Do you have a piece of music languishing in a bottom drawer? You are rightly convinced of its merits, but do not have the financial means to get it performed? When Harry Whalley, an Edinburgh based composer, found himself in this all too familiar predicament, instead of succumbing to bottom drawer desperation he launched his piece Entangled Music on Kickstarter, the website that…
Category: General Resources
Music in the Cloud
From my teens until my twenties I was an avid collector of CDs. A few of my friends in school were the same. Hardly a week would go by without one of us bringing in a new acquisition, usually from the mainstream classical repertoire. We would pore over every detail of the work and be witheringly critical of performances that…
Self-publishing
That the internet has revolutionized the consumption of recorded music is a truism. Artists can self-publish via their own websites or they may circumvent record labels by going directly to download services like iTunes, Amazon or Spotify. This is a trend that has long-since spread to more commercial forms of sheet music on websites such as musicnotes.com. Composers of contemporary…
NMC Music Map
For a bit of Friday fun why not take a look at NMC’s Music Map , an interactive application that explores links between composers? It launches with the composer you have chosen placed in the centre of the screen. Surrounding him or her like petals you will see others with whom the composer shares stylistic links. There is also a petal that…
Guardian Guide to Contemporary Music
Helmut Lachenmann. The latest composer to feature in Tom Service’s guide to contemporary music. I recommend checking out Tom Service’s excellent and evolving guide to contemporary music on the Guardian website. It started at the end of April and, during the course of a year, promises to give an introduction to a new composer each week. To qualify, a composer must either have…
New Music On Demand
I often wax lyrical about Spotify on this blog. What makes a resource like this different from the radio is that one can choose what and when to listen, either at a flat rate or for free. So what are the other ‘on-demand’ options for those interested in new music? The obvious starting point is BBC iPlayer. A large proportion…