But what they do is get an "expert" to reinterpret the score every few years.
There are actually very good musical reasons to do this. Music written or printed 300 years ago looks much different than that published today, and often requires an editor's help to bring it into a form usable by modern performers. To give one example, many instrumental sonatas and other works were written out in "figured bass" notation, which gave the keyboard player only the bass line and numeric symbols representing the harmonies. It was up to the player to improvise the right-hand part. Since very few keyboard players these days can do this, editors of modern editions of Baroque music usually provide a written-out interpretation of the chords, which looks just like normal, modern keyboard music. There are also many notational conventions that have either died out completely, or changed their meaning, which need an expert editor to "translate" them for modern players. In addition, many scores of the time were not published, but circulated in handwritten copies, which often contain many mistakes. Modern editors have to sift through the various copies and make judgments as to which versions are correct. Bach's Well-tempered Clavier is a famous example.
On the other hand, if you want or need to study the scores as they were written, you want to get an "Urtext" edition, which preserves the original notation as much as possible. Collected editions are presented this way. In the case of the music of J.S. Bach, there are two collected editions, one completed in the 19th century, and the other in the latter half of the 20th. The 19th century edition (Bach-Gesellschaft edition) is now in the public domain and may be copied freely - in fact the Dover editions of Bach are simply reproductions of this edition. The 20th century edition (Neue Bach Ausgabe) is still very much under copyright.
Also check out Celestia which lets you "travel" through space for up-close views of stars, planets, moons - even spacecraft are included. GPL, Linux, Mac, Windows. My 7 year old daughter loves it, although she needs help with the interface. For that matter, so do I.
http://www.openttd.org/ A railroad tycoon open source clone (gosh I'm getting old;-). Suitable for your oldest ones?
Just to be clear, OpenTTD is an open source clone of the Transport Tycoon (not Railroad Tycoon) engine, but to play the game you must provide the data files from the original game yourself; they are not available under an open license. So it's probably not a viable option given the submitter's criteria.
Also, in my experience the addictive quality of the game has a pronounced negative effect on the player's GPA. Proceed with caution.
And, the music offered infinite variations, so that each concert may have been of the same piece, by the same players, but was a little different, perhaps more mature, perhaps more geared towards the audience. After all, allegro is not necessary 120 bpm, and there's no exact number to forte.
Excellent précis of the pre-recording era musical world there; I just wanted to amplify the point posted above. Not many listeners nowadays realize the extent to which the great "classical" composers were both: A. virtuoso performers and B. brilliant improvisers. Classical soloists prior to the 20th century were probably more akin to today's jazz performers in their ability to improvise on a basic work or harmonic pattern than they are to the modern concept of a classical musician who is not really at liberty to make up new notes to go in a pre-existing composition. Before the 20th century skill at improvisation was part of the standard training of keyboard players and composers. Anyone named Bach could improvise at the keyboard all day long; Mozart sometimes didn't bother writing out the solo parts to his piano concertos. Why bother when you'll never play it the same way twice? So the extent to which each performance was "a little bit different" may be even greater than you realized when you wrote that.
As the situation in the musical world continues to evolve it is my hope that the electricity of improvisatory performance once again becomes a part of a successful evening of classical music.
"MBA Jerks" are like the MPs of the educated work force, everyone else hates them because they dont directly contribute anything and are in charge of everything. IT, science, anything.
Just curious, do you mean "MP" as in Military Police, or "MP" as in Member of Parliament? Your statement kind of works both ways.
J S Bach was one of those who worked on a solution to this, and he came up with the modern even-tempered scale, which averages out the intervals so that all keys are equally in-tune (or out-of-tune).
This notion, that J.S. Bach "invented" equal temperament, is a canard that arose sometime in the early 20th century. Twelve-tone equal temperament had been proposed as a theoretical tuning system prior to Bach, but no one took it seriously enough to put it into practice. Instead, a (large) number of "unequal" temperaments were proposed and used; these tuning systems made some keys more "pure" in intonation than other keys, while still trying to preserve the playability of most of the keys. Around 1722, Bach wrote the first volume of the "Well-tempered clavier" ("clavier" was a generic term for any kind of stringed keyboard instrument), demonstrating that with a suitable temperament, all 24 major and minor keys were in-tune enough to be musically viable. There is, however, not a single shred of evidence or documentation that he ever used equal temperament. His tuning method was described by his son C.P.E. some years after his death, and while his description is vague, it clearly indicates the use of an unequal temperament (he refers to J.S. tuning "most of the fifths slightly flat;" in equal temperament all of the fifths are tuned slightly flat).
In fact, equal temperament was probably not consistently employed until the very late 19th or even early 20th century. See Owen Jorgensen for more on this. The modern fantasy that J.S. Bach employed equal temperament for the Well-tempered clavier is probably due to the modern proponents of this tuning system needing an historical "pioneer" to legitimize it.
The authors of many recent articles claim to have discovered Bach's intended tuning (see the last two years of the journal "Early Music"), but the reality is that he did not record the steps he used to tune his instruments, and the precise tuning system he devised will forever remain a mystery.
These artists from an objective point of view could have such longevity jsut because there are so few extant examples from their time period.
WTF? There are many thousands of works by other composers and authors from "their time period." Hundreds of thousands of original publications and even autograph manuscripts survive from this era. These guys lived around 200-400 years ago, not during the Paleolithic era.
What happens is that over time the wheat gets separated from the chaff, and the "works of genius" endure while lesser works are forgotten (but not necessarily lost - check out the special collections department at a major research university library sometime). While not perfect, overall this filtration process is pretty accurate, with an excellent s/n ratio.
This is just a continuation of the trend towards higher prices for music, in spite of plummeting costs for media and distribution. Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!
Wax cylinders were comparitively much more expensive than the modern equivalents. Two-minute Edison cylinders sold for $1 around 1900-1910, which was a good portion of a typical employee's weekly salary. Cylinders cannot be pressed like discs, so each one had to be inscribed by a pantograph from a master cylinder which wore out after only 20-100 copies had been made. Very labor intensive, and expensive.
I can't speak to more recent pricing schemes, but prices have certainly gone down since the cylinder days.
Wow - a/. topic I'm actually qualified to comment on . . . anyway, I had a listen to the mp3 while waiting for the video to download. This stuff sounds absolutely nothing like authentic 15th century music. Granted, Scottish stonemasons may have been a bit behind the musical curve and not up on their Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin, but this stuff sounds more like Arvo Pärt on his worst day ever. The video is likewise unconvincing and little more than an ad for the CD and book. This strikes me as nothing but a pathetic attempt at riding Dan Brown's coattails.
I am quite intrigued by this: my friend, a professional violin player, says the same thing but if the recording is technically bad, noisy or compressed how can you hear all the details of masterfull technique or all the shades of expression in a singer's voice? Isn't that (at least in part) what genius music-making is about?
Also, listening to live music is quite often worse than listening to a well-made recording - take pieces like Beethoven's Missa Solemnis or Mahler's 8th symphony - you'd have to be pretty lucky to hear it live as well balanced as it comes on a good recording.
Would be interested what professional musicians thing of this.
IAAPM (classical), and I think part of the reason "all the details of masterfull technique" can come through on old 78s or other low-fi sound sources is that much of what we consider great musicality is subtle manipulations of rhythm, especially in classical and jazz. You can even hear this from old Tin-Pan-Alley type crooners. Rock probably began limiting our sensitivity to this sort of thing, and the drum machine and MIDI sequencers totally destroyed it. Anyway, this sort of rhythmic expression can come through even on a really bad or old recording.
Also, many of the older formats were not nearly as bad as you might think. Remember that when we listen to 78s we are hearing many decades worth of wear and cruft. Additionally, 78s are usually reproduced these days with entirely inappropriate reproduction curves on modern equipment. I recently heard some original 78s played back on a mechanical (i.e. non-electric) Victrola-style turntable in good condition, and the sound was remarkably clear. Quiet, but surprisingly pleasant.
You cannot boot a G5 from a G3/G4 boot volume, or vice versa. There are different, incompatible files that are installed by the OS installer depending on the CPU in use. For the most part, however, your point that a Mac OS X boot volume will boot several different hardware sets without difficulty is correct, and one of the nicest facets of the Mac from the tech support POV. The only gotchas I have run into are the G4/G5 divide mentioned above, and the occasional new devices which require drivers not included in the older OS X installer media (but which are obviously included on the media that ship with the newer Mac). One example is the scrolling trackpad.
"Silver gelatin" is just hifalutin art-crowd speak for ordinary black-and-white paper, the kind Kodak announced yesterday that they will no longer be manufacturing. It does not imply any kind of "silvery" mirror-reflectance quality in the paper.
Exactly. There are an awful lot of NT/2000 servers out there administered by part-timers with no formal training; these folks will jump at the opportunity to use open-source tools like Samba without having to compile/install/debug all of sourceforge.net. These people aren't stupid for paying out for an Apple solution. They just don't have time to become l33+ l1nnuX h4xx0r5.
Barcodes, images, just about anything but MP3 tracks can be printed on them.
Tonight, a thousand pizzas will be delivered, a thousand neighbor's TV sets will be reduced to a single tricolor dot, and a thousand RIAA lawyers will be mobilized as, in all corners of the globe, a thousand geeks simultaneously rise to this supreme challenge.
At my first job after college I was working in the data center of a major bank. A colleague and I had gotten in the habit of changing each others Windows color schemes (this was in the 3.1 days) to something garish and annoying like Hotdog Stand when the other was away from his desk. One day I decided to expand the joke to include our manager, who was nice enough and would understand the need to blow off steam when you are working dawn-to-dusk in a basement and never see the sun (not that impressive in Minnesota in the winter). I wasn't wrong, but what I didn't realize was that in changing her color scheme to "High Contrast for the Visually Impaired" or whatever it was called, I inadvertently made the color of some text the same as the background color of her Excel cells. So the next morning she came in and found that two-thirds of her spreadsheet data was gone, immediately freaked, and called the senior tech manager over, who spent upwards of an hour trying to figure out how her data had been lost before I "helpfully" suggested that perhaps the text color was the same as the background . . . I know a lot of people will find this funny but I just felt badly for wasting a lot of people's time, and I have not indulged in this kind of pranksterism again . . . except for the time I set my girlfriend's machine to yell "kah'PLAH!!!!" every time it shut down (found a great sample on the Klingon Language CD).
I guess what I am saying is, don't play practical jokes, but if you must, "kah'PLAH!!!" (Success!!!)
RMAs are fast yes, assuming you can coax the support drones to issue you one without hanging on the line for hours and running their pointless Dell Diagnostics (cr) app. I was once instructed by a Dell tech-support rep to run their diags by booting off a floppy in order get the correct error code which would indicate that the floppy was defective. You can't write material that good.
If you like classical, and want to support a record company that "gets it," check out Naxos (www.naxos.com). They cover both standard and exotic repertoire; many pieces in their catalog are not available anywhere else. The website has full-length streams of their recordings (WMP format, unfortunately). Best of all, they are unaffiliated with the RIAA and all their CDs are $7.99USD or lower. I'm not affiliated in any way with them, just a satisfied customer who wants to see them flourish.
No, for music that sounds like math, listen to Milton Babbitt and other "total serialists." The Second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) considered their music to be an ultimate expression of human passions. They developed the twelve-tone technique to make their music more not less emotional. Whether it worked I leave up to the individual listener.
Found this on his company's website (http://www.cidera.com/):
The Internet: A Brief Timeline 1968 ARPA--the Advanced Research Projects Agency--contracts for the Arpanet, a network of linked computers for the military and also academia.
1975 The first do-it-yourself computer kit: the Altair 8800.
1989 The World Wide Web is born.
2000 Worldwide users on the Internet exceed 300 million.
We use MacAdministrator from Hi-Resolution to administer about 300 macs in several labs on a large college campus. If you can afford it, I highly recommend this product. It's highly customizable, and straightforward to learn. It allows you to lock down the hard drive on a folder-by-folder basis, handles software distribution, print quotas, and controls access to the chooser and control panels (again on an individual basis). You'll need a server running Appleshare IP 6.3 I believe, although they are supposed to have an OS X server available soon.
Overall, there is nothing I have wanted to accomplish in my labs that MacAdmin has not allowed me to do. I have not tried Assimilator because, frankly, MacAdmin + Apple Software Restore do every thing I need.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, if you find this sort thing disgusting (as I do), stop going to weather.com and accu-weather.
Out of curiosity, what source(s) do you recommend instead of these? TIA.
But what they do is get an "expert" to reinterpret the score every few years.
There are actually very good musical reasons to do this. Music written or printed 300 years ago looks much different than that published today, and often requires an editor's help to bring it into a form usable by modern performers. To give one example, many instrumental sonatas and other works were written out in "figured bass" notation, which gave the keyboard player only the bass line and numeric symbols representing the harmonies. It was up to the player to improvise the right-hand part. Since very few keyboard players these days can do this, editors of modern editions of Baroque music usually provide a written-out interpretation of the chords, which looks just like normal, modern keyboard music. There are also many notational conventions that have either died out completely, or changed their meaning, which need an expert editor to "translate" them for modern players. In addition, many scores of the time were not published, but circulated in handwritten copies, which often contain many mistakes. Modern editors have to sift through the various copies and make judgments as to which versions are correct. Bach's Well-tempered Clavier is a famous example.
On the other hand, if you want or need to study the scores as they were written, you want to get an "Urtext" edition, which preserves the original notation as much as possible. Collected editions are presented this way. In the case of the music of J.S. Bach, there are two collected editions, one completed in the 19th century, and the other in the latter half of the 20th. The 19th century edition (Bach-Gesellschaft edition) is now in the public domain and may be copied freely - in fact the Dover editions of Bach are simply reproductions of this edition. The 20th century edition (Neue Bach Ausgabe) is still very much under copyright.
Also check out Celestia which lets you "travel" through space for up-close views of stars, planets, moons - even spacecraft are included. GPL, Linux, Mac, Windows. My 7 year old daughter loves it, although she needs help with the interface. For that matter, so do I.
Just to be clear, OpenTTD is an open source clone of the Transport Tycoon (not Railroad Tycoon) engine, but to play the game you must provide the data files from the original game yourself; they are not available under an open license. So it's probably not a viable option given the submitter's criteria.
Also, in my experience the addictive quality of the game has a pronounced negative effect on the player's GPA. Proceed with caution.
Excellent précis of the pre-recording era musical world there; I just wanted to amplify the point posted above. Not many listeners nowadays realize the extent to which the great "classical" composers were both: A. virtuoso performers and B. brilliant improvisers. Classical soloists prior to the 20th century were probably more akin to today's jazz performers in their ability to improvise on a basic work or harmonic pattern than they are to the modern concept of a classical musician who is not really at liberty to make up new notes to go in a pre-existing composition. Before the 20th century skill at improvisation was part of the standard training of keyboard players and composers. Anyone named Bach could improvise at the keyboard all day long; Mozart sometimes didn't bother writing out the solo parts to his piano concertos. Why bother when you'll never play it the same way twice? So the extent to which each performance was "a little bit different" may be even greater than you realized when you wrote that.
As the situation in the musical world continues to evolve it is my hope that the electricity of improvisatory performance once again becomes a part of a successful evening of classical music.
Just curious, do you mean "MP" as in Military Police, or "MP" as in Member of Parliament? Your statement kind of works both ways.
This notion, that J.S. Bach "invented" equal temperament, is a canard that arose sometime in the early 20th century. Twelve-tone equal temperament had been proposed as a theoretical tuning system prior to Bach, but no one took it seriously enough to put it into practice. Instead, a (large) number of "unequal" temperaments were proposed and used; these tuning systems made some keys more "pure" in intonation than other keys, while still trying to preserve the playability of most of the keys. Around 1722, Bach wrote the first volume of the "Well-tempered clavier" ("clavier" was a generic term for any kind of stringed keyboard instrument), demonstrating that with a suitable temperament, all 24 major and minor keys were in-tune enough to be musically viable. There is, however, not a single shred of evidence or documentation that he ever used equal temperament. His tuning method was described by his son C.P.E. some years after his death, and while his description is vague, it clearly indicates the use of an unequal temperament (he refers to J.S. tuning "most of the fifths slightly flat;" in equal temperament all of the fifths are tuned slightly flat).
In fact, equal temperament was probably not consistently employed until the very late 19th or even early 20th century. See Owen Jorgensen for more on this. The modern fantasy that J.S. Bach employed equal temperament for the Well-tempered clavier is probably due to the modern proponents of this tuning system needing an historical "pioneer" to legitimize it.
The authors of many recent articles claim to have discovered Bach's intended tuning (see the last two years of the journal "Early Music"), but the reality is that he did not record the steps he used to tune his instruments, and the precise tuning system he devised will forever remain a mystery.
WTF? There are many thousands of works by other composers and authors from "their time period." Hundreds of thousands of original publications and even autograph manuscripts survive from this era. These guys lived around 200-400 years ago, not during the Paleolithic era.
What happens is that over time the wheat gets separated from the chaff, and the "works of genius" endure while lesser works are forgotten (but not necessarily lost - check out the special collections department at a major research university library sometime). While not perfect, overall this filtration process is pretty accurate, with an excellent s/n ratio.
I think you mean 123 5 3 2 1 356 8 7 5 3 432
Finally, nine years of music school prove their worth on Slashdot! I just hope the RIAA don't come for me now . . .
Wax cylinders were comparitively much more expensive than the modern equivalents. Two-minute Edison cylinders sold for $1 around 1900-1910, which was a good portion of a typical employee's weekly salary. Cylinders cannot be pressed like discs, so each one had to be inscribed by a pantograph from a master cylinder which wore out after only 20-100 copies had been made. Very labor intensive, and expensive.
I can't speak to more recent pricing schemes, but prices have certainly gone down since the cylinder days.
Wow - a /. topic I'm actually qualified to comment on . . . anyway, I had a listen to the mp3 while waiting for the video to download. This stuff sounds absolutely nothing like authentic 15th century music. Granted, Scottish stonemasons may have been a bit behind the musical curve and not up on their Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin, but this stuff sounds more like Arvo Pärt on his worst day ever. The video is likewise unconvincing and little more than an ad for the CD and book. This strikes me as nothing but a pathetic attempt at riding Dan Brown's coattails.
Also, many of the older formats were not nearly as bad as you might think. Remember that when we listen to 78s we are hearing many decades worth of wear and cruft. Additionally, 78s are usually reproduced these days with entirely inappropriate reproduction curves on modern equipment. I recently heard some original 78s played back on a mechanical (i.e. non-electric) Victrola-style turntable in good condition, and the sound was remarkably clear. Quiet, but surprisingly pleasant.
-Aaron
You cannot boot a G5 from a G3/G4 boot volume, or vice versa. There are different, incompatible files that are installed by the OS installer depending on the CPU in use. For the most part, however, your point that a Mac OS X boot volume will boot several different hardware sets without difficulty is correct, and one of the nicest facets of the Mac from the tech support POV. The only gotchas I have run into are the G4/G5 divide mentioned above, and the occasional new devices which require drivers not included in the older OS X installer media (but which are obviously included on the media that ship with the newer Mac). One example is the scrolling trackpad.
"Silver gelatin" is just hifalutin art-crowd speak for ordinary black-and-white paper, the kind Kodak announced yesterday that they will no longer be manufacturing. It does not imply any kind of "silvery" mirror-reflectance quality in the paper.
Me too!
Exactly. There are an awful lot of NT/2000 servers out there administered by part-timers with no formal training; these folks will jump at the opportunity to use open-source tools like Samba without having to compile/install/debug all of sourceforge.net. These people aren't stupid for paying out for an Apple solution. They just don't have time to become l33+ l1nnuX h4xx0r5.
Barcodes, images, just about anything but MP3 tracks can be printed on them.
Tonight, a thousand pizzas will be delivered, a thousand neighbor's TV sets will be reduced to a single tricolor dot, and a thousand RIAA lawyers will be mobilized as, in all corners of the globe, a thousand geeks simultaneously rise to this supreme challenge.
At my first job after college I was working in the data center of a major bank. A colleague and I had gotten in the habit of changing each others Windows color schemes (this was in the 3.1 days) to something garish and annoying like Hotdog Stand when the other was away from his desk. One day I decided to expand the joke to include our manager, who was nice enough and would understand the need to blow off steam when you are working dawn-to-dusk in a basement and never see the sun (not that impressive in Minnesota in the winter). I wasn't wrong, but what I didn't realize was that in changing her color scheme to "High Contrast for the Visually Impaired" or whatever it was called, I inadvertently made the color of some text the same as the background color of her Excel cells. So the next morning she came in and found that two-thirds of her spreadsheet data was gone, immediately freaked, and called the senior tech manager over, who spent upwards of an hour trying to figure out how her data had been lost before I "helpfully" suggested that perhaps the text color was the same as the background . . . I know a lot of people will find this funny but I just felt badly for wasting a lot of people's time, and I have not indulged in this kind of pranksterism again . . . except for the time I set my girlfriend's machine to yell "kah'PLAH!!!!" every time it shut down (found a great sample on the Klingon Language CD). I guess what I am saying is, don't play practical jokes, but if you must, "kah'PLAH!!!" (Success!!!)
RMAs are fast yes, assuming you can coax the support drones to issue you one without hanging on the line for hours and running their pointless Dell Diagnostics (cr) app. I was once instructed by a Dell tech-support rep to run their diags by booting off a floppy in order get the correct error code which would indicate that the floppy was defective. You can't write material that good.
If you like classical, and want to support a record company that "gets it," check out Naxos (www.naxos.com). They cover both standard and exotic repertoire; many pieces in their catalog are not available anywhere else. The website has full-length streams of their recordings (WMP format, unfortunately). Best of all, they are unaffiliated with the RIAA and all their CDs are $7.99USD or lower. I'm not affiliated in any way with them, just a satisfied customer who wants to see them flourish.
No, for music that sounds like math, listen to Milton Babbitt and other "total serialists." The Second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) considered their music to be an ultimate expression of human passions. They developed the twelve-tone technique to make their music more not less emotional. Whether it worked I leave up to the individual listener.
Found this on his company's website (http://www.cidera.com/):
;-)
The Internet: A Brief Timeline
1968 ARPA--the Advanced Research Projects Agency--contracts for the Arpanet, a network of linked computers for the military and also academia.
1975 The first do-it-yourself computer kit: the Altair 8800.
1989 The World Wide Web is born.
2000 Worldwide users on the Internet exceed 300 million.
Yeah, I'd say that pretty much sums it up
We use MacAdministrator from Hi-Resolution to administer about 300 macs in several labs on a large college campus. If you can afford it, I highly recommend this product. It's highly customizable, and straightforward to learn. It allows you to lock down the hard drive on a folder-by-folder basis, handles software distribution, print quotas, and controls access to the chooser and control panels (again on an individual basis). You'll need a server running Appleshare IP 6.3 I believe, although they are supposed to have an OS X server available soon.
Overall, there is nothing I have wanted to accomplish in my labs that MacAdmin has not allowed me to do. I have not tried Assimilator because, frankly, MacAdmin + Apple Software Restore do every thing I need.
The piece is J.S. Bach's Invention in a minor, BWV 784. Download the midi file from here.
In my case, an obsession with this piece led to a career in music. And I'm posting this from work. Weird.