Mark Likes Music

A couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic posted an article about the  iPad's usefulness as a replacement for hard-copy sheet music,   and included this video of James Rhodes making a big deal of his decision to go electronic: About a year ago, Gizmodo e xpressed similar sentiments, declaring  that the iPad is "perfect" as a sheet-music reader.  Over at the  Technology in Music Education blog, there is a review of music readers for the iPad.  The music readers for iPads go beyond the gimmickry of Smule apps , but I'm sure there's something disconcerting about relying on a computer in a performance setting. Paper music can blow off the stand, but if a tablet computer loses power, you're out of luck.

Get ready for the big storm ! 1. A blast from the past (1940, anyway): 2. Perfectly obvious: 3. A little Sturm und Drang  for you: 4. Avoid tropical storms, and ghosts (thanks, Joe Lehman): 5. Something you might not have heard before, from the Sir Douglas Quintet : Also, Captain Bringdown, Gordon Lightfoot ; Max Webster ; and  hurricanes hitting out west.

After seeing my last post , my always-game mother-in-law sent me a link to Northern Bushcraft's page on edible mushrooms in Nova Scotia . Some of their pictures are just breathtaking, like this one, of the boar's head tooth mushroom:

Apparently, Nova Scotia had gotten a lot of rain before we arrived for our visit, creating perfect conditions (moist, dark, and cool) within Truro's Victoria Park for mushrooms. This one was my favorite:  This one was striking:  There were a lot of this kind:  Here are some others: No one else seemed as fascinated by their presence as I was, but I just don't remember seeing such an array of mushrooms in the park, or anywhere else in Truro. If you know the names of these, I'd love to hear from you. 

I just spent the last hour or so catching up on all that was written about the form-fitting orange mini-skirt Yuja Wang wore earlier in August at a Hollywood Bowl performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Well-Tempered Ear  has  a good discussion going .  Worry Later  notes that , when you Google Yuja Wang, the second autocomplete suggestion is "Yuja Wang boyfriend." For reviewer Mark Swed, the dress, "so short, so tight" was the triple-X highlight of his evening. In an article in the Los Angeles Times  (which cites some books on the subject of fashion and music), organist Cameron Carpenter, known for his own outrageous outfits, was quoted as saying that "What people are missing here is that Yuja might want to be seen to be making, as many us do, a personal statement without having played a note." WQXR posted a podcast and slideshow ; flipping through the WQXR photos, it looks as if what is scandalous is youth. There's more on blogs ...

Every time we go back to Nova Scotia , my family and I make a point of visiting Victoria Park in Truro. The centerpiece of the 400-acre park (with another 600 acres of protected woodland surrounding it) is Joe Howe Falls, named for  the journalist, politician, and one-time opponent of Confederation  best known for his successful self-defense on a libel charge in 1835. From Victoria Park, Summer 2011 I'm probably a bad dad for letting (making) my children climb the 175 steps of Jacob's Ladder, but this was something I looked forward to do when I came as a kid. From Victoria Park, Summer 2011 Here's the photo album of our latest sojourn to what is probably the most spectacular municipal park in the province (and that includes anything in Halifax): Victoria Park, Summer 2011

There are a lot of museums, historical sites, and memorials in Nova Scotia ; it seems you can't drive five miles without running into one. Of the ones I've stopped at, my favorite is Lawrence House in Maitland . Back in 1967, the Nova Scotia government bought the one-time residence of shipbuilder W. D. Lawrence from his granddaughter, Abbie. On this day in 1971, it opened as a museum, commemorating a more prosperous time for the Fundy region and Nova Scotia as a whole. I went down to Lawrence House this afternoon with my wife and children to join in the 40th-anniversary celebration. We spent about two hours there with the remarkable, knowledgable staff, and learned a lot about the man who lived there and his time. W. D. Lawrence's claim to fame was his building  of the 250-foot, 2,500-ton "great ship." Many of his contemporaries derided the Irish-born businessman's plan to launch the W. D. Lawrence, not necessarily because it was a wooden leviathan pow...

In 1952, Mills College students banded together with professional musicians from around Oakland, taught themselves how to play Harry Partch's array of strange, self-made instruments, and  put on the composer's King Oedipus . Oedipus garnered a surprising amount of national coverage (surprising in that it got any at all), including (most likely) the newsreel footage that Open Culture posted on its website yesterday . In this report, the announcer identifies cloud-chamber bowls "derived from atomic research" (!) and a 72-stringed kithara as byproducts of Partch's search for "the elusive tones that exist between the notes of a regular piano." Whether you think Partch was "kooky," as Open Culture puts it, or not (see the comments following the article), this newsreel is intriguing in that it takes Partch's search for new musical resources seriously. The tone is not jokey or disbelieving, but straight-up, delivered with the same seriousne...