Night Haunts – The London Night December 4, 2008 event at Studio X, Columbia University

 

The famed London night: “There was a time, well over a century ago now, when it was considered one the finest Victorian inventions.” Gas lighting opened up the night–rendering the darkness visible, and introducing new spaces of lawlessness and depravity. But have CCTV cameras and British Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) neutralized the night? Writer SUKHDEV SANDHU and composer ANDREW INGKAVET present a visual and sonic journey through an unfamiliar nocturnal London, encountering urban fox hunters, exorcists, cleaning crews, mini-cab drivers, sleep technicians and the Nuns of Tyburn, as they pray for the souls of Londoners.

SANDHU is a professor of English Literature at New York University, Chief Film Critic of the “Daily Telegraph,” and author of “London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City.” INGKAVET is a composer, filmmaker and designer. He began scoring films while working in Hong Kong as one of MTV-Asia’s first VJs. 

RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public

Getting to Carnegie Hall via YouTube

This is way cool!

from the NY TImes December 1, 2008:

Traditionally, auditioning for an orchestra means appearing alone onstage in a nerve-jangling performance before grizzled veteran musicians. In the Google way, it means posting on the company’s video-sharing site, YouTube, for online judging by the professionals and then, ultimately, the YouTube universe.

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

That second option is the main feature of a new marketing project by Google to bolster the organized presence of classical music on YouTube and promote the idea of online communities. And orchestras and professional musicians, poking around in the murky but fecund possibilities of the Internet, have jumped on board as a way to further their own educational and musical missions.

The project, called the YouTube Symphony Orchestra (www.youtube.com/symphony), was announced on Monday in London and New York.

Boiled down, it has two essential parts. The composer Tan Dun has written a four-minute piece for orchestra. YouTube users are invited to download the individual parts for their instruments from the score, record themselves performing the music, then upload their renditions. After the entrants are judged, a mash-up of all the winning parts will be created for a final YouTube version of the piece.

Read original article.

Should the EU Rethink Copyright Law For The Digital Age?

from IP Watch.org…

About eight million tracks by musicians from a wide variety of genres can now be listened to via the internet, a figure that is projected to rise to 12 million by 2012. With the entertainment industry estimating that 90 percent of music downloads are illegal and sales of CDs having declined sharply over the past few years, some technology firms are urging that the whole basis of copyright law needs to be rethought.

Kurt Einzinger, president of the Internet Service Providers Association (EuroISPA), believes that attitudes to music have changed so fundamentally that the “established copyright regime is not fit for the internet.”

Read full story at IP Watch.

The Problem We All Live With

Normal Rockwell 1964

It’s startling to look back and see the juxtaposition of then and now.

The next President of the United States

Growing up as the only Asian kid in my Long Island community, I never expected to see the day when we had Chinese basketball stars, Japanese pitchers in-demand, and black Presidents of the USA.

Forward!

Wanna Be Creative? Go Back to Kindergarten!

What should be in every Creative's office

As the father of a young son, I’ve been amazed at how wonderfully inventive young children are.  They synthesize concepts quickly and effortlessly without all the emotional baggage or shame or fear of embarassment adults have.  The number one creativity rule for kids is – “what else could this be?”

At the 2008 Serious Play conference, Tim Brown, co-founder of design firm IDEO, discusses ways in which his agency promotes creativity through creativity rules, having materials on hand and rapid prototyping aiming for quantity not quality thereby circumventing the dreaded “self-editor.”

It’s the same way I work in music.  I usually will create multiple quick sketches of musical ideas whether they are melodic, harmonic, textural, or just strange instrument juxtapositions (what I call a palette.)  Some of these forced palettes have created wonderfully inventive film and theater scores.  By working within my self-imposed creation rules, I am forced to seek greater results.

For the film Noelle, I utilized a palette of celesta, acoustic guitar, harp, jar drum and strings to evoke the wondrous magic of Christmas without the muzak-ness.  Just having these instruments put together suggested certain melodies and harmonies – it practically wrote itself.  You can view an old work clip of the opening for Noelle here. ( It’s the first in the gallery)  Note, the clip is an outdated edit of the film, but you get the idea.

Music is like wine…delicious, indescribable and causes trance-like states

Vino para mi

“Talking about wine is like talking about music, if I could tell you in words, then there wouldn’t be any point in playing it. A great piece of music, and a great wine, holds your attention and has more than you can say in words.” – David Chan, concertmaster for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

My first experiences with wine were terrible as was my first job – dishwasher for Beefsteak Charlies in Huntington Station, Long Island, NY at the age of 16.  I don’t know why I took this job – perhaps to prove that life can only get better from here. Anyway, I stole a gallon bottle of some horrible rosé wine and took it to my high school jazz ensemble beach party.  Needless to say, I had an indelible experience where I could not stand the smell of wine for over 12 years!

So what changed?  Whilst living abroad in Hong Kong, where I was a VJ for MTV (and completely drug and alcohol free contrary to rumors) I was handed a glass of some Bordeaux.  I had a sip and….fantastic.  What is this?

So when I saw Eric Asimov’s interview with David Chan in yesterday’s Dining section of the NY Times, it really resonated.  Music and wine.  Yes there is a connection.  I think I must have been a Cabernet Sauvignon in a past life!  How about a wine, music and film festival?  All wrapped together and held in Napa Valley?  Or in the mountain vineyards of Chile?

cooking up some of Lidia Bastianich’s garlicky white bean soup to go along with a oven-roasted bluefish. Yum!

Digging the CoolIris plug-in for Firefox. It’s like the iTunes album view for the web- cinematic and so fun! http://cooliris.com/

The reason for the hand you’ve been dealt in life…and art

Igor Stravinsky portrait by Pablo Picasso

“Melody, Melodia in Greek, is the intonation of the melos, which signifies a fragment, a part of a phrase.  It is these parts that strike the ear in such a way as to make certain accentuations…

The capacity for melody is a gift.  This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study…The example of Beethoven would suffice to convince us that, of all the elements of music, melody is the most accessible to the ear and the least capable of acquisition.  Here we have one of the greatest creators of music who spent his whole life imploring the aid of this gift which he lacked.  So that this admirable deaf man developed his extraordinary faculties in direct proportion to the resistance offered him by the one he lacked, just the way a blind man in his eternal night develops the sharpness of his auditive sense.

An excerpt from Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics Of Music In The Form Of Six Lessons – transcripts of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in the year 1939-40.

The entire series of Norton lectures is wonderful by the way.

Make opera, not war

Make Opera, Not War

’nuff said.