Mark Likes Music

Since just after Christmas, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra had been trying to raise money to save its season. They didn't quite get there: today, its board of trustees announced that it is cancelling the rest of the season , citing, in part, its inability to reach its March fundraising goal.

Because it uses Flash, there's only an Android app for Amazon's new Cloud Player --nothing for iPhone. But I'm having no problem installing the MP3 Uploader on my MacBook and can upload and play tracks through Chrome and Safari. At least I can listen through my computer at work (a PC) and through portable speakers at home (the Mac). Here's the thing: to upload all of my music from iTunes to the Cloud Drive, I need 20 GB of storage and they only give me 5 GB for free. If I buy an MP3 album from Amazon, I get that additional 15 GB without cost for a year . But what do I do after a year? Then I pay $20 annually to keep my music in the locker. That's pretty cheap, but I'm not going to go for it before I see what Google's got to offer.  For now, I'll live with my free 5 GBs, and because they'll let me store anything I buy from them for free,  I'll use Amazon's MP3 store. (See: they got me!) Want more?  Matt Brian speculates that all of this ...

The new Amazon.com "storage locker " for music (and other stuff) is nothing fancy; it's even more boring to look at than iTunes. Amazon gives you 5 GB for free, and nothing you buy from its MP3 store counts against this amount. So, if you already use Amazon.com as your source for music, it's a good deal.  I put up Fully Completely  and am listening to it now. Loading the album was a drag: I had to upload track by track. You can download an app that helps with uploading, but I'm at work and the firewall's blocking this. I'll have to try it out at home. I couldn't use Chrome to upload and had to shift to Firefox--not a big deal, but I use Chrome as my default. I went home and tried playing around on my Mac .

Berio's Italian, but he has some strong connections to the US and New York City in particular. He  wrote  Sinfonia  for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic in 1968 . This was no commission to an out-of-towner: Berio had been teaching at Juilliard since 1964, and before taking the Juilliard job he had taught at Mills College in Oakland for two full school years. He studied at Tanglewood in 1952 with Luigi Dallapiccola and then returned as an instructor in 1960. As the second movement of Sinfonia , Berio included a version of his 1967 piece O King, an elegiac tribute Martin Luther King, Jr. Originally scored for a small ensemble and one singer, O King  (here in its symphonic arrangement) projects the individual syllables of the phrase "O Martin Luther King" into the surrounding musical landscape; gradually they coalesce to sound out the slain civil-rights leader's name at the end of the piece. Even if you can't hear this, it's a beautiful, ...

I recently posted a note on the Carnegie Hall blog about Mozart's Zaide , which in the version that Ensemble ACJW is performing on Thursday really isn't Mozart's at all. Throughout the unfinished singpspiel is music that Luciano Berio (1925-2003) wrote back in 1995: the show starts and ends with it; it interrupts the action at two points during of the opera. Whether you like it or not, Berio's music asserts itself and--as a recurring comment on the action--hijacks the event. Berio showed a penchant throughout his career for this kind of appropriation, and people who know his music will compare the  Zaide music to the third movement of  Sinfonia (1968). Spoken texts from Beckett's The Unnamable --and Berio's own writings--uncomfortably intermingle with Mahler's scherzo movement from the Second Symphony , and quotations of Schoenberg and Debussy (for example). Here, things are not cut and dry: although Mahler is the clear focus, all the borrowed material ...

Your time at the top was short, cut down by those flannel-wearing, shoe gazing, heroin addicts . Apparently, Bach  is Canadian. You know who's not Canadian? The Irish Rovers .

Speaks for itself, really: Thanks to Liz . Speaking of Liz, Thin Lizzy is Irish . So are the Irish Rovers (although I thought they were Canadian).

Because they started out in Toronto, I always assumed The Irish Rovers were Canadian. I guess I was wrong , but they were all over the CBC in the 1970s. I had no idea "The Unicorn" was a song by Shel Silverstein. Clearly I don't know much about the Irish Rovers. If you can stand it, here's a video. Or you can listen to Thin Lizzy, who are also Irish .

Hard rockin' and totally ignorant of terms related to American football , Thin Lizzy recorded "Whiskey in the Jar" in 1972. It was their first hit.

My wife and I play "Riverdale Would Be Better If" a lot. Thanks to Mark Mandarano, the game just got a little easier (or harder; we have one less answer, at any rate).  This past Sunday, I went to hear his Sinfonietta of Riverdale . They played some typically facile French music--and Varese, sticking out like the most beautiful sore thumb I've ever seen. Although I have my suspicions that Mandarano was trying to hide Octandre from ticket buyers (the piece was conspicuously absent from the website), he doesn't typically shy away from programming interesting, challenging music.  Up next for the group: Wagner and Schoenberg on May  15 at the Riverdale Temple. If you're interested, check out their website or follow them on Faceboo k. 

Michael John Blake's "What Pi Sounds Like" has become quite the YouTube sensation--and the go-to story subject for Pi Day today.  NPR.org  ran a piece on  Morning Edition and it's up on Time 's website .  Gizmodo , Salon.com , The Stir , and Wired 's "Geek Dad" blog: all mention the clip. Then there's my friend Peter MacDonald, who clearly takes Pi Day very seriously .

I was going to wait, but just couldn't contain myself (and neither could Peter MacDonald , who mentioned this on Facebook.) Pi Day is coming up, and Michael John Blake is paying  tribute to everyone's favorite mathematical symbol through music . He explains: I can't wait to hear what he comes up with for Pie Day .

If you want to know how rock died, go to Steven Hyden's 10-part series Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? . It takes forever--I'm only halfway through--but it's worth it.    I particularly appreciated his evenhanded assessment of Guns N' Roses : in revealing how fraudulent metal bands had become, they were a psychotic precursor to Nirvana. Yes, it helped that I was only 10 at the time, but GNR was unnerving in a way that even the scariest of metal bands couldn't touch ... Nirvana is credited with making '80s hair-metal bands look silly with Nevermind, but GNR had already done that with the "Welcome To The Jungle" video several years earlier. It's this GNR that I remember--not those purveyors of cheese that brought us Use Your Illusion . Only a couple of weeks after the band filmed that "Jungle" video, I saw them open for The Cult in Halifax . They were loud, crude, clearly drunk. Best of all, they weren't Poison.

In addition to Dichotomy , it's important to mention the piece that made Riegger's name,  Study in Sonority .  He wrote it in 1927 for his Ithaca Conservatory summer-term orchestra; the group had mostly violins, so he wrote for 10 violinists. At Eastman, Howard Hanson programmed the work before Stokowski got a hold of it and performed it with the Philadelphia Orchestra strings in 1929 at Carnegie Hall and in their home city. The  New York Philharmonic played the piece a couple of times in the 1960 s, and in 1994 at the  American Eccentrics  festival . There's nary a commercial recording to be had, but you can view the score  on the New York Philharmonic's digital archives .

If you're a New York Public Library member, you can now download tracks from the Sony catalog for fre e through the F reegal music service. That's a lot of music. They've Isaac Stern playing Rochberg's Violin Concerto and Mumford & Sons, Miles Davis and Justin Timberlake. The good news is that the tracks are DRM -free: you can play them on anything. The bad news is that you can only download three tracks a week. So think hard about what you want to listen to.

David Hildebrand pointed out on the Society for American Music listserv that "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official US national anthem 80 years ago today. The BBC interviewed him  for World Update (at about 47:40) . I haven't seen much about it in the American news yet; I'm sure the Canadians will have something to say about it. You probably know that the "The Star-Spangled Banner" got its melody from a drinking song. But do you know which one? And did you know that Francis Scott Key's lyrics first appeared in September 1814 as a broadside in Baltimore? The Smithsonian Museum of American History has  a great section on its website where you can find out a bunch of stuff about our national anthem . Check it out and impress your friends. And whatever you do, make sure you know the lyrics .