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Via Steven Rubio, a tag cloud of last.fm genres I listen to:
This is as good a summary of my listening since December 2005 as any.
Critic Steve Simels apparently didn't get along with Frank Zappa. He goes on to post a link to the Zappa version of Stairway to Heaven, as evidence. Ok, it's not exactly a link. It's an embedded player via an MP3 search engine. Let me give it a try:
| Mother of Invention - Stairway to Heaven .mp3 | ||
 | ||
 | Found at bee mp3 search engine |  |
And I don't particularly remember why this was important, but YouTube has numerous videos of the song played in reverse:
By the way, last night Marin Alsop programmed music by Zappa as well as Philip Glass take on David Bowie's Heroes.
Zorn combat pants image via Wikipedia
Harold Budd Image via Wikipedia
Here's an article about how wealth interferes with happiness:
Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition – they’d been primed with all those Euros – had significantly lower savoring scores. This suggests that simply looking at money makes us less interested in relishing the minor pleasures of life. Furthermore, subjects who made more money in real life – the scientists asked all subjects for their monthly income – scored significantly lower on the savoring test. A subsequent experiment duplicated this effect among Canadian students, who spent less time savoring a chocolate bar after being shown a picture of Canadian dollars.I read this as I listen in the background to Harold Budd's Abandoned Cities, after reading a MetaFilter post on "long listening" and wondering if I no longer savor music as much as I did. Dunno. I did listen to part of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano earlier this week and was surprisingly unmoved...
Alex Ross points out that Q2, the New York classical streaming station, has the recent Varèse concert online. And impressively, the streams are in both the form of the entire concert with commentary as well as the individual works, which are embeddable:
Density 21.5
Un Grand Sommeil Noir
Amériques, arranged for 8-hand piano
Poème Électronique ringtone
Allmusic's Sean Hickey says, "According to the composer, Density 21.5 is based on two melodic ideas — one modal, one atonal — and all of the subsequent material is generated from these two themes. Despite the inherent limitations of writing for an unaccompanied melodic instrument, Varèse expertly explores new areas of space and time, utilizing registral contrasts to effect polyphonic continuity."On the other hand, I can't for some reason subscribe to the Q2 blog in Google Reader:
