although most people probably think it is).
Simon.
You're not making fun of our anthem now are you ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
How right you are! I used to listen to Classic FM, until it became the Beethoven and Mozart channel --- pop classical stuff. Then I turned to Radio 3, and discovered things like Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Ligeti (you mentioned), John Adams, and... Olivier Messaien.
The main reason for all of this: supply of classical musicians vastly exceeds demand. On the supply side, music schools, universities and conservatories worldwide are graduating thousands of performers of classical music every year. On the demand side, you can count the number of classical music professional orchestras in most countries in the low single digits; the reality is that the market for classical music concerts is much smaller than the market for popular music concerts.
However, what this means for the future of open-licensed freely downloadable recordings of classical music is less clear. There is no shortage of brilliant musicians already employed full-time in other paying jobs like music teaching who might consider getting together with others to perform classical works under some sort of open licence, like one of the Creative Commons licences . I suspect that as more people become aware of the open-licensing phenomenon in other media, more classical music performers will help create a similar bandwagon for classical music recordings.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
sorry that's more than its worth.
It's not like you were the only one to grow up. Beethoven did it, too. Did you ever listen to Beethoven's late string quartets? They're legendary and noone in their right mind could call them "pompous", "whiny" or "annoying".
Besides, Mahler is also a bit pompous (but I like his music).
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I think a better factor was that the disc diameter had to be able to fit within 5 1/4 inch disc drive bays, and then that manufacturing technology at the time only permitted a certain spiral density.
Still having a musical heuristic to validate its use as a musical storage format is a good idea.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe we should make all those filthy foreigners pay the license fee as well! What what?
The originality is in the performance - for example at what tempo is the piece conducted? how does the conductor play with the dynamics? etc.
One performers wrong note could constitute originality!!
SURELY NOT!!!!!
> Free classical music downloads.
Just think: our favorite pop hits might be available 200 years from now, too.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well I got the first one, but midway through the second download, it has slowed down to a crawl.
Wouldn't this be a perfect use of BitTorrents? Is there some good reason why they are not using BitTorrents or are they just unaware of the technology?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Went ahead and made a _trackerless_ torrent for those of you who want all the symphonies in this BBC series.
c kerless.torrent
Grab the torrent here: http://home.no.net/nexus/beethoven_symphonies_tra
Now, this is my first atempt at a trackerless torrent and you will need a client with trackerless support to use it (Newest Azureus and BitComet comes to mind)
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
If the cable conecting you to your ISP isn't thick enough and does not have gold plated connectors it will sound even worse!
> I reckon the 9th Symphony 67 minutes.
It depends on the pace set by the conductor. I have copies ranging from 59'43 to 69'34.
> Incidentally all of Beethoven's symphonies are very long.
And longer than expected at the time. Famously, during the premiere performance of the 3rd, someone in the audience shouted that he'd "give a kreutzer" for it to be done and over with.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I would say that, chances are, at least, a man who can sincerely enjoy Xenakis for what it is is a man who understands art in general. No guarantees though. Try listening to Koji Asano or Webern, Lawrence Hayward(Felt/Denim), Daniel Johnston or Jad Fair(Half Japanese).
I have always enjoyed the ninth. But I've always felt that the "choral Fantasy" OP.80 Fantasia in C for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra was much better. The music is better (if shorter) and the sentiment expressed by the lyrics is purer.
I'm listening to the sixth now. Sounds pretty good so far. However, why did the BBC have to mar it by a talking bit at the start. Not complaining too much, it is a free download, but still, it will be distracting in my music library to have that hear it every time I play the song if I decide to keep it.
... DUDE!!!
no seriously,
DUDE!!!!!!!!!!!
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
For those of you bold enough to leave the computer screen for a while, there probably is a local CD store near you where you can buy the whole set of beethoven symphonies.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
Try Shostakovich , and perhaps Rimsky-Korsakov - I love Rach - nothing better than hammering out a few of his preludes... c# minor is an amazing piece of music - as is elegie... His orchestral works are also pretty stunning, and the piano interludes are great to play if you don't have an orchestra to hand.
Just like cottage cheese and tuna!
Indeed, the 4th movement, and the 3rd are still among my all-time fave tracks, but try to get a good performance, I have a 120MB rip of the 4th movement by Bernstein, which is incredible. Cheap dime cuts are pathetic compared to a good performance (this one is the weiner phil), and just not worth it.
Been a while since I've been in a chill enough mood to sit down and enjoy them though, damn 5 second atten-hehe, i googled "boobs", hehe
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Google reveals this is a lossless format - info here
I believe this to be universally applicable. The more music I've listened to, the more I appreciate different kinds. I've slowly expanded to the point where I am now. I can listen to anything from Wagner, Mozart to Prince, Sting to Slayer, Manowar to The Time, D-A-D, to Bad Religion, Exploited and so on. When people ask me "what do you listen to?" I usually answer "good music" - it's the only bulletproof answer, since good/bad music is not a constant. I have stuff I can't listen to any more due to over exposure such as Nirvana, Veruca Salt, Strauss and many others. But the journey is the exciting bit.
Against the grain
Exactly, thats what makes "Frazier Crane" into a sit-com. I like Classical (the 9th was great score for Clockwork Orange) but I also like Pink Floyd, Madona and Eminem. I suppose that means my musical taste is immature? So fucking what? The whole idea of music is to enjoy it's emotions not worship it's practioners.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If you don't like classical music, that's fine but there's no need to be such a troll about it.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
What I mean is, music, like wine, is an acquired taste.
True, yet early music should not be forgotten once your ear is trained. The music that you are so fond of today was built off of the music that you've 'grown out of'. The building procedure was hundreds of years long, but it is the foundation. I still love to listen to Haydn, Mozart, Shubert, Brahms, Smetana, and other baroque-early romantic composers as well as Crumb, Berg, Scrabin, and other modern composers (and everything in the middle, plus lots of jazz). What I love to do is explore both modern and CPP (common practice period) composers, and try to find any connections betweeen them. Its a wholistic effect (listening to one enhances listening to the other and vise-versa). Its good to not stray on one side of the musical spectrum. Here's an excerpt from a poem from the Tao that will hopefully reinforce my point.
When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good, other things become bad.
Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.
Therefore the master acts without doing anything, and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.
It's a shame theres so much bloody blabbering pre-fixing the actual music though. They seem to be recorded straight off air.
:)
Still, cynics aside it's still jolly nice of the BBC
It can be found here.
I wonder how many of the 650,000 people actually removed the mp3's after 7 days of full enjoyment...
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
I know...I know...they say you can't edit it. But if you're only going to be listening in the snuggly comfort of your own home, who will know/care? Any audio editing program will allow you to chop the commentary with ease. Unfortunately, it's only a 128k encode. Fine for casual use, but the audio quality isn't that great. I'm sure they had little choice because of bandwidth issues. Oh well. The 9th recording sounds pretty good. Cheers,
As I understand it, nobody plays the original Beethovan|Bach|whoever scores, because modern instruments don't sound the same as the ones he composed for.
Everyone plays modern arrangements of the classical pieces, which someone does have a valid copywright to.
Theoretically some gifted fellow could sit down with the original score, re-orchastrate it, and release that arrangement with a friendly license.
The point I was making to followup what the other poster said is that, for most classical works, no fee is payable to the estate of the composer. You are right that there may be a fee payable to the owner of the copyright of the score. However, it has not always been the case. There was a recent, highly controversial decision in a court case in the UK on this very subject: Hyperion Records fails at appeal.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
Most of the fees you mentioned are included in a live performance. Hence, the only additional cost is mixing and polishing in the recording studio, if the BBC are going to broadcast, they've done all of this aswell.
I just downloaded them and the sound quality is very poor. 128kbps CBR MP3 is really not adequate for classical music (and it sounds like it wasn't a particularly good digital master either). In contrast, 128kbps AAC from iTMS is significantly better. I generally encode CDs at 256kbps AAC, since the Dolby consumer AAC encoder is not nearly as good as the Pro version (same bitstream format, slightly tweaked psycho-acoustic model).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They may be more concerned about gathering accurate statistics on the number of files downloaded, files per user, etc.
As far as I am aware (I am no expert on the BitTorrent protocol, so please correct me if I am wrong), the BitTorrent tracker collects these statistics already.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
It probably takes a bit more coordination than the average popular music performer to make a good classical recording -- at least one that requires any significantly sized orchestra. (Conductors, venues, recording equipment, lots of performers, practicing performing together cohesively, etc etc.) I suspect that most orchestras able to pull it off simply have to be professional, because there's so much rolling infrastructure involving a lot of people and resources behind the performances that's needed to make sure that they can do it properly. Arts funding to keep these things going is never very generous, and a lot of it probably comes on the condition that the orchestra management demonstrates that it's continuing to raise money on their own by charging for what it produces.
If it helps, you might find a lot of very cheap classical CD's in certain bargain bins. I've collected a lot of Mozart, Strauss and Dvorak for about $2 per CD, which is a price I'm perfectly prepared to pay and one that I think is quite fair. In my experience, they're often left-over stock of classical performances from some years ago, but they're not low quality.
Someone who cares about details such as particular orchestras or performances might not find what they want in the bargain bins. If you're like me, however, and just wanted a general introduction before finding out more, there's a lot of very cheap classical music out there.
(nt)
Speaking of world records (see the article yesterday about memorising digits of ), here we have the world's worst analogy.
but shn is not free for commercial use
according to http://members.home.nl/w.speek/comparison.htm
the fully free software FLAC seems to perform about as well
A quick biography of my brother, Edward Neeman:
For the past six years, I have been living and studying in Canberra, Australia with Larry Sitsky. During this period, I have won many prizes, including the Kawai Australasian Youth Piano Concerto Competition (2002) and the Paul Landa Memorial Scholarship (2004). I have performed as a soloist with the Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and Western Australia Symphony Orchestras, and my concerts have been broadcast on local and national radio stations. I was invited to perform in the Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music in 2000 and 2001, and the Canberra International Chamber Music Festival in 2003 and 2004. I have also participated in international competitions and masterclasses, including the Tel-Hai International Piano Masterclasses, Israel (2001), the Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition in Brussels (2003), the Young Concert Artists auditions in New York (2004), the Scottish International Piano Competition in Glasgow (2004), and the Panama International Piano Competition in Panama City (2004). From 2000-2005 I have been completing a Bachelor of Music degree at the Australian National University, where I have won the Erika Haas Performance Prize (2000), the Margeret Smiles Accompaniment Prize (2002) and the Winifred Burston Memorial Scholarship (2001, 2002).
Small download samples are available here and here. If there is enough interest, I can set up torrents of a bunch more stuff. Mostly modern (20th century), CC (no derivatives, attribution) license.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
...because the license on the MP3s says it's illegal to redistribute them.
Not that that's stopping me from using that torrent, of course. Some licenses are just stupid.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
> Try Shostakovich , and perhaps Rimsky-Korsakov - I love Rach
I love Rach Music too. It was great to see some of the classic bands reunite for the Live 8 concerts yesterday.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
download off kazaa at 600kB/s or download legally from the BBC at 4kB/s....
For encoding classical music, AAC is far better than the alternatives. Ogg Vorbis is close, but last time I checked had some issues with harpsichords (not sure if they're fixed now, but encoding, say, a Brandenbug Concerto would result in some quite unpleasant distortions).
If you have a license for the Dolby Pro codec, then you will find it's quality to be superb. If not, the only source of music encoded with it that I know of is iTMS. The PsyTEL AAC encoder is also very good (close to the Dolby Pro encoder, passing it in some areas), but the last time I looked it was Windows-only - although it's a command-line app so it probably runs fine with WINE.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No where in his post did he say he doesn't like classical music, or stated something other than facts.
:-P
Popular music has a large market. Regardless if popular music is any better or worse than unpopular music (usually worse).
He just said it's understandable that unpopular music has smaller markets, by definition of popularity
I know the music I listen to has a relatively TINY market, yet it's quality material, at least in my eyes.
^_^
I can understand that one's personal music taste changes, but your post makes it seem like Beethoven's 9th is something of a bygone era (musically speaking). Someone else mentioned that Beethoven's music evolved as he became more mature (again, compared to his 9th). I don't think that one can classify his 9th as immature, annoying, etc.
His 9th symphony was composed at the end of his life. I can understand perhaps calling his early symphonies "immature" but his later ones were works of an original, genius mind.
The 9th symphony was the first symphony to add singers in a symphony. I have heard some people refer to it as a work that helped start the Romantic period. Finally, Mahler spent his entire life trying to immitate the "greatness" of Beethoven's 9th. Whether he succeeded or not is a matter of interpretation.
As I understand it, nobody plays the original Beethovan|Bach|whoever scores, because modern instruments don't sound the same as the ones he composed for.
Everyone plays modern arrangements of the classical pieces, which someone does have a valid copywright to.
Not quite correct. First, the issue of how modern instruments sound: this doesn't in itself affect the scores. Changes of sound quality apart, the players can still play all the notes (technique permitting), and regularly do -- or try to! (I was recently playing from a photocopy of an 18th-century printed part, the printing style looked a bit weird in places, but it is quite playable.)
Second, 'the original' identical scores may sometimes not be obtainable, ok, but there are still plenty of early-enough editions around that copyright should not be an issue. (Although, to look at recent publishers' facsimile reprints of 19th-century scores of 18/19th century music, you might pick up an impression that the publishers want you to believe there is still a copyright in force there!).
None of this denies that a new arrangement can have a valid copyright (but there are lots of questions just what is covered by the copyright in a new edition that has only minor changes relative to the out-of-copyright original).
-wb-
It depends on what you want to know. In my opinion if you've found pieces you like you don't really need to know much else. For me it's all about the music, whether I enjoy it and how it makes me feel.
Any extra info you need about a composer or piece as a "beginner" is usually pretty easy to find on Wikipedia and via Google.
Andy.
Thank goodness I've got some Slashdot Anonymous Coward to tell me that Beethoven is crap. We all anxiously await your Symphonic efforts.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Well, welcome to the classical world, then :-)
Start with Beethoven's Fifth, there was a hint here how to get it. Or just buy a nice sampler in your store and go with your taste.
The most respected artists by the masses are Monteverdi, Vivaldi, JS Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Tchaikovski, but it's all about your taste. Try and if you like, try some more.
Check the WP for some background info.
Cheers!
They're unknown to me, at least. I don't collect classic music but as a member of the general public I don't know who they are.
It's funny because it's true... snobbism has probably led him away from listening to other good music, because it doesn't fit his image of what he should listen to.
It's sad how many of your assertions are false.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Sure. After all, we all know Ckwop would conduct Beethoven's 5th as well as Toscanini, don't we?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
In communist Britian, BBC watches you ;)
Me (Blog)
Regarding paying for music, I have no problems with that, except I do enjoy listening to something before I buy it. Also, 5 dollar bargains mean nothing to me as I get paid in yen.
So, to summarize:
1.) I don't want to buy music if I have no idea what it sounds like first, and
2.) Not everyone lives in the US.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
This sucks. If they're going to let you download them for free they should let you redistribute them...as long as it's for free of course.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
In other words, I do know what you mean, but I find it odd you include Beethoven in that group. I don't really put him alongside Vivaldi and Handel. I can agree that some classical forms have (sadly) become rather twee and pompous sounding, I can't but Beethoven in there. His stuff is seriously daring, the harmonies and chord movements are cutting-edge, they were shocking then and they can still be shocking now. Beethoven was light years ahead of his time, I consider him very much alongside Debussy, over a century later, in smashing through boundaries of acceptible harmony.
Obviously, though, Beethoven is very wide-ranging. There's the inevitable debate as to whether you file him as the last classicist or the first romantic - either way his career roughly seems to bridge the two, so there are Vivaldi-esque and Handel-esque compositions in there for you to dismiss if you want, but there are also genius works you could see as proto-Mahler, proto-Rachmaninoff - so if you're writing Beethoven off completely I think you might be missing some delights.
c# minor is an amazing piece of music
GO MICROSOFT!
No sig
Many classical forms have become pompous, whiny and annoying to modern ears.
I believe this is because classical music is most often used in whiny and annoying contexts, so people seem to develop that association. It's unfortunate, but true.
I, for example, can't stand any Vivaldi, Haendel, Beethoven.
I definitely would NOT lump Beethoven in with Vivaldi and Handel. That just doesn't make any sense to me. The musical styles are completely different. Beethoven was the first composer to really break out of the "classical" mold and start playing with new textures, new instruments, new chord progressions, etc. He brought much more emotion into his music than Vivaldi and Handel, for whom composing was basically just a job.
Beethoven's music is very complex and even today you can hear Beethoven influences in modern film scores (John Williams, etc). If you spend time studying the music and the scores, you realize what a musical genius Beethoven really was. He was a master of form above all else. But in order to appreciate the form, you have to listen to a complete symphony, all movements. This is why I'm annoyed by the fact that most people only know the cell phone ringer versions of a Beethoven symphony.
By the way, I think I should mention Mozart. I believe he is overrated-- he was a genius for sure, but his music doesn't do anything for me. It seems to lack that vital connection to the listener.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
So it isn't the whole concert just 15 min samples. What a crock.
You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead. ~ Laurel and Hardy
Above post sanctions not just software piracy, but this time, ass piracy as well.
Plus, did you know that it takes much harder work to become a good musician than to become a good software engineer?
Maybe to become a good enough musician or software engineer, but I'd strongly disagree with your point as written - it's just less obvious to people outside of the field when a software engineer isn't very good.
What would Lemmy do?
It's interesting - although the BBC has the FULL RIGHTS to distribute this music as they see fit (including free), the record companies were STILL whining about it, and going on about "how it would destroy the record industry" etc. The record companies were on the BBC news at least twice whining about this.
This proves the truth - record companies just don't like competition.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Not true. By Beethoven's time (early 1800s), the modern symphony orchestra format was well established, and his compositions are played by modern symphonies in their original forms. Bach (early 1700s) didn't write any symphonies, because symphony orchestras didin't exist at the time. But he wrote a lot of choral pieces, a lot for organ/harpsichord, and much for solo string instruments and small string ensembles. Some of the instruments are now different - piano is more commonly used than harpsichord, for example, and modern string instruments have a few changes - but the music for the most part can be played unaltered.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
You can get excellent recordings of small acoustic ensembles for $500-$1000 in recording equipment.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
If these recordings aren't original, they'd all sound exactly the same, right? So why bother having hundreds of different recordings of the same Beethoven symphony, or the Bach solo violin sonatas? Because they don't all sound the same; each performer has their own sound and interpretation of the music. Classical recordings are very much original and very much copyrightable. If you don't believe me, look for the copyright notice on the back cover of any classical CD.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I don't mean to disrespect them in any way, nor am I complaining that they are overpaid; however, the starting salary for a 1st violinist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is over $100,000. There are far too many great musicians who are indeed trying to scrape a meager living, but members of prominent orchestras are not such people. Of course, as you said there are more costs than that to an recording, and it is of little surprise that there are not more distributed for free.
English is easier said than done.
I've always wondered why MP3 and other audio formats are not encoded in two passes much like variable bitrate video encoding
Probably because audio is small enough that the difference between fitting eight albums on a CD-R and fitting nine albums on a CD-R isn't very wasteful, unlike DivX video where you try to fit the entire length of a feature film (or half of one) within a tight window of 695 to 700 MiB.
Root-mean-square error as a measure of fidelity works with processes that do not use a psychoacoustic model, but it does not take into account the various kinds of masking that the human ear uses and that codecs such as MP3 and Vorbis exploit. There is no known accurate measure of perceptual audio fidelity.
As others have pointed out: not true. The sound of the instrument has nothing to do with the score.
What a score may do is point out appropriate fingering -- but unless it's a transcription to a totally different instrument (eg, piano to guitar), the notes are exactly as Beethoven wrote them. There's certainly a copyright on the score but it's rather hard to tell from a recording which score was used when the notes are the same, and I'd doubt that the publisher of the score is entitled to royalties from the recording anyway.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The original length of the Compact Disk was designed so that Beethoven's 9th could fit on a single disk. Now, of course, we have the ability to cram 80 minutes worth of music onto a single CD.
BTW we just succeeded in slashdotting Auntie Beeb.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Wasn't that hard: here.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I'm intrigued by their business model...and happy that you led me to find them. I'll be supporting them, the music is very good.
The 1st Chair Violinist has a great deal of responsibility over and above being a hot violin soloist. S/He is usually the assistant conductor of the orchestra. S/He is the person who puts the orchestra through its rehearsals. S/He makes sure everyone has the right sheet music. S/He is basically the "second-in-command" of the orchestra.
;-)
All that, and they have to be a hot violin soloist too. It's really quite a set of responsibilities. No shit they get paid well.
Unfortunately the percussionists in the orchestra are the ones at the bottom of the totem pole. This was a fact of life that was quite depressing for my husband, who's a percussionist and was a member of the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble in the early part of the 1970s. Instead of classical, he took his chances on rock.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Only problem is the 2 minutes of talking before the music.
Actually, the layer-3 standard, when fully implemented, allows the encoder to use left-over bits from previous frames or to borrow from next frames, so it is sort of like ABR. The chief technical difference is that, for CBR, all frames are marked the same bitrate despite bit borrowing, where as ABR marks each frame with the appropriate bitrate. Of course, with CBR, the actual frame boundary can drift very far away from frame markers. This means you shouldn't naively cut and concatenate MP3 files, but most decoders can deal with incomplete frames (by ignoring them).
I once had a signature.
At the current 4.1 KB /sec on a 4-6 MB/sec cable connection, it would probably be faster for me to go out, buy the CDs, and rip them! The Sixth Symphony will take over three hours to download at the current rate. :)
Ah, well. If it helps to give credibility to legal music downloading, I'll wait for the transfers.
A site gets slashdotted when it has nothing to do with geeks, gadgets, or gizmos. Who would have thought it?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
What if there isn't one?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Watching an amazing goal is fun. But it is nowhere near the same experience as watching a full game at the edge of your seat, and experienceing an amazing last-minute goal in its context.
After sitting through an entire game of soccer, it would take little to excite me.
Famously, during the premiere performance of the 3rd, someone in the audience shouted that he'd "give a kreutzer" for it to be done and over with.
And ironically, the composer wasn't deaf yet.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
No, not all. The analogy is extremely apt because it shows firstly that whether creative people can afford to publish their stuff under a free-redistribution type of copyright licence has nothing to do with whether they are musicians or software engineers, and secondly that being a non-professional does not automatically imply the person can make only lower-quality content.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
I hate the Bush administration as much as the next guy, but people need to realize that BOTH parties have been thoroughly pwned by Big Business. In these entertainment cases, the Democrats are the ones who deserve our ire.
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Beethoven is a good place to start, because even if you don't have any musical inclination, his work will quickly become familiar to you. It's literally as recognizable as Nine Inch Nails -- just as you know when you hear some synth work by Reznor, even if you've never heard it before, you'll also know when you hear something by the lovely Ludwig Van.
Mozart is the same way for a lot of people. But ultimately, sticking with the old dead German guys is like learning about rock and roll and stopping with the Stones and the Beatles. Try some Faure on for size, too -- "Pavane" is almost as recognizable as Beethoven's Fifth, and there are a lot of Faure discs that include it and some other very good stuff.
The Wikipedia suggestion is a good one.
Ok, so it's mostly amateurs, but I definitely like some of it.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
That's why you get Download Accelerator or FlashGet.
-Palal
Just think: our favorite pop hits might be available 200 years from now, too.
Except that most of today's music will not stand the test of time.
The classical music that is still around today is the best of the best, just as only the best of the best of today's music will still be listened to 200 years from now.
nil
Any audio editing program will allow you to chop the commentary with ease.
Any recommendations for Linux, FreeBSD, ...? I understand that MP3 files consist of frames, so chopping off the beginning (minus the header) won't be so difficult; but an audio editing program with GUI would be a nice thing to have.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
and... Olivier Messaien.
/. For the ADHD crowd, no, it's not Nine Inch Nails and yes, it really is that long.
Egh . . . just avoid the Livre d'Orgue. I sat through a concert of Messiaen's organ works at my church, the Livre d'Orgue was one of the pieces played. 47 minutes of atonal, disjointed crap. "I'm going to randomly hit every stop on this organ!" Later, the music director (guy with a Ph.D who knows from good music) told me I was deserving of a Purple Heart for sitting through it.
Be that as it may, it's great that the BBC is making this available and it's great that real music is finally getting some mention on
Well, hmmm... yes. But www.allofmp3.com has a nice collection of classic music too (besides other things).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
often an orchestra is recorded in their home base, or one they travel to. a lot of purists feel the optimum way to record a piece of classical music is with an orchestra in a hall they know using one really really really good microphone (yes, mono). i am not trying to oversimplify it, but that is the way a lot of people like it. it also gives a unique sound, a lot of halls are well known for the sound they have, and it can take years for the orchestra, director etc to learn how to get the optimum sound for that space.
recording may not be as complicated as pop artists that can not actually sing in key and need 55 takes of a guitar solo, but it is a different beast.
also of note, the orchestra often will count on the revenue from those recordings to keep going.
> It's not like you were the only one to grow up.
> Beethoven did it, too. Did you ever listen to Beethoven's late string quartets?
> They're legendary and noone in their right mind could call them "pompous", "whiny" or "annoying".
Unfortunately, recommending "late string quartets" assumes a familiarity with Beethoven's body of music that the receipient knows what is early, what is late and what is encompassed by "late string quartets".
Would someone knowledgable please tell me specifically which pieces are in the group of "late string quartets" so that I know what I'm looking for?
String quartets op. 127 (128?) and beyond. You know what an opus is.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
I've never been a music geek, but after hearing the 9th today, I think that may change.
It is true, you have to listen to the whole thing. This was the first time I've ever done so and I can't begin to explain what a difference it makes to hear it all together in the intended order. I never really understood before that a symphony creates its own vocabulary and language as it progresses so by the end it says all sorts of things that I can't put into words.
I feel as if I've been somehow raped but in a good way. It keeps making me think of the myth where Zeus becomes an eagle and snatches Ganymede away to Mount Olympus to be his lover and cupbearer. I see it as Zeus making the boy into a god, but at a price. That's the 9th to me, Beethoven dug his talons into me, and for an hour I became a god in Beethoven's heaven and experienced joy so profound it hurt like hell. It was a truly mind altering experience.
http://www.marxist.com/
I know this is probably the wrong time in your life to do this... but for the ... very young ...
Play a string instrument in school.
Any good conductor/teacher will choose music that isn't what the masses have already heard 1000 times. Along with finding new music and composers, you'll learn about music theory, and be able to understand how it all works.
Here's the best part: women love guys who play the violin. (Yeah, I made that up).
But for parents: get your kids into playing an instrument, because it provides a nice balance to more stressful school activities (sports, AP classes, general bulshit).
Well obviously not, because in this case professional musicians can't afford to public their material freely, and the non-professionals can only produce lower-quality content.
Here's a copy of Beethoven's 9th stretched out to 24 hours. The algorhythm used is superb, and the end result is amazing.
This too, will end.
You're right that they record in the hall with one microphone, but not mono.
Generally an extremely high quality stereo condenser mic is used (usually hung from the ceiling around the middle of the hall), as it can replicate the spatial arrangement of the musicians on the stage without spreding them too far apart (you don't want the 1st violins only in the right speaker) as well as capturing the tonal characteristics of the hall itself.
The advantage of this is, of course, that it doesn't take much longer to produce a classical recording than it does to perform the piece. The microphone is designed to pick up and record exactly the sound in the room -- meaning there's very little processing that needs to be done afterwards.
Contrast this with pop music, where it can take weeks in the studio to get the right guitar sound (don't even get me started on what it takes for drums).
If you listen to new pop bands, they may have great sound, but it's not all that impressive considering how much time they spend tweaking things to get that sound.
What is impressive, are those old Elvis recordings with Carl Perkins and the Sun Studio house band, where they'd cut the whole record in a couple of days. That band still sounds tighter and swings harder than just about anything today.
You forgot to multiply the cost of one broadband connection by 100 people for 2 years in a software project (a symphony orchestra has up to 100 people), and to add to that the costs of 100 computer purchases' pro rata depreciation during those 2 years, 100 electricity users during evenings and weekends at 500Watts for a PC, plus 3kWatts more if there is room heating/air conditioning... Assuming the bandwidth for hosting the software project itself is free to the users (e.g. sourceforge), the PC room is effectively free and the PCs are used for the project for say 1/5 of the switched-on time, the total cost is still at least USD 20000. Let's compare that with the costs of producing a digital recording of one piece of classical music in a project that is intended to release the music for eventual free distribution, i.e. minimized costs -- no need to hire Carnegie Hall, no need for 5* hotels, etc. Did you know that classical music can be very satisfactorily performed and recorded in a large church (many of which have excellent acoustics) at a cost of USD300-500 for one evening's hire of the church using multi-track digital recording kit at a hire cost including amps, mikes, stands etc of USD600-1000, and a whole-day's hire of a recording engineer at USD500-1000? That's a total hire cost of around USD1400-2500 to produce a digital recording of one piece of classical music.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
No, you missed the point about copyright expiry: "their stuff" in the case of classical musicians is available for them to use at no cost because it is classical music which was owned, not by the performing musicians, but by the classical composers whose copyrights have mostly expired, and also the point I made earlier here about the availability of talent apart from professional performers.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
Hmm. Download Accelerator or FlashGet?
I thought this was slashdot. Use `wget`
The fifth sysmphony shows that Beethoven can have a sense of humor, even if it is on a gigantic scale.
The story is that there was a review of the Fourth Symphony (by Hoffman [if I recall correctly], same guy as in 'Tales of Hoffman') who complained that the melodies were way too long and unwieldly, thrashing about like tortured snakes.
So Beethoven poked him in the eye, so to speak, by baseing many of the themes of the first section of the Fifth Symphony on the shortest of motifs, the famous "Da Da Da Duuuuum".
Of course, he still built extended melodies from the motif, but now it was so clear that even this reviewer could understand it.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Theoretically, yes, but practically, people like to do things like eating, so they charge. A radical concept, that, and one seemingly lost on the FOSS zealots.
Witness with success of Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Monteverdi Choir, and English Baroque Soloists. http://www.monteverdi.co.uk/ In fact, any classical music fans should be able to recall that his recording of the Beethoven Symphonies with Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique using period intruments was hailed as a landmark recording and won numerous prizes.
You really see this for the first time in the first movement of the Eroica, Symphony #3, but it is also evident in the Fifth, and is pretty obvious in the 9th. But being music, the ideas are more difficult to put into directly into words.
it is like abstract art that at first is non-comprehensible, until you spot the context that the piece was created from. An example from visual art can be seen here where a cool science fiction scene is created from a snapshot of some kitchen shelves.
Point being, there is another whole level going on there.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That doesn't mean that it isn't worth occasionally getting those recordings, especially for obscure composers or pieces that don't get recorded very often, but for major pieces it's going to make a lot of difference. On the other hand, university orchestras may be more interesting than most of the commercial orchestras, because they've got more flexibility to fool around.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've downloaded some of the first 5 symphonies at work at about 10kB/s, and at home at about 5 kB/s using my 56k modem. I was quite happy with those downloading speeds (I live in South Africa, the country with the most expensive internet access in the world).
/. effect...
After the Slashdotting I'm only getting 2.1 kB/s. Hopefully I'll be able to download the rest before they take it off. I want to keep it 100% legal, so therefore I'll only use the torrents as a last resort.
Hopefully the Beeb won't stop making music freely available for download because of the
In general, this is the best download performance I've seen - usually anything large that I'm downloading other than bittorrents will either saturate a small server with a small number of downloaders, or a large number of downloaders on a large pipe, but this just blazed away.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Like the classical forms that you despise, you are also quite pompous, whiny, and annoying. I have enjoyed childish comments like yours, especially when I was younger, but I've since grown out of it.
P.S. - By the way, I can't stand the self-aggrandizing, I am too important to express myself and thus cannot make anythng that sounds good modern classical music composers. Give me Mozart's sublime Le Nozze di Figaro anyday!
Coming from the knowledge of a music student and choral music librarian... It's true that the copyrights on a lot of old music have elapsed. However, a lot of sheet music for old music is still copyrighted because the publishers edited the score (adding performance notes, performance marks, dynamic marks, etc.). So those editions are under copyright even if the original music is not under copyright. However, you still have to pay for the printing of music that is not under copyright. I can usually tell if new copies of a work are still under copyright because the ones that aren't are dead cheap (under $1.00 per part, depending on the number of pages). Interestingly, there is a resource online (I can't remember the name or site) that collects old choral works which are no longer under copyright and makes them available for free download and printing. We've been seeing a lot of choirs use these resources, which is wonderful.
Thanks for that! It sounds really interesting. Tonality is over-rated. I'll have to take another trip to the university's "reference-only" music resource room. With my laptop. Most of Messaien is an "acquired taste". Turangalila-Symphonie sounds like a mess when you first listen to it, but after about five goes your brain starts to make sense of it.
OK, you can diss Messaien all you like, but leave those exceedingly long fasteners alone! I mean, what next? "The melody of Ayers, Everall and Harris's Mesmeric Enabling Device was saturated with late-eighties cheeze, evocative of Pete Waterman snorting parmezan off the black keys of a Casio?"
Well, if you're going to such detail, maybe you should add in the costs of the musical instruments too, which are MUCH more expensive than the pc's. And yes, I'm more than aware that some churches have good acoustics for concerts, but for serious recordings with 100-piece orchestras I'm not so sure... Are you?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
This might be more than you asked for, but here are some good pieces of music which some may consider "accessible". Many of these were instant hits with me on the first listen.
:) Listen to all of the two-part inventions.
Bach's well-tempered clavier, book one. Kind of a "best hits" of Bach.
Liszt's hungarian rhapsodies. Nos. 2, 6, 12, 13, 15, 19 are fun.
Prokofiev's 5th piano concerto. Ten pieces, op. 12 (especially #7 and #8). Tocatta, op 11 is awesome.
Rachmaninoff's c# minor prelude. 2nd and 3rd piano concertos. Definitely listen to etudes tableaux, especially the d-minor etude from op.33 and op.39 no. 6.
Chopin piano etudes. Get them all. Op. 10 nos. 1-4 are pretty good to start with. Op. 25 no. 5 too. Listen to all of the ballades.
Some Scarlatti sonatas are real gems, like K27 and K141.
Beethoven's piano sonatas #8 and #23 are good starters. #14 is the moonlight sonata. You've no doubt heard the first movement a thousand times. His 7th symphony is great.
Schumann's kinderszenen.
Mussorgsky's pictures at an exhibition, either original piano or a later orchestration. The promenade has one of the great russian melodies, instantly recognizable.
Take up an instrument in your free time. I took up piano, which is why most of what I listed is piano music. You will no doubt naturally look for more music on your own and learn a shitload of music history and appreciation from a music teacher. Go to the library for borrowing music CDs and getting music history/appreciation/theory books.
You'll find the more you listen to such music, the less it sounds the same. Individual pieces by any of these composers will sound as different from eachother as anything else.
Thirty years ago it was easy: the first Vienese school (the three "great" classical composers - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), plus a little Schubert, followed by the romantic repotoire of Schumann, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
Nowadays Classical music embraces an amazing soundworld of medieval vocal and instrumental music, right through to very accessible contemporary composers like Tavener, via more music than we have space hear to discuss. It makes it harder to get started, but means there are more rewards for the adventurous.
How to get started? Read books of reviews, or buy magazines, and use them as a guide. Then buy one or two records that are similar to what you know you like to each one you buy that is totally new. Some new ones you'll hate, some you'll love, but you'l know more about what you like :-)
Random recommendations? Klemperer's recording of Mahler's second symphony, Mitsuko Uchida's Mozart Piano Sonatas, download the BBC Beethoven symphonies, try some Tudor music - not just Thomas Tallis, start with Tye.
http://fsfeurope.org/
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
I second this. When I need to edit/convert audio files, Audacity gets the job done in a jiffy. If you have a package manager like Synaptic, you can download and install Audicity like so: "apt-get -y install audacity"
Could it get any simpler?
I can't afford a sig!
Anyone heard of The Video Game Pianist? (aka Blindfolded Pianist) He basically is a college music student who plays video game music (Mario, Final Fantasy, Zelda, etc.) and posts them free on the internet. You've probably seen him on Ebaums playing mario songs blindfolded. The mission statements of his site. :)
Mission 1: "I am dedicated to promoting video game music as well as increasing the popularity of video game music."
Misson 2: "My second goal is to enhance the image of the piano and to make the piano a more mainstream instrument in today's music culture."
Mission 3: "My third goal is to popularize classical music by performing video game music."
And he's not half bad
I'm a bit puzzled by your statement "The first time I got 8-9 MB samples at slow speed." The downloads appear to be resumable. So I'd simply abort the download when it slows to a crawl and resume, rather than restart, the download. Of course, resuming as against restarting a 40MB download probably doesn't make much of a difference for those on a 500K pipe. But it does matter for those on a 56K dialup line (a three-hour download).
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
I've slowly expanded to the point where I am now.
.sig.
Sounds like a new
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
As for recordings not being a cash cow for classical music artists, most of the top-tier artists make their living from giving black-tie concerts. But most artists of lesser talent or promotion have to content themselves giving music lessons, either tutoring young brats on how to do-re-mi or lecturing at the music college of some university. I should know: I was the pain of quite a few such frustrated concert performers, and I still can't read a piece of simple sheet music on first sight.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
These are the time offsets that you can set in iTunes or another player, to get past the talking parts for each of the symphonies to get only the music part to play in your playlist: (minutes:seconds)
1: 3:00
2: 2:12
3: 2:59
4: 1:19
5: 1:11
6: 2:16
7: 1:55
8: 3:11
9: 2:38
Beethoven and Bach didn't put any fingering in their scores, either, so you could just play their music on a different instrument anyway. If there is any fingering in these scores then it was added by the publisher. Composers writing fingering in scores only really started happening in the second half on the 19th century (think Chopin & Liszt) and then it was only for music that was so difficult that you probably couldn't play it on an instrument that wasn't the same sort of construction as the original. The same holds true today, as far as I have seen.
One good turn - gets all the covers.
Ancilliary note:
Free Mozartrecording I got off the bottome of the Wikipediapage on him.
Needle Nardle Noo
Barenboim conducted Das Konzert celebrating the end of The Wall. The 7th symphony is nothing special but the first piano concerto is a brilliant performance.
Needle Nardle Noo
The Ode to Joy (orignally Ode to Freedom but changed due to the censor) is Europe's new 'National' Anthem. And what better piece of music can you think of for that role? What piece of music could represent a united Europe, the cradle and defender of western civilization, now finally and perhaps permanently becoming free of the millenia of wars and internal strife?
I agree, Beethoven is, if anything, more valid today than ever before, thought he grandparent poster is being given an unnecessarily hard time over his views.
Needle Nardle Noo
By the way I recently got a lot more interested in classical music from a manga called Nodame Cantalibre which is still growing at 12 issues (Japanese only so far). It is about classical music students and a fun and fascinating look at music school and the post graduation world for classical musicians. I'm looking for classical sheet music / lessons on the net for guitar (or piano perhaps).
How can you even mention the word 'pompus' without mentioning Wagner in the same sentence?! Shame on you, Shame! Shame!
/Big Wagner fan though.
Would you recommend anything by Mahler for me please?
Needle Nardle Noo
I have the double CD set from Philips (1 and 2). I would unequivocally state, is the only time I have paid what the disc was worth.
Truth be told, I still don't understand a good 9/10ths of those late quartets but of what I do, it is Beethoven at his clearest, most personel, and most pertinent. He speaks perhaps his clearest ever here. He wrote them at the end of his life, it is as if he knew he was going to die so he sat down to write the greatest music he had written yet (these were done 2 years after the 9th), and to write the most personal and messaging (for lack of a better word) music for people.
Can you recommend any of his other quartets to me?
Needle Nardle Noo
And it is the EU's new 'national anthem' (as I posted above), but I do get what you're saying.
Needle Nardle Noo
sorry--can you give me a hint about Prokofiev's works? i have no idea what i would google to find what you're talking about...
You have to hire the music, which includes a fee payable to the estate of the composer in most cases.
Something like 90% of all classical music is now public domain. Why would anyone pay fees to composers' estates?
"You on the other hand... how do you like that new Britney Spear album?"
...err I mean develop.
Wow, no kidding, Britney has a new album!
I think the GP was trying to make the point that there is a lot of snobbery surrounding certain types of art and music, ie: some people look down at others because they don't have "sophistcated tastes" that took years to learn
By all means share your opinions about what you do and don't like, but running people down because of the music that they enjoy is crass and immature (yes, that also applies to poeple who like B. Spears. or The Bay City Rollers).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Lied von der Erde".
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Well, there's the symphonies. The best known is probably the 2nd, 'Resurrection'. I also recommend the 5th. If you want pomposity, look to the 3rd. The songs from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn' are fairly well known too.
I'm just an amateur, I have no ability to critically distinguish between the works of such genius like Beethoven and say "this is good" and "skip that". I think all Beethoven's quartets are worth listening to. The early ones are light and like, a bit shallow when compared to the old ones, but they still sound great and on many occasions I preferred to listen to them than to the later ones.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Snide comments aside, do check out some Rachmaninoff if you haven't already. The playing gets pretty hardcore and downright violent. The 3rd Concerto is legendary in that respect.
This sucks. If they're going to let you download them for free they should let you redistribute them...as long as it's for free of course.
Why, though? Because you feel like it?
It is still their content, and so they decide... no matter how much it makes people whine that it's not absolutely free.
I just pooped your party.
Your work as a musician is to get up your ass and perform for an audience.
Or composing music on request.
Or teaching.
Your work is not recording once something and then sit down to do nothing and expect to be paid for that.
Technology has distoreted completely the way musicians think about music, before the advent of recordings musicians earned their living doing some actual work.
Now many musicians expect to be paid for one performance that happens to be recorded. The recording industry has brainwashed them, and in the process they have lost touch what music is all aobut: people relating to people, in the meatspace mind you.
Recording of any kind, specially nowadays where copying them is practically impossible to stop, should be considered as a nice advertisment vehicle from which some (very few) may even derve an income.
All the "semi-professionals" expecting to make money from recordings are simply completely unrealistic and obviously have been living in a cave for the last 10 years.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Thanks, I'll check them out.
Needle Nardle Noo
Thanks! That's a really extensive network they've got. Looks like my downloads were coming direct from London via Abovenet, rather than from some caching server in the US, which makes the performance even more impressive.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A short quiz: what piece of literature probably inspired the 2nd?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Not proud. I suspect that I've been fed the same "easy for the public to understand" music as everyone else. There's much more classical music out there than what you find on those "Best of" albums, but as you know, availability is key.
;)
About "classic" vs "classical" it's probably from Norwegian. "Classic" "Klassiker". "Classical music" "Klassisk musikk". "Klassisk" is more similar to "Classic" than it is to "Classical" and "Klassiker" is more similar to "Classical" than "Classic", as you can see, which is probably why I made that mistake.
Bach's well-tempered clavier, book one. Kind of a "best hits" of Bach. :) Listen to all of the two-part inventions.
Recommended recordings:
Well-tempered clavier Book I.
Well-tempered clavier Book II.
"I feel as if I've been somehow raped but in a good way."
I'm almost tempted to change my sig.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
One thing to do is find some music you like and go to a live performance of it. Being in a theater and having the orchestra there is a totally different experience.
I once was able to attend a performance of the 9th (Beethoven) and Carmina Burana (Carl Orff) performed by the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra (W.VA. USA.) and there is a quality to the live performance. A resonance that you can feel in the air that no CD or DVD-A has been able to reproduce. Words fail me to describe the feeling enough to do justice to the experience.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
I find that with overplayed artists, it's best not to drop them, but simply avoid the 1-2 overplayed songs (most often all the other work they do is forgotten) there is usually some good stuff outside of the "hits" that get overplayed.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.